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August 31, 2006

Reeler Casting Call: Who Will Play Peter Biskind's Moustache?

The news that Peter Biskind's 2004 opus Down and Dirty Pictures is on its way to a feature film adaptation has me virtually choking on intrigue. Besides the obvious imagination pique juxtaposing director Ken Bowser against plain-old Sha-Na-Na goner Bowzer, I wondered what kind of D-grade Boswell the filmmaker would have to be to follow his 2003 Biskind doc Easy Riders, Raging Bulls with this latest long, loving swallow.

You'll never collect swag in this town again: Down and Dirty first choices Hugh Jackman and Owen Wilson with alter egos Weinstein and Redford

We'll probably never know, but Variety's Chris Gardner notes that Bowser finds the author's sprawling history of the '90s indie-film boom "outrageous" and "insane," both qualities that should get plenty of mileage in a film community that finds the book largely "bullshit" and "apocryphal." The running joke (still not funny, incidentally) around the Web is that neither Miramax nor the Weinstein Company are likely candidates to distribute the film, and Sundance is out as a premiere possibility. A faaaaar more pressing question, however, is what fucking actors would be crazy enough to participate above the line on this thing--the equivalent of pissing in Harvey's coffee and playing keep-away with Bob's glasses. And don't even think any of your future films will appear at Sundance, or at a Sundance lab, or on the Sundance Channel, like, ever.

That said, somebody has to play the brothers, and somebody has to play Robert Redford and Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino and Sundance czar Geoff Gilmore and even distribution legend Jeff Lipsky, I suppose. So who will they be--any suggestions?

Posted by stvanairsdale at 03:40 PM | TrackBack

'Not Yet Rated' Redux: NYC Premiere Brings Out the Panelists

Ever the pathological completist, I could not pass up yet another opportunity Wednesday night to view yet another premiere of Kirby Dick's MPAA exposé This Film Is Not Yet Rated at IFC Center. As I noted after a Not Yet Rated preview last spring, the film has tightened nicely since its Sundance bow, and on this, my fourth bleary-eyed run-through, I found myself appreciating Dick's accomplishment even more: A smart, fearless, efficient political doc with enough entertainment value to transcend frothy-mouthed ideology. Whatever flimsy illusion of credibility the American film ratings system still maintained before Dick came along is officially dismantled here. Overhaul may not be immediate, but it seems thoroughly inevitable.

Anyway, last night was particularly notable for the panel discussion following the film: Dick joined fellow filmmakers Mary Harron and Michael Tucker, critic Owen Gleiberman, ACLU president Nadine Strossen and anti-censorship leader Joan Bertin. Having no shame in my game and feeling like trying something new, I filmed a portion of the discussion and uploaded it to YouTube. I admit the resolution looks terrible, but I'm working on fixing it. Meanwhile, right around the 2:24 mark, Dick offers a nice breakdown of the restrictive MPAA-Washington complex facing filmmakers today. Tucker is equally articulate at the top of the piece.

The film opens Friday--I swear my shilling here is done.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:08 AM | TrackBack

August 30, 2006

Indie Hearts Shattered as Gyllenhaal Keeps It Real in NYM Fall Preview

Look--you all know how I feel about Fall Movie Previews, and for better or worse, you are doomed to learn more once The Times gets its own "New Season" forecast on newsstands and I can finally undertake my 2006 Fall Preview Review. In the meantime, I cannot help but bring up New York Magazine's new Fall Preview Issue, the 2005 version of which pleased me none too much and the current version of which leaves me similarly chilled.

But while I will save the clinical diagnosis for later, Emma Rosenblum's nifty interview with Maggie Gyllenhaal deserves a nudge into the spotlight for its subject's candor. I waited 90 minutes at the Sherrybaby premiere last night for a Gyllenhaal chat that never came through, but after reading this, to be honest, I really didn't have that many more questions:

NYM: There’s a lot of raw sexuality in the film. Was that difficult for you?

MG: When I was shooting it, I was focusing on the pleasure. The scene when she’s fucking that guy in the basement after they just met, I think you could cry through the whole scene, but why? That would be so boring. For me, when I was filming that scene, I was thinking, This is great—pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. I’ve been in prison for three years and I want to have sex with a man! But when I watch it now, I think, Oh, man, that’s horrible, and I feel very disturbed by the sex. ...

NYM: Now that you’re doing studio features, do you think you’ll keep doing independent films like Sherrybaby?

MG: With a movie like Sherrybaby, I love it, I’m proud of it, and I believe in it. But it’s so much work to get a little movie like that made, to get it seen, to get it bought, to get it into theaters—it’s almost like you have to be a producer. That makes me look at little independent movies more closely—like, do I really want to spend years, or not? I want people to see the movies I make. I’m not just acting for me.

In other words: Showing up to your premiere seven months pregnant is like having twins two months apart. And I wish Bart Freundlich would lose my number.

Anyway, there's some other interesting but brief commentary about Gyllenhaal's notorious 9/11 comments, which I applaud her for not only answering but also not ruling them out in some bold-faced, all-caps preemptive screed-by-publicist. She has not succumbed to A-list antipathy yet, bless her heart.

(Photo: Jeff Vespa/Wireimage)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 02:20 PM | TrackBack

Dream Big: Gondry Chat Draws Hundreds in SoHo

Hate to say I told you so about getting to SoHo early for last night's Michel Gondry appearance: A few hundred fans had packed the Apple Store's second-floor theater by around 6:30 (for a chat that started at 7), but seats were gone well before that and the queue winding onto Wooster Street was little fun in the rain. With nothing to the left of the decimal point in The Reeler's bribe budget, I blew the usher to let me sneak up to the front, where the filmmaker joined indieWIRE boss Eugene Hernandez for a comprehensive clip-show conversation and Q&A sprawling from his early years in music video to his superb new feature, The Science of Sleep, which opens Sept. 22.

I noted here what outtakes I could before giving up on the translating game; Gondry is funny, spirited and exceedingly smart, but fuck if I could not make out every third or fourth sentence. What I could decipher, though--well, I don't know. It mostly makes sense:

ON SURVIVING HUMAN NATURE: "I was really depressed after Human Nature because critics weren't so nice to me, so I took a notebook, and I wrote everything that was mean, and I tried to figure out why it was bothering me. The reason it was bothering me was that there was some truth in it, and I had to find out how I could make it develop. So I had this 40-page book that's become my, um... It was pretty awful. But it really helped me when I did Eternal Sunshine. Everyday when I would go to the shooting, it would help not to forget the goal I had set for myself. Every time I would go in that book with the lists, it was a good thing."

Hernandez: "So there's 40 pages just from Human Nature?"

Gondry: "Yeah. But I've lost it now. It was too bad."

ON THE IMPACT OF DREAMS ON HIS CREATIVE PROCESS: Sometimes I write them down, or I do drawings. I have a lot of paper; it's not like I have a book. I don't think I can do something that's so organized. But I have a very bad sleeping pattern. I sleep very little, but from what I read in some books, if you skip a night of sleep, the next night, you REM sleep doubles. So particularly what it said was that if even if you sleep a little, the amount of dreamng is consistent. In my case, I sleep very bad and terrible, so the few times I sleep I keep dreaming. ... And I wake up with very strong feelings that the dream was real. And I screened this for some therapists who are working on dreams, and we talked about what could happen to provoke that. I have sleep apnea, which is a problem. Maybe my brain has a lack of oxygen, but I work in a different way from other people when I wake up, and sometimes I have a hard time telling the difference from sleepy time. Maybe my brain wakes up in a different way. Basically I wrote this experience and this tradition; I thought it would be interesting to experiment."

ON HIS FIRST MUSIC VIDEO: "The first video I made was for a girl who was six feet tall. She had a huge nose and big feet; I dressed her like a princess and she looked like a drag queen. I completely failed. And on top of that, her partner in the video--I dressed him like a drag queen because it was the song. It was a complete horror, this video. I remember when I showed it to my family, I had spent two months during the post-production, and they didn't say a word. I knew they were horrified. They couldn't look me straight in the eyes. It took me a long time to understand that I really had to fix this problem."

ON HIS NEW FILM: "It's called Be Kind Rewind. It’s a comedy with Jack Black and Mos Def, Mia Farow and Danny Glover, and it's a story about theese two guys who work in a video store run by Danny Glover, and when he's away for a week... Jack Black becomes magnetized and erases all the tapes by mistake. So they don't want to disappoint their boss, and the only way they can think of to cover their mistake is to start to reshoot the films one after the other. The first movie is going to be Ghostbusters. They go out and take their camera and shoot the film in two hours, like playing all the parts and stuff. [Customers] realize they are not the real movies, but it is actually pretty funny because it's Jack Black and Mos Def. And so they become a big hit in town, and little by little they reshoot the originals. ... We're in this little town, Passaic, New Jersey, where we found all of our locations. In fact, one of the mechanics who worked on Eternal Sunshine has his shop there, and so I went to visit him with the idea. His shop is next to a power plant, so he always complains he's having headaches and stuff."

The event wound down with a sneak preview of a new Beck video for the song "Cell Phone's Dead," a one-room, black-and-white exercise featuring the plaid-suited singer morphing into a hulking figure of cardboard boxes, wood blocks and, I think, a bedroom dresser. Or maybe he just climbed into it. I have got to take better notes. At any rate, give Gondry a shout if you happen to be traveling through Passaic (he starts shooting today) and get some Sleep later next month.

(Photo: STV)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 29, 2006

Going, Going, Gondry: Michel Does SoHo

Just a quick heads-up to those of you bleaked out by the steady diet of rain facing the city: The masterminds at indieWIRE have a fairly whimsical alternative set for this evening as Michel Gondry talks up his brilliant The Science of Sleep with Eugene Hernandez at the SoHo Apple Store. The event promises clips, comments and God knows what metaphysical meditations the filmmaker can summon, not to mention plenty of Q&A time for you to praise Eternal Sunshine, ask him when he plans to work with Bjork again, etc. etc.

The fun starts at 7 p.m., but you might think about leaving work 10 minutes ago if you want a decent place to sit. But if you do show up closer to showtime, be sure to introduce yourself--I'll be the guy way, way, way in the back straining on tiptoe with a camera.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 12:49 PM | TrackBack

NYT Film Crew Diversity Story Born Six Months Premature, Many Pounds Underweight

Today in The Times, Joseph Fried contributes this mildly intriguing piece about the city's push to notch up the film crew opportunities available to women and minorities in New York. I say mildly intriguing only because that's how I would describe any such story springing from the Point A of "journalist's ass" and landing on the Point B of "NYT Metro desk."

Not that I would insist women and minorities are not underrepresented among New York film crews, though the half-dozen or so film sets I have visited over the last few months incline me to believe government intervention may signal a slight overreaction. The basic point is that, like Fried, I do not know, and, unlike Fried, I am not going to waste readers' time with abstract, pre-masticated PR bromides from horse traders like Dan Doctoroff to convince you otherwise.

Oh, hell--why not:

[The Bloomberg administration] is putting together what it calls a working group that “will have a goal of developing specific recommendations in six months” for increasing job and training opportunities in the industry for minorities and women, said Daniel L. Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding. The group is to include representatives from production companies and labor unions. ...

Mr. Doctoroff, in an interview, said the Bloomberg administration saw the planned group as a “joint effort with the Council.” But he and Councilwoman Letitia James of Brooklyn, the chairwoman of the Council’s task force, said it was not clear whether the task force would continue or would be subsumed by the new group. ...

Mr. Doctoroff said it was too early to guess what steps the group on film and television production might suggest. ...

Mr. Doctoroff said that given a lack of demographic data on the industry’s production ranks in the city, “I don’t think we know for sure” whether minority groups and women are seriously underrepresented. “But we believe we can do better,” he said, especially in relation to the higher-paying jobs in the industry. ...

But Ms. James, whose district includes Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, said she had often heard “complaints that when you go to film locations, you see a paucity of women and people of color” in the production ranks.

Ms. James recalled that at the hearings, she asked the companies’ representatives “what statistics they had on the employment of people of color and women” in production jobs. “They said they didn’t know; that they don’t keep those numbers,” she recalled. ...

Now, of course, production companies are required to file the totals of women and minority crew members on their sets when applying for the city's generous industry tax credits. Which would be fine and dandy if only the city could establish control over the ratio of qualified crew of any sex or color to veteran Teamsters idly speckling the set like so much back acne. To wit, in his story's only useful interview (tacked on at the end, natch), Fried gets NY Production Alliance board member Sylvia Kinard-Thompson to equivocate brilliantly:

[Kinard-Thompson] said minorities and women “absolutely are” underrepresented in the production ranks. But she said she found the unions to be “pretty responsive” to recent calls for change.

Ms. Kinard-Thompson said the underrepresentation was a legacy of “how the industry evolved,” with many people having had a leg up on finding their first jobs because their “grandfathers were in the union and their fathers were.” And on small productions that do not use union members, she said, “it’s still who you know” that often determines who works on a film.

Come on--all that stuff doesn't really matter in the end. Just ask Dan Doctoroff.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:35 AM | TrackBack

The Infamous Fur Situation: Rome, Woodstock and Hamptons on Opening-Night Radar

Another harbinger of fall: The last 48 hours brought a flurry of festival news smoking the wires, revealing the loooooong-awaited Diane Arbus biopic Fur (right) to be the inaugural RomeFilmFest opener Oct. 13 (for those keeping score at home, Jeff Wells and I were only nine months off in pegging Fur's festival debut). The remaining schedule breaks Sept. 26, but organizers hint to Variety that Mira Nair's India-to-NYC family epic The Namesake will also follow its Toronto bow in Rome.

Back in New York, the Woodstock Film Festival named Doug McGrath's delayed Capote riff Infamous as its own opener; it gets sloppy fourths after Venice, Telluride and Toronto for a cherished "upstate premiere" Oct. 11. Out at the Hamptons, meanwhile, programmers scored a nice little opening-night coup with the world premiere of Philip Haas' Iraq war drama The Situation. Starring Connie Nielsen, Damian Lewis and Miko Hamada and evidently revirginized after a screening last April at Drexel University (just a preview, folks--really!), the film is penciled in for an Oct. 14 Hamptons debut. The fest promises the remainder of its selections online sometime in September.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:22 AM | TrackBack

August 28, 2006

Reeler Link Dump: 'What Did I Miss?' Edition

Wherein your humble editor wades through a week's worth of headlines in 15 minutes, out of sheer compulsion if not necessity:

--Anita Gates cooked up a Sherrybaby souffle in Saturday's NY Times, featuring a tour through director Laurie Collyer's "white-bread" New Jersey milieu. the filmmaker claims to have gotten Jersey out of her system; her star Maggie Gyllenhaal, however, revealed her sense that she has a whole script's worth of topless scenes she has yet to shoot.

--In other New Jersey news, it's nice to see director Davis Guggenheim cashing in his Inconvenient Truth meal ticket for a shot at directing the formidable tandem of his wife Elisabeth Shue and her brother Andrew. Set for a 2007 release by Picturehouse, and according to a studio note, "inspired by real life events in the Shue family, Gracie is the story of a 16-year-old girl who, after a family tragedy changed her life, fought for and won the right for girls everywhere to play competitive team soccer." Shooting begins today in Englewood. Run.

--From Cindy Adams' column today: "Marcia Cross hates sex scenes. Says stripping off and making out in front of a crew is 'embarrassing.' Yeah? No kidding." Straphangers around New York throw up in their mouths.

--Cinecultist and beloved Reeler sub Karen Wilson has a few words with Jonas Mekas about his ongoing 365-film iPod project: "I have been working now for about three months and I finished about 60, 65 of them, and I will continue for quite some time. Though I’m involving other people, like Scorsese, Jarmusch, John Waters, and Virginie Marchand is doing 10 iPods in India, in Bollywood." Leave it to an 82-year-old man to make me feel like a gross underachiever.

--Film Forum sends word that director Terry Gilliam will be in the house to introduce an Oct. 3 screening of Time Bandits, programmed as part of the theater's upcoming Monty Python series. Tideland questions are more than welcome; Brothers Grimm inquiries not so much.

--Meanwhile, fashion designer and cinema dabbler agnès b. will be at BAM Oct. 9 to introduce a screening of Reflections in a Golden Eye, which she chose as one of nine American films to screen in October's agnès b. Presents series.

--Quit, fired or contract expired: Really, it is all just one hair-splitting way after another of saying that Tom Cruise needs to come to the Baby Jesus.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:41 PM | TrackBack

Raimi, Franco Getting Around to Telling Studio About 'Spider-Man' Reshoots

Obviously, no return to full-time blogging can really be undertaken without an immersifying charge through the gossip mill, so let us get this out of the way quickly: Sources at Sony tell The Reeler this morning that they know nothing about the Spider-Man 3 reshoots invoked this morning on TMZ.com:

Spider-Man 3 is going back for reshoots, says co-star James Franco, after test audiences decided they needed more action. The actor tells MTV, "The next thing I'm shooting? Re-shoots on Spider-Man. ... Probably next month. Director Sam Raimi wants more action."

While I am positive Franco said exactly that, and just like that ("Studio Sony is banking on this for summer '07," he very likely continued. "Co-star Tobey Maguire is back on the diet."), studio publicists informed me that the reshoots were news to them, adding that as of now, production remains wrapped and fans should not expect to see Raimi and Co. back in New York any time soon. Of course, that's just the official word--always subject to swift, surreptitious change. I will pass along more information if or when it trickles my way.

(Photo: Many Highways.com)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:50 AM | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitters: Enough With the Quality Already

Well, I am back, so you can just forget about all the pithy, penetrating insights that made last week's Reeler Pinch Hitter series far-and-away the most heavily visited week in this blog's brief history. I will not get into numbers, but between the movies' hot Jew babe surge, waning New York film orgs, Roman Polanski's foot fetish and over a dozen other swell subjects that attracted so much interest, I have finally edged my own attention to NYC cinema into complete irrelevance. Think of it as losing your only child to the babysitter, but you still have to raise it. Whatever--I never lked kids anyway.

So please pardon any sludginess as I detoxify my system of California and get back up to speed in the city. It should not take too long, assuming the sitter left care and feeding instructions. At any rate, I raise my coffee cup in honor and thanks to all of my guest bloggers; without giving away too much, you might expect to see a bit more of them around these parts in the weeks and months ahead. Stay tuned.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:41 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 26, 2006

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Andrew Wagner, Filmmaker

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Andrew Wagner wrote, directed and shot The Talent Given Us, VanAirsdale's favorite film of 2005. Here, he sends a dispatch from the editing room of his latest film, the New York-set Starting Out in the Evening.]

The great seduction of shooting in New York City is to assume your film inherits the intensity of the city simply by virtue of taking place within it. It's a concern that was heightened for me because I grew up in New York and feel it on a cellular level. So I was especially motivated to approach the city/character dynamic from the inside-out and was devoted above all else to exploring the inner lives of the characters and the relationships between the characters. In this sense, the real turf of the film is the field of emotional necessity. To reflect this, in shooting the city itself, we worked with the idea of wide avenues that produce a constant rev that is equivalent to a kind of silence because it is within the shadow of stillness that the true self resides.

There is a tremendous tension in the soul of New York City. While it's a point of origin for forward-thinking and future-making, the city's very essence is born out of the energy of the moment. The hum of human endeavor marries the city to the present tense. New Yorkers are embedded in the moment, a condition that is the starting point for drama, where catharsis and transformation are produced by doing and being, in characters who are not separate from their narratives and become aware of their second skin, their unconscious patterns, finally and only as an act of survival. And this idea cuts to the center of Starting Out In The Evening, a story about a New York writer who makes it into his 70s before he awakens to the necessity to change.

Going back to this idea of emotional necessity--it's really the password to storytelling. In Starting Out In The Evening, we're telling the story of author Leonard Schiller's unacknowledged need for love and recognition. Because he's in the last chapter of his life, the possibilty for these needs being met enters his life in the unexpected force represented by a young graduate student--Heather Wolfe is writing her masters thesis on Leonard's long-forgotten novels and through her thesis she aims to return this exiled king of American literature back to his throne. Painfully for Leonard, his young emissary to immortality has a collision with truth, idealism and ambition that splits his heart and leaves his legacy where it was before her promises: in doubt. But his losses leave him unnaturally vulnerable to a core shift; and though the honesty he gains with his daughter and his work will not have a public value when he's gone, it will sustain him in the rest of his life.

In making this film I had the privilege of working with a cast of uniquely gifted actors--Frank Langella, Lili Taylor, Lauren Ambrose and Adrian Lester. They all prepared and worked differently, but they had in common a passion and commitment that was so pure it was almost shocking. To the film's great benefit, Frank agreed we should rehearse as much as possible in the months leading up to the shoot. He was unflinching in the discovery of his character, and as I watch the film unfold now in the editing room, I'm awestruck by the transformation he pulled off in becoming this sealed-off man who dares only to show himself through measured word and minor gesture. And it also went this way with Lili, Lauren and Adrian, who give performances of genuine power and tenderness. We only had 18 days to shoot this film, and perhaps the most gratifying aspect of the collaboration was to witness the place of sheer transcendance these actors went to as the chaos of the filmmaking process was going on around them.

(Photo: Backstage)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:20 AM | TrackBack

August 25, 2006

Reeler Pinch Hitter: James Ponsoldt, Filmmaker

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. James Ponsoldt's debut feature, Off the Black," will be released Dec. 1 by THINKFilm. He blogs at MySpace and at OffTheBlack.blogspot.com.]

While in my third-grade art class, Karen--the girl who I thought was my girlfriend, but wasn’t--"accidentally" spilled glue and glitter all over my drawing of a mountain lion squatting on top of a mountain. Our teacher walked over, saw the sparkly mess, and asked, “Trying to make Dadaism?”

Eight-year-old me replied: “What’s Dadaism?”

Exactly.

From MoMA's Dada exhibit (L-R): Kurt Schwitters, by El Lissitzky, 1924; Entr'acte, by Rene Clair, 1924.

Well, right now (and through Sept. 11), the Museum of Modern Art has a sprawling, once-in-a-lifetime exhibition that tries to answer that question. And this exhibit is a must-see for New York film lovers.

Really? Yes, really.

Born at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich as a reaction to the horrors of World War I, Dada quickly jumped to New York, then found root in four other cities around the world: Paris, Cologne, Berlin and Hanover. An art movement constructed out of nonsense and chaos, claiming to mean nothing, Dadaism managed to use humor to tackle weighty topics of the day, with an emphasis on anti-war messages. Dada thrived only for a short period in the teens and early 1920’s before giving way to surrealism and other art movements. But the effects of Dadaist artists and filmmakers--like Man Ray, Rene Clair, Viking Eggeling, and Hans Richter--still influence today’s filmmakers (whether they’re aware of it or not).

Clearly not an art historian, I sometimes become lost in the art-soup of Dadaism, Surrealism, Modernism, and whatever -ism is currently in fashion. As a fascinated layman, I’ve waded through Tristan Tzara’s Seven Dada Manifestos as well as Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, and while there are certainly differences, it is sometimes tough to say where Dadaism ends and Surrealism begins. As far as it applies to film and popular culture, I’m not sure that it matters. (But I would argue that the silliness and nothingness that Dada brandished as an anti-war tool 90 years ago still has relevance today--especially today, while we find ourselves lodged in the center of a Middle East quagmire.)

It’s easy to watch masterpieces like Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel (co-written by Salvador Dali), El Topo by Alejandro Jodorowsky (right), or Mullholland Drive by David Lynch, and recognize the obvious influence of Surrealist art—they feel like filmed nightmares. Not quite as easy to spot is Dada’s influence—but it’s there if you look closely. Perhaps best used for comic effect, I can’t help but think of Marcel Duchamp’s sense of whimsy when I watch a Marx Brothers film like A Night at the Opera, where many of the funniest lines are utterly ridiculous (“I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my socks.”). The same is true for the jabberwocky of Monty Python and the Holy Grail or anything by the Pythons. Their humor doesn’t always make sense, but that’s OK. These are films where non-sequiturs are abundant, and the refusal to be wrestled down by logic is part of the film’s brilliance.

As the stakes get higher, gallows humor can becomes sublime. For example, wartime always seems like a ripe target: films like Dr. Strangelove, King of Hearts, Three Kings and Wag the Dog are most successful when they’re most absurd. As Oscar Wilde said, “Life is far too important a thing to ever talk seriously about.” Leave it to a director like Stanley Kubrick to deal with the issue of mutually assured destruction by plopping Slim Pickens on a bomb and letting him ride it like a mustang.

And in an age when a quirky screenwriter like Charlie Kaufman appears to have a following that rivals that of many actors and directors, it would seem appropriate to suggest that Dadaism helped give birth to a new kind of weird. With allies like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, Kaufman is able to see his odd, fantastic and sometimes-illogical fantasies come to life on screen.

But before you think that this Dada-is-everywhere suggestion just applies to art/indie films, let me throw out one name: Will Ferrell.

In just two movies--Talladega Nights and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy--Ferrell and co-writer/director Adam McKay have managed to make incredibly successful mainstream films that also happen to have some really strange moments. They just come out of nowhere--suddenly a bear talks to a dog, or a weatherman tosses a trident during a street fight. Sure. Why not? We accept it because, well, we’ve been conditioned by other mainstream comedies featuring Ben Stiller, Mike Myers or Adam Sandler that also happen to be peppered with nonsense. If you don’t believe me, re-watch some of their films--you’ll be surprised by how bizarre they are at times. Babble has virtually become the norm for comedies. In the post-9/11 world, where film audiences have, for the most part, stayed away from direct attempts at addressing the world we live in (United 93 was an excellent film that for most people, apparently, “came too soon”), thoughtful yet silly comedies about adults behaving like children have flourished.

What's a little rock-flute without flames? Will Ferrell in the contemporary Dada masterpiece Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Yes, perhaps this is far-reaching, but I don’t think it’s possible to limit Dada to its glory years (approximately 1916-1923). Dada casts a long shadow, and has been used, since its beginnings, as a tool not only for picking apart the status quo, but also coping with pain: Nonsense art thrives during wartime. I think Dada was a hugely important counterculture movement that developed into many other counterculture movements. And it’s a far more interesting world for it. Though, as Dada itself was a simultaneous, worldwide movement, connecting the invisible cables through time and ending in a multiplex in Phoenix at a Will Ferrell movie might take a bit of imagination.

Dada wasn’t the first movement to use humor and art to attack necessary targets (political or otherwise), but it certainly had a ton of gusto and flair. And that’s worth something. You should go to MoMA and check out the well-curated exhibition, because there probably won’t be another Dada show like it anywhere for a long, long time. It includes well-known works by Duchamp, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst and Francis Picabia, as well as much more obscure pieces. There’s even a section including landmark short films called Dada on Film (that’s being screened separately through the Department of Film and Media).

And as you finish reading this perhaps-indulgent essay (thank you, by the way), please remember what Dada’s grandfather, Tristan Tzara, said: “Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism.”

Posted by stvanairsdale at 03:12 PM | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Lauren Wissot on Roman Polanski's Foot Fetish

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Lauren Wissot is the author of Under My Master's Wings; visit her MySpace site here.]

"What’s up with the feet?" my fellow cinephile friend Roxanne and I wondered.

It had gotten to the point where they could no longer be ignored: Roman Polanski’s feet. No, not the director’s own two feet, but shot upon shot of those attached to names like Deneuve and Farrow, Mastroianni and Kingsley. Some of the greatest ankles and arches ever to grace the screen appear in loving close up or wary long shot in every film in this master’s oevure. It became a game with us: spot the foot shot. We could hardly wait for The Pianist to be released just for a possible glimpse of Adrien Brody’s bunions.

But that’s when it morphed into more than a sport; it became the concept for our very own short film. "Maybe if we recorded all the foot shots," we thought, "and lined them up frame after frame, a hidden message would appear from the director-in-exile telling us what it all meant." Eschewing gratuitous sex for gratuitous feet, we found Polanski engaging in no shortage of predictable camera ogling. Could innocent Mia Farrow ever have imagined that removing her shoes and stockings in Rosemary's Baby would become a voyeur’s striptease? (And what would Frank have said?) What about Sigourney Weaver tucked away in the background of Death and the Maiden, her pretty feet distractingly propped up on a table nonetheless? And Emmanuelle Seigner receiving that foot massage on a park bench in Bitter Moon--come on! How did the MPAA miss that scene of public indecency?

To his credit, however, Polanski performs his most intriguing filmmaking with the gentlemen. Take for example:

--Marcello Mastroianni crushing a ping-pong ball with his foot in Che? (or Diary of Forbidden Dreams);

--Lionel Stander for allowing his feet to be set on fire in Cul-de-Sac;

--Peter Coyote for grabbing a dog’s foot while enjoying a blowjob in Bitter Moon.

Anyway, The Foot (or Un Piede di Roman Polanski) is an experimental meditation that Roxanne and I have been pursuing on-and-off for several years. Because neither of us have ongoing access to equipment, it’s been mostly off. So now we’re putting the call out to any editors interested in helping us to finally achieve our foot fetish dream. We still must collect a few stray toes from The Pianist, Oliver Twist and from the Criterion Collection DVD of Polanski shorts, sync up our Vicious Pink score and voila! Feet!

Interested in putting your best foot forward? Contact Lauren Wissot at laurenvile@yahoo.com or Roxanne Kapitsa at pinkbox@aol.com.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 12:03 PM | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitter: David Schwartz; Chief Curator, Museum of the Moving Image

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. David Schwartz is chief curator at the Museum of the Moving Image.]

Summer is quickly winding down, which means the busy fall film season is upon us. While S.T. VanAirsdale is squeezing in a few more vacation days burnishing his bronze tan, I’m pleased to have the chance to look ahead to late autumn and tell you about the Museum’s upcoming Jacques Rivette retrospective.

Rivette (right) is probably the greatest director to emerge during the French New Wave who has never had a complete retrospective in New York. His films, including Celine and Julie go Boating, La Belle Noiseuse and Up, Down, Sideways, are playful, engaging works that express Rivette’s fascination with artifice and theatricality. Yet the movies are also famously long and multilayered. In fact, Rivette’s most famously long film, Out One: Noli me tangere, runs nearly 13 hours and has never been shown in the United States.

Amazingly, only three of Rivette’s 20 films are in theatrical distribution in this country. Now, with the enormous assistance of the National Film Theatre in London (which created laser-subtitles for Out One: Noli me tangere and five other films) and the French Embassy (which has negotiated with international archives and distributors to arrange screenings of 10 films), we have been able to put together a complete retrospective. New York audiences will have their first chance to see all of Rivette’s films in a theatrical setting.

The fun begins on November 10, and continues every weekend day through December 24. Cinephiles be prepared: Out One: Noli me tangere will be shown one time only, on December 9 and 10. If you’re interested in attending, send an email to info@movingimage.us and you’ll be notified when tickets are available. If your summer tans aren’t gone by Labor Day, they definitely will fade away after two solid months of weekends in the Riklis Theater.

While we’re at it, a quick sneak peek: on Sunday, September 17, we’ll be presenting a preview screening of The Last King of Scotland and a discussion with stars Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy and cinephile-turned-director Kevin Macdonald. Go to the Museum's Web site and sign up for our weekly email, and you won’t miss a thing. Terry Gilliam (Tideland) and the Quay Brothers (The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes) will also stop by in the fall.

(Photo: Photofest/Museum of the Moving Image)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 24, 2006

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Eric Kohn, Film Critic

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Eric Kohn is a regular film critic for the New York Press. His writing has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, FHM and Reverse Shot. He blogs at Screen Rush.]

It’s hard to keep up with the fantastic writing about film by veterans in the critic crowd, considering the lesser effort required to rely on the blogosphere for regular bite-sized updates on the state of cinema. Finding the time and strength to pick up a book is a much heavier task than it used to be. Consequently, I’ve just gotten around to finishing Jonathan Rosenbaum’s seven-year-old tome Movie Wars, a solemn tirade against a loosely defined “media-industrial complex.” Rosenbaum, the accomplished Chicago Reader film critic and scholar of all things celluloid, brazenly accuses his projected antagonists of wasting time pumping up mediocre corporate products, preventing commendable foreign and independent cinema from receiving well-earned love. Call it Chomsky for cinephiles.

Surprisingly, however, the only aspect of the book that’s particularly iconoclastic is the title. Despite a few possibly justified jabs at David Denby’s tunnel vision taste, Rosenbaum spends most of the 225 pages discussing films that he considers worth watching, then thoroughly rebukes American theatergoers for not paying closer attention. This is engrossing stuff--the first thing I did after completing the last chapter was place Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami at the top of my Netflix queue--but Rosenbaum unevenly oscillates between analyzing specific films and decrying the treatment of art as a commodity, which obscures the intended polemic.

The book also has an odd tinge of anachronism. I was shocked to find that the Internet, in all its film journalism complexities, is excluded from this discourse--and Rosenbaum, writing when Ain't It Cool News and other movie sites were in their infancies, was surely aware of medium's relevance, even if his early career pre-dated it by several decades. As a result of this regrettable omission, more accomplished worker bees than myself have long ago tackled the supposed flaws of Rosenbaum’s unremitting contempt for studio tactics that often bind critics to the whimsical will of a publicity-driven economy.

Actually, I read the book while on vacation, and the best result of exploring its self-styled diatribe is that it got me pumped to be back in New York, with all the lovely variety this city offers. I’ll suggest with equal fervor that you dig Film Forum’s upcoming series of Frank Tashlin films and trip out to Monster House in 3-D at the multiplexes. Because, folks, if this is a movie war, then somebody needs to bring down the wall.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 03:44 PM | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Karen Wilson, Cinecultist

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Karen Wilson, otherwise known as the Cinecultist, is a film writer living in the East Village. She also contributes frequently to Gothamist, The Movie Binge and Jane magazine's celeb blog.]

With summer winding to a close and the previews for the big fall heavies hitting cineplexes, it's getting to be that favorite time of year for serious movie fans. Something Cinecultist mentioned in our Gothamist round-up last week but that we felt merited an additional post is the Filmmakers Symposium, which starts in September at Anthology Film Archives.

For the past 15 years, this series of Tuesday night screenings has featured some of the most buzzed about movies of the year. For those who don't have access to the advance press and industry screening circuit, it's an amazing opportunity to see early all the movies which will be in the running for awards. This year's proposed lineup (which allows for scheduling difficulties and conflict) has some of Cinecultist's most highly anticipated fall films like Fur (above, with Nicole Kidman as Diane Arbus), The Good Shepherd, The Fountain, For Your Consideration, Marie Antoinette, The Departed, Babel and tons more.

Tickets are a bit steep (it works out to about $30 per flick), and you have to buy a block of them in either a group of five or a group of 10 but still. If you have that kind of cash and are as obsessive as CC about seeing the big fall movies, it could be an investment well worth the obvious bragging rights: "Oh, Babel? Yeah, I saw it already. You know how Alejandro can be--so very Iñárritu-esque." You get a bit of a discount if you register before the end of August, so check out the Symposium site soon.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:33 PM | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Lawrence Levi; Co-author, 'The Film Snob's Dictionary'

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Lawrence Levi is co-author of The Film Snob's Dictionary. He blogs at Looker.]

You don't need a snobbery expert to tell you which films at the 44th New York Film Festival will appeal most to film snobs. That's because, as every cineaste knows, the NYFF is the snobbiest film festival anywhere. That's not to say it's pretentious; it's only that the Film Society of Lincoln Center pointedly, and unapologetically, makes no concessions to popular taste. And just because two of the five members of this year's selection committee, John Powers and Lisa Schwarzbaum, are critics at glossy magazines doesn't mean Casino Royale made the cut.

Among this year's snob-worthy New York Film Festival selections (L-R): Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, David Lynch's The Inland Empire and Manoel de Oliveira's Belle Toujours

But Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette did. Ms. Coppola is NYFF's idea of slumming: an Oscar winner who's popular with the kids. Artsy college kids, anyway. Xenophobes, take note: there are just three other movies by Americans in the festival. Little Children, directed by Todd "In the Bedroom" Field, stars Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly. Far more tantalizing is David Lynch's high-def video debut, The Inland Empire. Celebrating its 25th anniversary with a special screening is Warren Beatty's Reds—which racked up 12 Oscar nominations but somehow managed to lose Best Picture to the now-forgotten-except-for-its-ironically-deployed-theme-music Chariots of Fire.

The centerpiece is Pedro Almodóvar's Volver, which stars Penélope Cruz in tight tops and is just as good as you've heard. Those peppy Brits whom Michael Apted has trailed for 42 years are back in 49 Up. Offside, the latest from Iran's Jafar Panahi, concerns a group of girls who dress as boys to watch a soccer game. (Good luck getting a visa for the Q&A, Mr. Panahi.) Thailand's cheeky master of the nigh-incomprehensible, Apichatpong "call me Joe" Weersethakul, brings his latest fractured narrative, Syndromes and a Century. South Korea's Bong Joon-ho, who made the twisted police procedural Memories of Murder, arrives with a monster movie, The Host, and the Hong Kong wildman Johnnie To offers up Triad Election. Closing night belongs to the Mexcian horrormeister Guillermo del Toro and Pan's Labyrinth (above), a gothic fairy tale set in Franco's Spain.

Old-school film snobs won't be disappointed. Alain Resnais, now 84, is back with Private Fears in Public Places, and Manoel de Oliveira, unstoppable at 97, offers something totally unexpected: Belle Toujours, a sequel—38 years later—to Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour. (No, Catherine Deneuve's not in it, but Michel Piccoli is.) And for snobs who find the 21st century intolerable, there's the festival sidebar, "50 Years of Janus Films." Tickets go on sale September 10; until then, please try to control yourselves.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:14 AM | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Jamie Stuart, Filmmaker

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Jamie Stuart is a New York-based filmmaker. His series Mutiny City News appeared on MCN in 2005, and his current site is www.mutinycompany.com.]

All right. Never wanted my own blog. Never wanted to blog at somebody else's blog. So when The Reeler e-mailed me in a sweaty, clammy panic and pleaded for me to sub one day while he jetted off to Fiji or St. Tropez or wherever, I decided I'd take him up on the offer just so I could write about how much I don't want to blog.

Funny thing that creative process. As I sat down to write my nuclear treatise, which was to run complete with half-naked MySpace photos taken with Photobooth on my Mac (using the stretch effect), I decided there was too much goddamned negativity already out there. And as I'm anything but a conformist, I decided instead to make this argument:

In terms of quality output, the period ranging from roughly 1999-2003 will go down as one of the most significant in film history, not unlike the late 1960s/early 1970s. This era featured a convergence of generational shifts, millennial angst and the adoption of digital both professionally and in the consumer spectrum. Most observers still point to the '90s indie revolution as the last great period, however, I'd argue that it was already over by the time the media jumped on it--Pulp Fiction was the end, not the beginning. Even though by nature I prefer the concept of independence, the '99-'03 phase that saw the rise of the dependents was more dynamic--and with that, idiosyncratic filmmakers who had emerged independently (Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell) or via music videos (David Fincher, Spike Jonze) were able to further their creativity by having modest budgets to play around with. The energy created by these new talents was met with the returns of Terrence Malick, George Lucas and Stanley Kubrick, and it also sparked the second golden era of Steven Spielberg, whose films best illustrated the immediate impact of 9/11 (he formally led the charge to reinvigorate movies with ideas after accepting blame for getting 'em kicked out in the first place). Meanwhile, with the releases of The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix and Harry Potter, the modern FX blockbuster serial was born.

Book-ended by Wes Anderson's Rushmore in late 1998 and Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in early 2004, we received: The Thin Red Line; Fight Club; Minority Report; Elephant; Bowling For Columbine; Eyes Wide Shut; Lost In Translation; The Matrix; The Lord of the Rings; Being John Malkovich; Magnolia; Election; The Blair Witch Project; Donnie Darko; Requiem For A Dream; The Royal Tenenbaums; O Brother Where Art Thou? ; All About My Mother; Amelie; Three Kings; Mulholland Drive; 28 Days Later; City Of God; The Shape Of Things; The Sixth Sense; One Hour Photo; The Limey; Y tu mama tambien; Catch Me If You Can; Adaptation; The Fog Of War; Kill Bill; Ghost World; 21 Grams; Dancer In the Dark; American Splendor; Touching the Void; Punch-Drunk Love; Spider-Man; About Schmidt; Talk to Her; 25th Hour; The Pianist; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Traffic; Far From Heaven; In the Bedroom; The Man Who Wasn't There; Waking Life; Auto Focus; A.I.: Artificial Intelligence; and American Beauty -- not to mention Apocalypse Now Redux and a 70mm re-release of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I'm sure I missed more than a few. But you get the point. The good news is it happened. The bad news is that it's over. And so is my anomalous blog attempt.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 23, 2006

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Joe Swanberg, Filmmaker

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Joe Swanberg is a filmmaker based in Chicago. His first feature, Kissing on the Mouth, will be released on DVD Aug. 29. Here he writes about his second feature and his ongoing series featured on Nerve.com, both of which screen as part of this week's Vloggers Unite! program at the Pioneer Theater.]

When 200 people crammed into the theater for a sold-out screening of LOL at the Independent Film Festival of Boston in April, the energy in the room was palpable. As the film played, it was as close to the perfect theatrical experience as I could ever expect, and proof that the theater is still my favorite way to see movies. But if you weren't in Boston that night, you couldn't see LOL, no matter how badly you wanted to.

Joe Swanberg as Patrick and Mollie Leibovitz as Maggie in a scene from Swanberg's Young American Bodies, screening Aug. 26 as part of the Pioneer Theater's Vloggers Unite! series. (Photo: Joe Swanberg)

Two weeks later, one hundred times that number of people would check out the first episode of Young American Bodies, the web-series that I directed for Nervevideo.com. Most of them probably viewed it by themselves on a crummy computer screen with dinky speakers. It was nothing like the great experience of the LOL screening in Boston, and I couldn't care less. More people watched the first episode of YAB on its first day than will see my first two features in a theater combined.

Audience size and accessibility aren't everything. I'm not convinced that the Internet is a good home for feature films just yet. When file sizes get small enough and bandwidth speed gets fast enough, it will be, but right now the medium lends itself best to time-killing. It's hard to watch a feature film when you're bored at work, but it's easy to watch a five-minute podcast. I'm less interested in putting my features online than I am in creating the best time-killing content I can produce. The audience for small indie features shrinks as the audience looking to kill time grows exponentially.

The Pioneer Theater's Vlogger's Unite! series is a sampling of some of the best time-killing content out there. They are spotlighting the first video generation in the cutting-edge art form of entertaining bored people at work. Prime time has shifted from 8 p.m to 9:30 a.m. TV dinners have given way to morning coffee. People are looking for one more reason not to start their day, and if you're good, your show (or blog or vlog) could be that reason.

As I write this, I'm in post-production on my third feature, Hannah Takes the Stairs. I will continue to chase the elusive feature film audience. I will keep lusting after that communal experience. But I'm equally excited about this new audience and these new ways of reaching them. I want to make good work and I want as many people as possible to see it, and there has never been a better time to do both.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 02:32 PM | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Lewis Beale on Cinema's Jewish Babe Renaissance

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Lewis Beale writes about the entertainment industry for a number of national publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and USA Weekend.]

Lately I’ve been having this fantasy that someone makes a movie in which the male lead is Jewish, and gets to kick some serious ass. You know--he’s Sam Goldberg, the undercover cop about to bust a major Mexican drug cartel. Maybe he’s Capt. Cohen, a combat vet sent behind the lines in Iraq to rescue an aid worker kidnaped by Shiite terrorists. Or wait: How about a film about a real person, baseball Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg--not only one studly looking man, but a WWII vet and a serious Jewish role model who was subjected to endless anti-Semitic taunts, and refused to play ball on Yom Kippur?

Now there’s a movie I’d pay to see. Unfortunately, when it comes to Jewish male portrayals, those of us who are Members of the Tribe--and I’m not referring to the Cleveland Indians--have had to endure a long string of cinematic whiners, wussies, neurotics, anal retentives, victims and jackasses. Think Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. Ben Stiller and David Schwimmer. Adam Sandler. And that beloved template of all things urban, obsessive and annoying: Woody Allen.

I’m confused by this state of affairs, for two reasons. It’s no secret that the film and TV industries employ a high percentage of Jews in all sorts of positions, so it’s hard to figure out why Jewish executives and performers would allow these buffonish caricatures to represent their people. Plus there’s this: At the same time that representations of Jewish males border on Der Stürmer-like stereotypes, there has never been a better time to see a whole slew of hot Jewish babes onscreen.

Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson (yep, she’s one of ours - her mom is Jewish - eat your hearts out), Amanda Peet, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Selma Blair, Winona Ryder, Sarah Silverman, Julianna Margulies. They’re all solid performers, scorchingly sexy and smart as all get-out. And they don’t play to type.

So what’s going on here? Back in the day, movie stars like John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson were recognizably Jewish, yet allowed to play a broad range of roles that best suited their talents. But today, in a dumbed-down intellectual environment, the shorthand of stereotypes is an easy way to connect audiences with film and TV performers. Hence, the Hebraic minstrelsy represented by the Ben Stillers of the world.

It’s also important to note that when it comes to their onscreen roles, several of these male buffoons are specifically identified as Jewish: David Schwimmer’s whiny Ross Geller. Larry David’s obnoxious version of himself (a performance I find especially repulsive, as if it had been written for an anti-Semitic cable channel). Adam Sandler in several films. And the self-absorbed Jerry Seinfeld of Seinfeld. Contrast this with the women, who are rarely ID’d as Jewish in their work. Sure, Natalie Portman, one of the most public Jews in the business (may Yahweh bless her), has played Jewish roles in the past, but for the most part, actresses like Peet, Johansson and Weisz pretty much avoid ethnic stereotyping.

How come? One reason, I think, is that the JAP (Jewish American Princess) stereotype, long used to define Jewish females, has pretty much been confined to the dustbin of history. It’s still around, but after years of complaints from the Jewish community, it’s hardly the defining pejorative it once was. Which means something else has also gone to the Graveyard Where Stereotypes Die: that Jewish women can’t be hot and sexual. This was an essential part of the JAP mythos; that they wouldn’t perform oral sex, or they would only do the nasty if promised a shopping spree at Bergdorf’s.

So let us give thanks, at least, that we have returned to those days of yesteryear, when an actress like Lauren Bacall could be both hot and Hebrew. Now the entertainment industry needs to turn its attention to the Jewish male and update our image for the masses. It's time for someone, anyone, to step up to the plate--the whiny shtick is getting really, really tired.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:33 AM | Comments (52) | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Bill Plympton, Filmmaker

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Bill Plympton is the Academy Award-nominated, New York-based filmmaker behind animated works including Your Face, Guard Dog and Guide Dog. He sent along this postcard from his trip to this year's San Diego Comic-Con.]

So, what's all this hype about the San Diego Comic-Con? And why do I keep going every year? Isn't it just for "comic geeks"?

Well, it used to be just for comic geeks, but since the blockbuster success of comic-based films such as X-Men, Spider-Man and Sin City, the "Con" is now the place to launch a film, and consequently one sees all the movie stars and directors there: Hilary Swank, Samuel L. Jackson, Guillermo Del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, Bryan Singer, Robert Rodriguez and the Wachowski Brothers.

Bill Plympton (R) with Claymation pioneer Will Vinton at the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con (Photo: Bill Plympton)

I just returned from the 2006 Con, and besides having a booth there, I was involved with a number of events:

--I did a panel discussion and signing of the 3rd volume of Flight, a huge
graphic novel containing work from many artists, such as Jeff Smith. I did an 8-page story called "The Cloud."

--Nickelodeon had a presentation of their new crop of pilots from Frederator Studios, mine is called Gary Guitar. They showed a few others that were knock-outs. The Spike & Mike Festival had their annual late-night screening of Sick and Twisted shorts, where the audience's applause (or boos) decides the fate of some untested cartoons. About 4,000 rabid cartoon geeks were looking for blood. They showed a film called Spiral, directed by reclusive animator W.P. Murton and produced by my studio; happily, it didn't get rejected.

--A presentation of the new Animation Show. I was joined by Robert May, Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge. My film Guard Dog was shown, as was Don's ever-popular Rejected," to an equally large and rebellious crowd.

Beyond these events, I had a table to sell my merchandise--CDs, posters, books, T-shirts, sketches and mostly DVDs. The great part for me is an opportunity to meet my fans and talk to people about independent animation.

This year, the convention seemed to be twice as busy as last year, and I also got to hang out with such animation directors as Will Vinton, Aaron McGruder (The Boondocks), Mike Mignola (Hellboy), Geoff Darrow (The Matrix), Danny Antonucci (Ed, Edd & Eddy), the Adult Swim guys and, of course, the aforementioned Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt. I also encountered Eric Goldberg, Matt Groening, Art Clokey, Tom Warburton, Craig McCracken, Robert Smigel and Ray Harryhausen.

Programs included sneak previews of Brother Bear II, Open Season, Ant Bully, Happy Tree Friends, plus Jerry Beck's Worst Cartoons Ever Made. How many animation festivals can compare with that line-up?

The good news is that NYC will host the New York Comic-Con next February; I happily predict they will have equal success in attracting the large animation crowd--and I recommend that you attend. For more information, check out NYComicCon.com.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:12 AM | TrackBack

August 22, 2006

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Bennett Marcus, Open All Night

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Bennett Marcus is the co-editor of the celebrity and gossip site Open All Night. He graciously contributed this dispatch from the Ziegfeld Theater premiere of OutKast's garish cinematic soul-ocaust, Idlewild.]

Who knew that Liza Minnelli was into rap? Homegirl said she hung out with OutKast's Andre "3000" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi" Patton down on the Wilmington, N.C., set of their new film Idlewild. I would have loved to have been a fly on that wall, but Liza told your humble Guest Reeler about it Monday at the film's New York premiere.

Liza with a ZZZZ: (L-R) Macy Gray, Ben Vereen, Liza Minnelli, Andre Benjamin and Antwan Patton arrive at Monday's Idlewild premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater (Photo: Louis Lanzano/AP)

It should be noted here that today’s Guest Reeler, far less astute than the Real Reeler, initiated the conversation with Ms. Minnelli by asking if she was in the movie. “No, but I was there for a lot of the filming," she said. "I went to visit Ben [Vereen] because I thought it was such an unusual project. And it was thrilling to watch. I mean, he worked with these kids for like a month before they got in front of a camera, and they are so marvelous in it. And [choreographer] Hinton Battle’s work is so good. And the director is brilliant.” It should be noted here that the Real Reeler disagrees with Liza on the last point about director Bryan Barber being brilliant. (Let me also point out the obvious: This Guest Reeler has not seen this film.)

Liza then looked at me like I was crazy when I asked if her buddy Vereen had taught the guys to dance. “They could always dance!” she said.

Now that Liza had set me straight on the rap world, I was prepared for my conversation with Benjamin, who sings a love song to a dead woman in the film. “Well, actually, that was the original concept," he told me. "Like, the movie started from two video concepts, and that was the video concept for a song called ‘She Lives in My Lap,’ which I perform in the movie, and a song called ‘Church.’ Bryan Barber took those video concepts, and he stretched it out and made it this long-form movie. But it’s not a video at all.”

I didn’t get to talk to Barber, but it should be noted here that the Real Reeler also disagrees with that last statement, and in fact called the movie a long-form music video.

At any rate, your Guest Reeler is more comfortable discussing weightier issues: Benjamin displayed his appealingly offbeat fashion sense in a straw hat, orange- and blue-striped shirt and white pants.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 03:05 PM | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Brian Newman, National Video Resources

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Brian Newman is the executive director of National Video Resources, a non-profit organization supporting filmmakers and other artists in independent media. He blogs at Springboard Media.]

During a recent dinner with a filmmaker, our conversation turned to the death of the Association of Video and Filmmakers, a non-profit collective better known as AIVF. "What's wrong with New York that we can't have one good organization?" she asked, "Austin, San Francisco, even Cleveland all have great film organizations and us? Nothing."

She was exaggerating, but her point was valid. The conversations about the demise of AIVF have made it clear that they had problems, but also that filmmakers have unmet needs--a place to meet, network, find crew, collaborate, to advocate on their behalf, to find in-depth information and to exhibit their work. Some aspects of these needs are served by certain local groups and by many new online companies and blogs, but many feel that we don't have a place that is clearly identified as the New York film organization; where a filmmaker new to town can walk in the door and feel like they are connecting to the community. This would seem a bit odd in the supposed independent film (and cultural) capital of the world.

I have posited that AIVF's demise is just the first fallout of a larger crisis facing similar organizations. At National Video Resources, the organization I manage, we've recognized this and are changing our model to adapt to the changing times--things like the decrease of governmental and foundation support, or the impact of new technologies on the needs of artists. Like everyone else, we need to adapt and think differently about our business, and like everyone else, we may fail. Almost every other organization has called me up to deny there is a crisis or that it applies to them. Let's take this on face value and say that the crisis isn't affecting everyone; the fact remains that no one has taken a lead at picking up the pieces of AIVF or designing better ones to take their place. This tells me that the field may not be in crisis, but it definitely has a cash flow problem.

Add to this the particulars of New York--chiefly, rising rents affecting filmmakers and cultural groups alike, and it seems that a conversation is needed about where we go from here, and what is on the horizon. We need some more imagination, some dreaming about what New York filmmakers deserve.

What if one of the larger groups in town could add just a few things to their already great programs and become the New York hub for the community? The Tribeca Film Institute, for example, has the power to build a downtown home for filmmakers, and could easily build programs to rival Sundance, but with a focus on the "edginess" of New York. Or IFP could become the perfect organization if it added some advocacy and better networking for its members (kudos to them, however, for the "Do It Yourself" additions to Independent Film Week).

What if some of the smaller groups (the DocuClubs, Film/Video Arts and similar-sized groups) considered mergers to better serve more people? There are benefits to a diversity of groups, true, but there's too much competition for the same funding and audiences right now. What if just one of these groups would move to Brooklyn (you know, where filmmakers live) and build a home there? What if we all made a case to foundations, the city and the public that independent filmmakers are crucial to New York's creative economy? What if we used the demise of AIVF to spur a greater conversation about what is needed?

Last week brought news that shows one group is dreaming about "what's next?" Downtown Community Television (DCTV) announced the receipt of major grants--over $2 million--to build a downtown home for filmmakers and audiences. Plans are still in the works, but they'll be able to offer education, facilities, equipment, screening rooms, servers and a networking location for documentary filmmakers, audiences and the surrounding communities. DCTV's focus won't solve all the issues, but they are clearly dreaming.

What's needed next are more innovative projects like those at DCTV--to help filmmakers in New York to make their films, have the freedom to create their visions and to have audiences find their work. Undoubtedly, other groups have their own unannounced plans, but I would propose that to really keep New York as the independent film capital, we need a lot more dreaming, and soon.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Martin De Leon and Lauren Kinsler, Blank Screen Media

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Martin De Leon and Lauren Kinsler edit the splendid new NYC film blog Blank Screen.]

Blank Screen really is fresh off the boat. Well, maybe more like fresh off the wagon: It was only a mere three-and-a-half months ago that we arrived here in New York from Austin, Texas, a town that, while in the middle of one of the reddest states around, proves to be a cultural haven for artists and filmmakers.

Most people know the Austin film scene from our resident cowboys Robert Rodriguez and sweetheart Richard Linklater. While Rodriguez comes with an attitude, no one better represents Austin than Richard Linklater--from the love of science fiction to the development of new animation technology to the two kids and a fuel-efficient car. We used to see him all the time at our local grocery store (he likes Dijon mustard!). But it isn’t just the filmmakers that make Austin a tight, thriving film community. It's the University of Texas, which continues to churn out award winning filmmakers every year and whch hosts the production company Burnt Orange. It’s the arthouse theaters like the Alamo Drafthouse, the grassroots Cine Las Americas Film Fest, the Austin Film Society (which gives out grants to emerging filmmakers), and, of course, the big elephant in the room, good ole South by Southwest. Those two weeks of cultural indulgence are what Austin is about. Well, maybe what Austin on speed is about.

But Austin, though sunny and long-haired, is still a small town, and that's one reason moving to the Rotten Apple sounded neat-o. For example, there is only one alternative newspaper (you can only get so much press out of them), not enough independent film screenings and only one major film society. Austin also has too many qualified, creative people and not enough places for them to work. You have Ph.D.'s waiting tables, established screenwriters working crap temp jobs and snot-nosed directors just waiting to take your gig. Texas may be huge, but the amount of arts jobs is as tiny as Danny Devito.

And now we arrive in New York City--the “cultural capital of the world,” they keep telling me, where I continue to walk around in awe at the size of the film community that exists. Not only is it the endless amount of arthouse theatres, production companies and damn good film blogs, but it’s the high school kid throwing movie parties on his roof, the grass roots film fundraising, the experimental movie/music/theater/comedy/movie events and this unparalleled passion for film. And while we may have just gotten here, I can assure you we won’t be leaving any time soon.

So, Austin, meet New York--you two should be friends.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:10 AM | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Evan Shapiro, IFC

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Evan Shapiro is the executive vice president and general manager of IFC. His Captain's Blog appears on the network's Web site.]

I loathe “reality programming.” I harbor no disrespect for the hundreds of people who produce “reality” TV--I know it’s a very difficult job, and realize that the shows can often be entertaining. But, ever since the arrival of Survivor and The Amazing Race and Project Greenlight, and Project Runway and The Contender, and, and, and, and... I have feared that we are on the precipice on the demise of Western culture itself.

"Reality" then and now: (L-R) PBS' An American Family and IFC's This Film is Not Yet Rated

Other than the new class of un-celebrity it has created, my major issue with the genre is that--like many things in these Orwellian times--“reality programming” is deceptively named. After all, “reality programming” is not based in reality at all. It is a complete manipulation that owes far more to fiction than any reality I know. Survivor bears about as much resemblance to being stranded on a deserted island as General Hospital does to The Mayo Clinic.

Today’s ever increasing number of “unreality shows” are genetic mutations of cinema vérité television, begun in 1973 by PBS with its stunning twelve part documentary series, An American Family.The series--directed by Alan and Susan Raymond--chronicled in painful detail the disintegration of the family of Patricia and Bill Loud and their five children. The eldest child, Lance, was the first openly gay person in a prime time television series, and, during the series, Bill moved out and Pat filed for divorce. It was riveting. No audition shows, no text message audience votes. Just real reality.

By comparison (for the most part – there are exceptions), today’s unreality shows look like Star Trek: They are clearly scripted; they are highly planned; and they leave little, if anything, to chance, circumstance or actual filmmaking.

But, I have found, there is an upside.

The explosion of “reality programming” has seemingly created something unusual in the American public--an appetite for reality. This, in turn, has created a significant boon for what is traditionally the most downtrodden end of the entertainment industry--documentary films and filmmakers.

Documentaries are supposed to reflect the culture back unto itself--to show us a reality that we might have otherwise missed. Great documentary or vérité directors unveil secrets that lie beneath or behind the veneer of every day life. The stories they tell are sometimes uncomfortable for us to see. But that does not make them any less important than, say, Superman or Wedding Crashers.

"Who woulda thought Al Gore could be a box office star?"

Traditionally speaking, however, the word “documentary” has spelled death at the box office. Now, while far from reaching blockbuster status, documentaries have become a somewhat reliable and sought-after genre among indie and mainstream studios. Even theatrical failures are relatively low risk ventures with an upside on television and DVD, while the hits can be--and have been--substantial money makers. Shit, who woulda thought Al Gore could be a box office star?

This has created a renaissance of sorts for docs, with the minis, indies and majors getting in the game and more funding flowing from investors in Hollywood and beyond. More importantly, for the first time in my memory, it has helped important filmmakers and relevant films actually find audiences. This shift has allowed the genre to grow beyond Michael Moore, to include entertaining films such as Wordplay, The Aristocrats and March of the Penguins, but has also allowed films like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, The War Tapes and The Ground Truth to garner greater recognition and distribution.

While I am loath to admit it, I believe this current phenomenon is owed at least in part to “reality programming” on television. Audiences have been taught--by none other than Super Nanny and (gulp) Donald Trump--that a television show or a film does not have to have movie stars and special effects to be entertaining. In some cases, they’ve learned, it’s even OK to actually learn something while you watch! There are other factors, I’m sure, at play, but it’s hard to ignore the new found appreciation for vérité created by shows like 30 Days and My Life on the D List.

On September 1, IFC is releasing Kirby Dick’s documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, into theaters, including an exclusive run at IFC Center. It’s an unvarnished, real-life examination of the Motion Picture Association of America, and the censorship of American movies--featuring a lesbian private eye (Becky Altringer) who investigates the MPAA’s ultra-secret ratings system. This is the first time I’ve overseen a theatrical release (let alone a multi-city theatrical run) of a documentary. And while I retain a major distaste for “reality programming,” it’s hard--if not impossible--to imagine staging such a wide documentary release in a pre-reality TV world.

This is hard to say, but… Thank you, Jeff Probst.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 21, 2006

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Lisa Vandever, CineKink

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Lisa Vandever is the co-founder and director of CineKink, which is dedicated to the celebration and encouragement of kink-positive depictions in film and television. She likely watches less porn than you think she does.]

Historically speaking, August is known as the poor-pitiful-me month around CineKink world headquarters. This is the time of year when, leading into our annual October festival run in NYC, everything suddenly feels mind-crushingly undone. Promotions feel uninspired. Sponsorships feel unconfirmed woefully untapped. And, most pressing, piles upon piles of tapes and DVDs feel unscreened, sitting accusingly in a post-triage, pre-viewing assemblage in various corners of the office.

With our call for entries doubled over last year, we’re also enjoying some nice growing pangs this season. While this is great in terms of "mission"--providing a safe and enthusiastic harbor for the kink-friendly and sex-positive from around the globe, the more the merrier--this kinda sucks in terms of enjoying the activities one traditionally associates with summer. Quite certainly, everybody else in the free world is enjoying a sun-dappled day at the shore. And/or taking in the latest high-production-valued studio release involving snakes on a plane or any other inconsequential somesuch.

Instead, childhood admonitions to get outside and get some fresh air jump to fevered mind while sitting in the air-conditioned dark, eyes fixed blearily to the screen, pondering life’s eternal questions: Which is the stronger drive - the one for sex or the one for narrative? Is this an insightful commentary on the desire to be taken fully by another--or a juvenile miscomprehension of that crucial little thing known as consent? How much screen time devoted to full-on cunnilingus will a theatrical audience tolerate in today’s remote control society? (And how do you spell "cunnilingus"?)

Happily, I’ve been able to take a brief respite from all of that, as this guest missive finds me in beautiful Portland, Oregon, my hometown and site of the latest Best of CineKink screenings. This touring component of our festival was just introduced this year; our bookings have been haphazard to date, with the determining factors generally being a welcoming venue, along with a personal desire to visit the city of said welcoming venue. The notion of turning my usual late-summer visit with my parents into a tax deduction made a Portland run quite attractive, and a friend was able to put me in touch with the Clinton Street Theater, a city institution that also boasts one of the country’s longest continuous bookings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (I was there for it once, sometime circa 1981.)

The audiences for the tour have been a little hit or miss. Mostly hit, fortunately, with a turnout surpassing New York in some places. And even where the actual attendance has been rather grim, we’ve been greeted with a seemingly heartfelt appreciation and anecdotes of someone driving all the way across state for the chance to take in the program.
Still, back on my old turf, I’m exceptionally nervous. As the screening draws near, I’m expecting to count four heads in the audience with the knowledge that two of them are my parents (and my dad is also one of the filmmakers featured in this particular showcase, which is a whole other story.) We linger as long as possible over dinner, then venture to the theater. Waving aside the offered comps, I insist on paying for my parents so they’ll count in the box office tally.

Inside, though, the crowd is not only not embarrassing, it’s altogether respectable. Better still, since the theater also hosts a brew pub, they’re drinking--always a good predictor for a fun screening. As the films begin to play, I relax, though I always relax at this point. It’s never about the quality of the works. The drama is always over getting people into the seats to see the works in the first place.

I wander outside and snap a few pictures of the marquee. I chat with the cashier and learn that the attendance is not only phenomenal for a weeknight, but the crowd is mainly new faces drawn to the theater by CineKink. In the pub, I commiserate with the owner over the ever-shrinking pie of revenues--and we talk about doing a fuller festival run next spring.
The post-screening Q&A is brief, but friendly and enthused. No anecdotes of cross-country ventures this time, but the enjoyment and appreciation of the works is most definitely there. I find myself ready to go back and delve into those waiting stacks of tapes for the next go-round of CineKink.

Though a few days at the shore would also be nice...

Posted by stvanairsdale at 03:32 PM | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Paddy Johnson, Art Fag City

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Author of the popular blog Art Fag City, Paddy Johnson is a writer and artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Her writing has been recently been featured in the New York Observer, Flavorpill, and NYFA Current.]

Over the last year, MonkeyTown has received a lot of attention for the successful combination of an innovative performance and screening venue with some very fine cuisine. Assuming you don’t mind sitting on couches designed for the rare few who enjoy awkward posture, the attention is well-deserved. The primary viewing and dining space in the back of the restaurant boasts four giant projection screens that flank the walls of the room, an open center space which is often used for performance and a rather fancy sound system (6.1 surround sound, for those who take stock of such things.)

Largely because we like MonkeyTown, this Friday we attended its SloMo Video screening, with the intention of determining whether 100 One Minute Long Slow Motion Videos is the best or worst curatorial film concept of the year. Contrary to what you might think, there are a lot of reasons for this project not to suck. In addition to having the reputable backing of MonkeyTown, it is conceived and curated by Ryan Junell, who is responsible for all kinds of great work you’ve probably seen or heard about, without knowing who’s behind it. For instance, he has directed brilliant videos for high profile indi bands such as Spoon, Gravy Train!!! and The Soft Pink Truth, is the director of See The Elephant, an experimental documentary on the 2004 presidential election, and the event director of Webzine, a 2005 conference on an independent publishing on the Internet.

With this background in mind, perhaps it is not overly surprising that SloMo Video defies expectations and is not an exercise in self-inflicted pain. Outside the quality of video submissions, the largest contributing factor to this is that Junell works with the understanding that the novelty of the slowed down human voice very quickly wears thin on an audience. For the most part the mix of sounds throughout the screening is tolerable, and on the rare occasion is even excellent. This may not sound like a ringing endorsement, but it is important keep in mind that there is only so much a person can do to a slomo compilation without entirely altering the soundscape of the project. As far as I’m concerned, the fact that everyone who came to the screening stayed for its completion is a feat in and of itself. (It should be noted here, however, that the screening unexpectedly turned out to be a popular date movie, so our analysis of audience attention span should probably take into account such things as “the cuddle factor.”)

A still from Calling All Occupants, one of the featured films in the SloMo Video series

Date interests aside, the most engaging videos in the series were usually the ones that employed sound in unusual ways. For ten bucks, you too can watch the limited edition DVD and learn that squeaky dog toys have a fascinating pitch in slow motion, as do kids screaming at the top of their lungs (Internet nerdocracy alert: There are less than 400 DVD’s left of the original 1000.) Made by Junell himself, this particular video is arguably the best in the series. Other standouts include a humorous alien dance video (we all hate the hipster alien, but multiply this species, film in slow motion and suddenly it’s entertaining,) and on the more disturbing note, a video of man pushing a safety pin through his eyebrow in slow motion, proving that videos under a minute can still be way too long. The man playing Russian roulette with a loaded gun also proved this point well.

The only real caveat with this touring film festival is that even at an edited-down 120 minutes, there is still far too much material to truly keep the audience’s attention for over an hour and a half. The show could benefit from shaving twenty videos from the roster, and the first piece I’d chose to go is the slow motion animation of the mullet man beating a woman to death on the beach. With the amount of good material already in the screening there is no need to water down the screening with videos that excel in the arena of bad gender politics and poor taste.

Click here for a complete list of SloMo Video's 85 participating filmmakers.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 12:23 PM | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Josh Horowitz, BetterThanFudge.com

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues. Click here for other entries in the series.]

Howdy, gang. Josh Horowitz of BetterThanFudge.com (bookmark it--it’ll make you feel gooood) here with a little contribution as The Reeler does whatever it is he does when not chained to a computer and giggling to himself with glee over the latest selections at BAM. Oh, come on--I kid because I love. And I write to fill space. So here we go…

Lessons Learned from a Summer at the Movies

--All I really need out of a summer blockbuster is Felicity to get her brain fried.


--Judging from his unpleasant facial expressions, I’m convinced Paul Bettany was suffering from IBS throughout The DaVinci Code shoot.

--Having seen Art School Confidential, maybe it’s not the worst thing that Bad Santa was cut without Terry Zwigoff?

--Some movies are about how much the human spirit can endure and some, like Keeping Up with the Steins, actually test how much the human spirit can endure.

--Movies about global warming don’t need scenes of Jake Gyllenhaal being chased by wolves after all.

--Some lines (“I’m the Juggernaut, bitch”) really do read better on paper.

--Making Doc Hollywood into a Pixar film is a waste of a lot of talented people’s time.

--A Prairie Home Companion was pretty good. Does Francis Ford Coppola need a new heart too?

--The Lake House is gonna make a wicked Saturday afternoon TNT combo with Sweet November one day.

--Watching Adam Sandler sob uncontrollably in old age make-up is as uncomfortable for me to watch as it surely was for him to film.

--Do you frigging remember Nuclear Man? You all were way too hard on Superman Returns. For shame…

--I will take Cutthroat Island over that bore of a Pirates sequel any day of the week.

--When Gong Li asks you how fast your motorboat goes, she’s being literal. She wants to know.

--Woody Harrelson might want to consider having his performance animated over every time from here on out.

--Night, I love ya, but no matter how many times you cite it as an influence, Lady in the Water ain’t E.T. It’s more like Batteries Not Included.

--My Super Ex-Girlfriend has more funny in it than you’ve been led to believe.

--“Sugar Tits” Gibson may hate the Jews, but I still love Conspiracy Theory. That’s how big a guy I am.

--Rex Reed just isn’t the limber man we all thought he was.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:03 AM | TrackBack

Reeler Pinch Hitter: Noel Murray, The A.V. Club

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues. Noel Murray writes about all things popular and cultural for The A.V. Club and the Nashville Scene. He lives in the thriving metropolis of Conway, AR—population 40,000.]

I’ve never been to Los Angeles, but I think I understand it. I’ve lived my whole life in small towns and suburbs--mostly in the south--and when I see Los Angeles in movies and on TV, it makes sense to me. Strip malls, subdivisions, supermarkets... this is what I’m used to. I blame Spielberg and sitcoms for my nearly lifelong desire to live in California--a thought that makes a lot of my friends shudder. But I can’t help it; Hollywood makes West Coast suburbia look like the life I’m used to, only bigger and cleaner and newer.

"The flip side": (L-R) Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember and Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets

I’ve never been to New York City either, but based on what I’ve seen in movies, I don’t “get” New York. The city seems nice enough on film--especially in that bronzed, autumnal phase that filmmakers are so drawn to--and I can almost relate what I’ve seen of New York in movies to other cities I’ve spent time in, like Boston or D.C. or Toronto. (Though not the cities I know best: Nashville and Atlanta.) I’ve ridden subways. I’ve walked through Chinatowns. I’ve stayed in fancy old hotels. But New York still doesn’t make any sense to me.

The reason? Nobody seems to live there. New York on film is all apartments and offices and Central Park, with trips to restaurants and bars and ballgames and the Met, and there’s a lot of moving from one place to another on trains and taxis. But New York is so big that all the individual spaces look disconnected--like a series of movie sets. Even Do The Right Thing, shot on location in one Brooklyn block, looks abstracted and unreal. I miss the sense of continuous space I get from, say, a movie by Curtis Hanson or Alexander Payne, whose greatest directorial gifts are related to the way they can make Pittsburgh or Omaha look like a complete world, so detailed that you almost feel like you could drive from one location to another without a map.

I confess that my fascination with cinema is as much voyeuristic as it is aesthetic. I’m constantly scanning movies--especially old movies--for flashes of familiarity. Real restaurant menus, real home interiors, real magazine covers and office parks. Other people may hate product placement, but I kind of like it, because it means that in 20 years I’ll be able to go back and see what a Mountain Dew can looked like in 2006. I’ve often said that movies are a substitute for the diaries and scrapbooks I don’t keep; and movies from the early '70s in particular allow me to piece together parts of my childhood that I barely remember.

But New York movies aren’t much help to me. Maybe it’s that the city is too fixed in time, full of skyscrapers and brownstones that have been standing since the early 20th century. Meanwhile the suburbs and exurbs continue to change--some would say too rapidly. As it is, the New York movies that speak to me strongest are the ones that spend most of their time out of the city, like On Dangerous Ground, which starts as a remarkably lively urban policier, and then heads out to the sticks. Or The Ice Storm, which is about people who live in Connecticut but work in New York, and which lets audiences feel both their closeness to the city and their physical and emotional remove.

Woody Allen's Annie Hall and Ang Lee's The Ice Storm

Don’t get me wrong: I like movies set in New York. The ones I like best are the ones that let me in a little, like Mean Streets or Midnight Cowboy or Madigan, all of which show a seedy but very lived-in New York. I wouldn’t want to live there, but at least I can almost picture it. On the flip side, I’d have no idea how to live in the New York of An Affair To Remember or Breakfast At Tiffany’s. And as much as I like Woody Allen films, I can’t picture what it would be like to live inside Annie Hall--except for maybe in the scenes where Allen and Diane Keaton go to the movies.

Maybe that’s the problem: that people in New York movies don’t spend enough times in multiplexes. Or grocery stores. Or banks (unless they’ve got guns and ski masks handy). I have little sense of what it’s like to live in New York in the minutest sense. Do you ever swing by a fast-food drive-through on the way home from work? Do you hit the convenience store for a 20 oz. Coke? Where do you buy gas? Or open checking accounts? I can’t get my toddler to sit in her stroller or hold my hand when we take a walk around our quiet cul-de-sac; how do you ferry your young around New York?

Oddly enough, the piece of entertainment that gives me the greatest sense of how a person might live day-to-day in NYC is Seinfeld, which always moved its characters from one mundane locale to the next—including drugstores and health clubs and malls and movie theaters. I get such a strong sense of New York every time I watch Seinfeld, it always takes me a minute to remind myself that the whole show was shot in L.A.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:02 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 18, 2006

The Reeler Escapes From New York

I think I would like to try something different in this space for a while: I am going to let someone else do the work. Not just anybody, mind you, but dear friends and colleagues in whose kind, capable hands I leave you as I travel someplace else--anyplace else--for a bit of a breather. I won't jinx anything just yet by naming names (the plane doesn't take off for another few hours), but let it suffice to say you should definitely keep your browsers here and on auto-refresh for at least the next seven days. Then I'll return, and you can go back to the irregular reading my own lame, underachieving content inspires.

At any rate, please be nice to the substitutes and do exactly as they say. I will see you back here Aug. 28!

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:45 AM | TrackBack

August 17, 2006

Lynch, Coppola, Apichatpong Among 28 Chosen For NYFF '06

Get your highlighters out, film geeks: The 44th New York Film Festival lineup is locked, with 28 films screening at Lincoln Center from Sept. 29 to Oct. 15. There are a few of these selections we saw a mile away--Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (right), David Lynch's title-tweaked The Inland Empire--as well as a few surprise omissions: There is no Fountain or The Departed to be found, nor is Babel making an appearance. Nevertheless, the European and Asian contingents are typically well-represented, with everyone from Michael Apted (49 Up) and Manoel de Oliveira (Belles Toujours) to Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Syndromes and a Century) and Johnnie To (Triad Election) finding spots in the schedule. Todd Field's Little Children rounds out the rather paltry American premiere contingent, while Warren Beatty's Reds will be featured alongside Lino Brockia's 1976 Insiang and Alberto Lattuada's Mafioso in the festival's Retrospective program.

The full lineup follows the jump--I'll look for you at Lincoln Center.

49 UP
Michael Apted, United Kingdom

The seventh segment of the landmark documentary series catches up with a dozen of the 14 British participants whose lives have been chronicled every seven years. Conceived 42 years ago, the first film, 7 Up, examined the worlds of a multi-ethnic, multi-class cross-section of children. Michael Apted, a researcher for the original film, returns to interview the “children”, now on the cusp of their 50s, on a variety of subjects including love, marriage, career, class and prejudice and captures more life changing decisions and shocking revelations than ever before. A First Run Features Release

August Days (Dies d'agost)
Marc Recha, Spain

Part fiction, part documentary and part personal essay, August Days is a lucid and touching re-creation of a trip actually made by director Marc Recha (The Cherry Tree) and his brother David (both of whom play themselves), an experience now understood as a key moment in the director’s artistic evolution. Having hit a creative block while trying to conceive a new work based on the memoirs of a recently deceased friend, Marc is convinced by his twin brother David to take a break and to accompany him on a trip through the back roads of Catalonia. During the journey they re-establish the closeness somewhat dissipated since going their separate ways; have several brief interludes with strangers they meet on their way; and hear a number of stories, such as the one about a man-eating fish with whiskers that trawls a local lake. But what comes to define their time together are the extraordinary landscapes they encounter, each mountain passage or river run teeming with memories and history.

Bamako
Abderrahmane Sissako, France / Mali

In the dusty courtyard of a West African communal dwelling, a remarkable tribunal has been set up. On trial are the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, accused of bankrupting the African nations that they supposedly intended to support. It’s a tribute to the extraordinary artistry of Abderrahmane Sissako (Waiting for Happiness, NYFF 2002) that he’s able to alternate so effortlessly the images and rhythms of everyday village life (commerce goes on, a couple gets married) with a stark exposé of the causes of underdevelopment; prosecutors offer devastating critiques of so-called aid and development packages, while the accused and their attorneys defend their record and seek to shift the blame elsewhere.

Belle Toujours
Manoel de Oliveira, France

In an homage to auteur Luis Buñuel by Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira (soon to celebrate his 98th birthday), Belle Toujours revolves around two characters from Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, that are reunited 38 years later. Séverine Serizy (Bulle Ogier, in the role originated by Catherine Deneuve) tries to avoid Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli) but he lures her with the promise to reveal a past secret. Severine, now a widow, expects a resolution but is driven to despair; Henri is satisfied that he has exacted the perfect revenge on the woman he both desires and detests. A New Yorker Films Release

Climates (Iklimler)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey

Nuri Bilge Ceylan builds on a major theme found in his earlier films, Clouds of May and Distant (NYFF 2004)—the ravage caused by the inability to express one’s feelings—in this visually stunning tale of a couple’s rupture and the aftermath. The director himself plays the lead role of Isa, a selfish architecture teacher, who after breaking up with the only woman he every cared about (played by Ebru Ceylan, the director’s wife), travels across Turkey while attempting to come to terms with his need for her. A Zeitgeist Films Release

Falling
Barbara Albert, Austria

Inspired by actresses of her generation who have influenced Austrian cinema, Barbara Albert brings together five women in their early thirties who meet for the first time in 14 years when they return to their small home town to attend their favorite teacher’s funeral. The reunion unexpectedly propels them in a new direction as old wounds are re-opened, friendships are re-ignited and each of them wonders whether they have lost sight of their dreams. Albert is clearly a leading figure in the most recently emerging generation of European filmmakers.

Gardens of Autumn (Jardins en automne)
Otar Iosseliani, France

In the comic, floating world of Otar Iosseliani (Monday Morning, NYFF 2002), people betray their vanities and fears with sardonically amusing, telltale eccentricities that propel them headlong into a series of comic misadventures. In this latest symphony of folly, Iosseliani's warmest and most winning, we chart the life of Vincent, a powerful minister with an immense office, innumerable staff, a limousine and a beautiful wife, Odile, who spends all his money. But his world is transformed when the people he has ignored for so long, rise up in protest and force him to step down. Finding himself alone, back in his childhood apartment, his friends re-acquaint him with the simple pleasures of music, drinking, flirting—and the beauty of public gardens.

The Go Master (Wu qingyuan)
Tian Zhuangzhuang, China

The Go Master is based on the true-life story of the world’s most renowned master of the ancient Asian game of Go, Wu Qingyuan. A Chinese prodigy practicing a Japanese game, Wu's allegiances are torn by the increasingly bellicose relations between the two countries. Remaining in Japan in spite of the outbreak of war, and later, sucked into a religious cult which tries to exploit his celebrity, Wu (excellently played by Chang Chen) is the still center of the storm, following his own inner notions of spiritual integrity and loyalty to the discipline of his chosen vocation. Few filmmakers today can make movies as visually elegant and psychologically astute as Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Blue Kite, NYFF 1993).

The Host (Gwoemul)
Bong Joon-ho, South Korea

A smash hit in South Korea, the exhilarating third picture from Bong Joon-ho is the decade’s best monster movie. Its premise has a 1950s purity: Toxins from a U.S. military base flow into the Han River causing the birth of a mutant creature (imagine the world’s hugest, most malevolent guppy) which proceeds to terrorize Seoul. When it grabs a little girl, her dysfunctional family must band together to save her. Bong’s movie is everything our homegrown horror movies are not—funny, suspenseful, rich with ideas and intelligent about family values. A Magnolia Pictures Release

The Inland Empire
David Lynch, France / USA

A Polish woman looks, intently, into someone or something ... an actress (Laura Dern) is warned that her new movie is cursed ... a rabbit-headed family perform sit-com actions on a stage set as if engaged in a solemn ritual ... Such are just a few of the elements and recurrent motifs of The Inland Empire, a mesmerizing surge through countless looking glasses that lands us on the far side of the land of nightmares. Lynch’s first foray into high-definition video is just as visually stunning as his work in 35mm, but the long gestation period of his new film (he shot on and off over two years, and wrote as he went) has allowed him to give his own uniquely epic form to many of his primary concerns: the exploitation of young women, the mutability of identity, the omnivorousness of Hollywood.

Insiang
Lino Brocka, The Philippines, 1976

The first Filipino film screened at the Cannes Film Festival, Insiang begins as the title character, marvelously played by Hilda Koronel, watches as her mother, Tonia (Mona Lisa), eases her relatives out of their ramshackle house so that she can ease in her boyfriend, Dado (Ruel Vernal). It doesn’t take long for Dado to notice the beautiful Insiang, and soon the three are locked in a vicious emotional and sexual triangle clearly heading for some kind of explosion. Like his contemporary R.W. Fassbinder, Brocka used the conventions of melodrama in order to transcend them; if Hell is other people, with Insiang Brocka created one darkest visions of the inferno ever committed to film. A New York Film Festival Retrospective.

The Journal of Knud Rasmussen
Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, Canada

The new film by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn focuses on the Danish explorer and scientist Knud Rasmussen’s visit to the isolated camp of the great Igluik shaman, Aua, in 1922. Rasmussen and his protégé, the young anthropologist Therkel Mathiasse, are captivated by the artic paradise, an intoxicating mix of spiritual and physical vitality, amazing intelligence and exuberant generosity. But the tranquility of the nomadic Inuit community is interrupted and irreversibly marred by encroaching Christianity, foreign goods and the shocking first murder of a white man.

Little Children
Todd Field, USA

Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly and Patrick Wilson star in Todd Field’s multi-layered romantic drama that is loosely based on the acclaimed Tom Perrotta novel. Little Children follows a group of young married couples whose lives intersect in the playgrounds, town pools and streets of their small community in surprising and potentially dangerous ways. The lives of the seemingly perfect parents are disrupted when a mom has an affair with the neighborhood’s only stay-at-home dad, causing everyone involved to look inside themselves and discover what they really want in life. A New Line Cinema Release

Mafioso
Alberto Lattuada, Italy, 1962

A comic classic from the Golden Age of Italian cinema. Antonio (Alberto Sordi), a conscientious factory official, takes his wife and children to meet his family in Sicily and finds himself in the favor of local mobster Don Vincenzo (Ugo Attansio). Terrified and conflicted, he tells his family that he is going hunting but instead seeks out an enemy of the mafia in New York. A New York Film Festival Retrospective. A Rialto Pictures Release

Marie Antoinette
Sofia Coppola, USA

Academy Award®-winning Sofia Coppola’s new film brings to the screen an imaginative interpretation of the life of France’s legendary teenage queen Marie Antoinette. When betrothed to King Louis XVI (Jason Shwartzman), the naïve Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) enters the opulent French court, which is steeped in conspiracy and scandal. Without guidance, adrift in a dangerous world, the young girl rebels against the isolated atmosphere of Versailles and becomes France’s most misunderstood monarch. A strong supporting cast including Marianne Faithful as Maria-Theresa and Rip Torn as Louis XV. A Columbia Pictures release

Offside
Jafar Panahi, Iran

A tireless chronicler of the inequities and contradictions of contemporary Iran, Jafar Panahi here traces a group of Iranian girls who attempt to enter Tehran's Azadi Stadium dressed as boys to watch a major football tournament. Their deliberate flouting of the law, which forbids women to enter stadiums, puts them at great risk as they are caught, arrested and punished, yet nothing can quell their spirit of rebelliousness—or their willingness to ignore a law they consider unjust. A Sony Pictures Classic Release

Our Daily Bread
Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Austria

Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s sparse and restrained documentary about food-manufacturing factories is punctuated with footage of anonymous workers and startling images of meat processing. The measured, un-narrated piece aptly demonstrates humans’ disconnection from their meals. The few scenes with factory workers enjoying their lunch break before heading back to operate the unearthly machines underscores the fascinating polarity that such a messy business as eating starts in these clinical and robotic environments. A First Run / Icarus Films Release

Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) - CLOSING NIGHT FILM
Guillermo Del Toro, Spain / Mexico

Guillermo Del Toro’s sixth and most ambitious film, Pan’s Labyrinth is a gothic fairy tale set against the postwar repression of Franco’s Spain. The film centers on Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a lonely and dreamy child living with her mother (Ariadna Gil) and adoptive father (Sergi López), a military officer tasked with ridding the area of rebels. In her loneliness, Ofelia creates a world filled with fantastical creatures and secret destinies. With post-war repression at its height, Ofelia must come to terms with her world through a fable of her own creation. The film is a haunting story that deftly combines the director's penchant for the fantastical with a rich historical vision. A Picturehouse Release

Paprika
Satoshi Kon, Japan

Satoshi Kon’s new animé plays like a head-on collision between Hello Kitty and Philip K. Dick. The plot starts with a machine that lets therapists enter patients’ dreams: When it’s stolen, all hell breaks loose, and only a woman therapist (nicknamed “Paprika”) seems able to stop it. Kon is a brilliant director by any standard and as the characters shuttle from dream to dream, nightmare to nightmare, Paprika becomes a thrilling tour-de-force of visual invention—every frame is packed with imagination. This delightful movie is bursting with ideas about Japanese repression, multiple identities, collective dreams and the dark side of his countrymen’s love of Cute. A Sony Pictures Entertainment Release

Poison Friends (Les Amities Malefiques)
Emmanuel Bourdieu, France

Eloi (Malik Zidi) and Alexandre (Alexandre Steiger) meet André on the first day of the academic year. Seduced by his cool behavior, charisma and intelligence, they easily fall prey to his charm. André (Thibault Vinçon) offers them friendship and mentoring in return for a pledge of loyalty. Overcome with admiration, Eloi and Alexandre bow to the harsh discipline until the day that he leaves them pretending he has earned a scholarship at an American University. Suddenly left to their own devices, Eloi and Alexandre have nobody to turn to and must grow up. A Strand Releasing Release

Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs)
Alain Resnais, France

Alain Resnais collaborates again with British playwright, Alan Ayckbourn. The setting is snow-covered Paris where six lonely peoples’ lives collide. André Dussolier is the real estate agent in love with his pious assistant (Sabine Azéma) who moonlights as a home care worker for the demanding father of a widowed bartender (Pierre Arditi). One of his customers, a bitter army vet (Lambert Wilson) splits from his fiancée (Laura Morante) and meets a shy young woman (Isabel Carré) who lives with her brother, the real estate agent. Ineffably graceful, Private Fears is a heartbreakingly delicate meditation on loss, uncertainty and love, made with the kind of serene wisdom available only to true masters.

The Queen - OPENING NIGHT FILM
Steven Frears, United Kingdom

With Helen Mirren in the title role, The Queen is an intimate, revealing and frequently acidly funny portrait of the British royal family during the dramatic days after the death of Princess Diana. Stephen Frears’ fictionalized account features James Cromwell as Prince Phillip and Michael Sheen as Tony Blair and captures the interaction between the royal household and the government during their struggle to reach a compromise between allowing privacy for a personal family tragedy and the public's demand for an overt display of mourning. A Miramax Films Release

Reds
Warren Beatty, USA

Reds is a masterful political and historical epic that mesmerized critics and audiences alike. A love story between activists John Reed (Warren Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) set against the backdrop of the outbreak of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, it became an American cinematic milestone, garnering 12 Academy Award® nominations in 1982—more than any film in the previous 15 years. The film boasts a tremendous supporting cast including Jack Nicholson as playwright Eugene O’Neill, Gene Hackman, Paul Sorvino and Maureen Stapleton. A New York Film Festival Retrospective. A Paramount Pictures Release

Syndromes and a Century
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / France / Austria

Syndromes and a Century is an exploration of how people remember as well as a fictional account of the lives of filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul's parents before they became lovers. The movie is broken into two distinct, but analogous parts: one focusing on a female doctor in a small-town clinic, the other on a male doctor at a big city hospital. What unites the stories is Apichatpong’s superb eye for nuances of feeling and an alluring knack for finding marvelous moments, be it a droll Bangkok doctor boozing it up before she appears on TV or the exquisite poetry of villagers listening to a Thai country-western singer serenading the night.

These Girls (El-Banate dol )
Tahani Rached, Egypt

Filmmaker Tahani Rached’s sensitive documentary delves in to the marginalized existence of adolescent girls on the streets of Cairo, many of who are escaping acute poverty and abuse. All exude astonishing strength and camaraderie whilst coping with a gamut of human experiences ranging from rape, drug abuse and prostitution to pregnancy and motherhood. This uncompromising film follows the girls over an extended period of time, allowing us to discover the inner workings of an invisible section of Middle Eastern society.

Triad Election (Hak se wui yi wo wai kwai)
Johnnie To, Hong Kong

Jimmy (Louis Koo, one of the superstars of Hong Kong cinema) is in the running for the coveted post of Triad president. He faces resistance from his “godfather” Lok (Simon Yam), who has served his two-year term and makes an increasingly desperate effort to throw tradition to the wind and maintain his position. As the power plays escalate, so does the violence ... not to mention the virtuosity of director Johnnie To, who creates one spectacular cinematic set piece after another. To is working deep within the gangster genre, whose traditions he observes with the greatest respect even as he’s busy revitalizing and re-contextualizing them. But he’s also given Triad Election a genuinely political edge: in To’s dog-eat-dog vision, the body of free-market expansion beats with a savage heart. A Tartan Films Release

Volver - CENTERPIECE PRESENTATION
Pedro Almodóvar, Spain

Pedro Almodóvar’s 16th feature returns to his roots; the lively working-class neighborhoods, where immigrants from various Spanish provinces share dreams, lives and fortune with a multitude of ethnic groups and other races. Three generations of women survive wind, fire and even death, thanks to goodness, audacity and a limitless vitality. With an ensemble female cast: Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Blanca Portillo, Yohanna Cobo and Chus Lampreare that was awarded an ensemble award at the recent Cannes Film Festival. A Sony Pictures Classics release

Woman on the Beach (Haebyonui yoin)
Hong Sang-soo, South Korea

A filmmaker, trying to complete a script, stumbles into relationships with two women during a stay at an off-season seaside resort. The affairs reveal the patterns of destructive behavior that define his romantic relationships—and generate material for the new film. Even for director Hong Sang-soo’s many admirers, his new film turns out to be an unexpected delight—the most sheerly enjoyable and satisfying film of his career. Even as Woman on the Beach brilliantly explores one of Hong’s enduring themes—the Korean male psyche in all its willfulness, anger and self-contempt—it brings its female characters to the forefront in a revelatory new way.

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Posted by stvanairsdale at 07:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

And Somewhere in the City, Scorsese Chokes the Last Breath From a Warner Bros. Marketer

I never thought I would say this, but I am in full agreement with Ain't It Cool News's assessment of the recently unveiled one-sheets for Martin Scorsese's The Departed, a disheartening grotesquerie of typefaces, type sizes and photographs:

This feels like they were going for a retro feel, and waayyyy missed the mark. Ended up with something that looked cheap instead of evocative. It reminds me of the title sequences for BARNABY JONES or THE STREETS OF SAN FRANSISCO. “The Departed – A Quinn Martin Production! (in Color)”. Whatever.

All I know is that just because someone broke through with a movie poster semicolon this year does not mean we get to go willy-nilly now with fucking phonics. I mean, what--did Marty veto at about 725 points?

Posted by stvanairsdale at 12:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

'It Doesn't Excuse Itself': Refn's 'Pusher Trilogy' Screens for First Time in New York

"Trilogy" is such a pretentious word. Everything it carries and implies--magnitude, breadth, conceptual rigor-cum-excess, finality--presumes an abstract necessity that its proponents can rarely fulfill, let alone sustain. Did Ingmar Bergman really need to earmark three consecutive films--Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence--to get his and his viewers' heads around the nature of faith? Why not four films, or 40 (as so much of Bergman's canon could ultimately be construed)? Are we really supposed to confine Gus Van Sant's mortality fixation to Gerry, Elephant and Last Days--the formal "Death Trilogy" that even MoMA officially recognized in 2005? A trilogy like The Godfather--the last film of which nobody but its studio wanted (and even then would barely pay for)--is even worse off, with its retarded prodigal sibling tottering behind it like Ted Kennedy in a neckbrace (or like Fredo Corleone in a tuxedo, for that matter).

Zlatko Buric stars as Milo, The Pusher Trilogy's drug kingpin in crisis (Photo: Magnolia Pictures)

So anyway, when I learned a couple of months ago that the Danish export The Pusher Trilogy was soon arriving in America (Friday at Cinema Village, to be specific), I winced. Nicolas Winding Refn's five-hour-plus, decade-in-the-making, interweaving saga about drug dealers in Copenhagen, cast in part with real criminals(transgressive!) and name-dropping Hamlet in its press notes, Pushers I, II and III all but alienated me even before the first thundering credit sequence or heroin deal gone bad. I admit it: I was worried.

And I was wrong.

Raw, uneven and quite frequently astonishing, Refn's films in fact make up a totally incidental trilogy: easy to categorize and market, conferring all the status that trilogies symbolize in arts and letters, yet eschewing a thematic whole in exchange for a sordid, continuous reality. That a half-dozen or so of Pusher's characters come and go between films inclines it not toward some finite, Godfather-style mythos, but rather a TV-style tableau. In other words, don't think of it as a franchise--think of it as a parallel universe, and a visceral, compelling one at that.

And even a literally necessary one, to hear Refn tell it. In 2004, he was eight years removed from the original Pusher, which follows the grueling trail of drug dealer Frank (Kim Bodnia) as he sprints from bust to score to a particularly implosive transaction that puts him in the crosshairs of Serbian kingpin Milo (Zlatko Buric). The film and its 24-year-old director earned international renown, but Refn's subsequent films in Denmark and America--1999's Bleeder and 2003's Fear X, respectively (Refn called the East Village home for several years and actually co-wrote the latter film with Hubert Selby Jr.)--fared incrementally worse.

"Basically, I owed a million dollars and had to pay off the debt," he told The Reeler during a visit last month to New York. One of his executive producers suggested a sequel to Pusher. "I was like, 'How dare you even say something like that? Me? Going back to my original format? And I'd always vowed never to do another gangster film, and blah blah blah, and artists should not be dictated by greed. and money. You know, all those stupid things you believe in wehen you're young. But it did get me thinking, because I was desperate. I really was. And I said, 'Well, what if I were to do this? How can I make it a challenge more than a necessity? How can I challenge myself in this situation?' And by that time--I'm a very big television junkie--I basically went back and saw the first one again, which I hadn't seen in years, and I said, 'What if I took this as a television concept? I have this familiar environment that I could redo that would work, and then I could do episodic stories about people's lives.' Like television, but keep everything the same familiar range and style. So I went back and said, 'I'll do II and III.' That was basically my challenge."

The potential for failure terrified Refn (right); flops were one thing, but impugning the legitmacy of his precocious debut was not a misstep he wanted to flirt with. "All these things were going though my head constantly," he said. "But I think it probably made me a better filmmaker being in that situation, because film is also a commodity, and in order to survive for a long time, your films have to make money. You are a slave, and you have to buy your freedom. And if I could incorporate my artistic integrity, than I could have the best of both worlds. ... It's easy to make one or two films, but if you want to make them for the rest of your life, in the end, that's what it's about."

Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands, released in Denmark on Christmas Day, 2004, reintroduces viewers to Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen), a loose-lipped accomplice from the first film whom Frank nearly beat to death and who spends the second film wavering between post-prison inertia, absentee fatherhood and a mortal struggle with his own father, a crime boss who relishes in withholding the redemption Tonny craves. The film's bleakness is brandished almost as a middle finger to expectations for another kinetic thriller in the first Pusher mold; Tonny sleepwalks through life with a pity-party languor, impelled to act out only when challenged by strung-out survivalists whose doomed fate he knows he shares.

But while the flat self-actualization of Tonny's ordeal stifles Pusher II to often unbearable degrees (you try finding a remotely sympathetic character in that movie), the crisis facing the old kingpin Milo in Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death (2005) simmers and smolders through one of the best films I have seen this year. Struggling through the early stages of sobriety and overextended in preparations for his adult daughter Milena's (Marinela Dekic) birthday, Milo finds himself snagged in a drug transaction overlapping generations (he does not know how to sell ecstasy) and ethnicities (he gets cheated by Albanians playing fast and loose with translations). His younger henchman literally don't have the stomach for his quieter domestic ambitions, and the most gratifying gift he can give Milena is generous terms on her own fledgling narcotics enterprise.

Making matters worse is his own failed ecstasy deal, which requires calling in a climactic favor that has to be seen to be believed. "I think that's what the films were headed for," Refn told me. "This inevitable film about this man who's about to lose his empire. And I think that part three is probably my favorite one, reason being it's the most experimental and it is the most..." Refn halted. "It's the one that just..."

He paused again, a little longer. "It doesn't excuse itself," he continued. "And I like things that are extreme. I also like that people have different opinions: Some like the first, some like the second, somebody hated this, somebody loved that, because that's what art does. Art works when you can discuss. When everybody's happy, how does that touch you? That's also why my films have open endings: How can you end something you're supposed to live with the rest of your life?"

Well, exactly. The Pusher Trilogy alternately has its endings going for and against it. The mysteries facing each character in their films' final scenes transcend closure; by disallowing Frank, Tonny and Milo's escapes, Refn disallows your own. It really is sublime episodic storytelling, and the films completely defy the expectation that three will, in fact, be enough. You leave wanting more--a lot more--if only because you know it's there.

(Refn photo by Jeff Vespa / Wire Image)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:54 AM | TrackBack

August 16, 2006

Independent Film Week '06 Locked in with Montiel, 'Four-Eyed Monsters' and More

IFP yesterday announced its plans for Independent Film Week 2006, which is actually more like four days but can feel like two weeks depending on your panel choices and your luck viewing unfinished films at the at the IFP Market. But I digress: The week features a NY Times-sponsored panel discussion warming up the action Sept.13, then fires up in earnest with the Sept. 18 premiere of Dito Montiel's A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints and the first-ever IFP Filmmaker Conference.

IndieWIRE mentions the event's new "DIY Series," featuring screenings of The Guatemalan Handshake and Four-Eyed Monsters, and a side note confirms the resumption of $6 admission available to all filmgoers at BAM, the ImaginAsian, MoMA, the Angelika and elsewhere around town. And while I know you already have Sept. 18 and 19 blocked for The Reeler's screenings of Jesus Camp and Heights, feel free to take advantage of those discounts on the 20th and 21st. I know, I know, you're welcome--team player is in my job description.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:58 PM | TrackBack

Eulogizing Bruno: New Yorker Kirby Dead at 57

As pretty much everyone who writes about film on the Internet has noted by now, veteran character actor (and native New Yorker) Bruno Kirby died Monday from complications imposed by leukemia. He was 57. Naturally, his passing has inspired a surge of recollections from legions of fans he likely never knew he had, but that, as they say, is showbiz.

Silent, terrified, terrifying: Bruno Kirby as Clemenza in The Godfather, Part II

Now, for your browsing convenience, find below a handy guide to those who miss him, what they say made him officially famous and their own favorite Kirby role.

S.T. VanAirsdale, The Reeler
"Kirby was best known for...": City Slickers
"But my favorite Kirby role is...": The Godfather, Part II
Sample praise: "For a guy with more than five dozen screen credits in 35 years, Kirby will be best remembered as young Pete Clemenza, backed against a wall and pointing a revolver at the door through which that New York cop could enter... at... any... moment. Silent, terrified and terrifying. And indelible."

Nikki Finke, Deadline Hollywood Daily
"Kirby was best known for...": City Slickers, When Harry Met Sally
"But my favorite Kirby role is...": Between the Lines
Sample praise: None

Erik Davis, Cinematical
"Kirby was best known for...": City Slickers, When Harry Met Sally, Good Morning, Vietnam
"But my favorite Kirby role is...": City Slickers
Sample praise: "I will never forget about that performance, and we will never forget about Bruno Kirby. Farewell my good man. Farewell."
Reader comment bonus: "Ah man, that's terrible news. 'Baby fishmouth!' always makes me laugh. RIP, Mr. Kirby." -- Scott Weinberg

Joe Leydon, Moving Picture Blog
"Kirby was best known for...": City Slickers, Good Morning, Vietnam
"But my favorite Kirby role is...": "I'll Be Waiting," from the Showtime series Fallen Angels
Sample praise: "'When I was casting this role,' [director Tom] Hanks told me years later, 'I wanted someone who looked like he was a shoe salesman – but who could break your thumbs if he had to.' If other directors had been as audacious as Hanks, Kirby might have had a very different career."

Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere
"Kirby was best known for...": The Godfather, Part II, City Slickers, Modern Romance
"But my favorite Kirby role is...": None
Sample praise: "A sad thing... sorry."
Reader comment bonus: "If I were ever asked for a list of my favorite character actors, Bruno Kirby would never have crossed my mind; but hearing he's died is like losing a piece of my childhood because he was just one of my favorite people in movies, and I plain took him for granted." -- "Hallick"

Edward Copeland, Edward Copeland on Film
"Kirby was best known for...": A dozen films, evidently, including The Harrad Experiment, City Slickers and Tin Men
"But my favorite Kirby role is...": The Freshman
Sample praise: "He wasn't just about comedy though -- he also played the closeted coach in The Basketball Diaries and appeared in Donnie Brasco as well."

(Copeland and Leydon via GreenCine Daily)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:36 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 15, 2006

Kang Moves Out of 'Motel,' Onto 'West 32nd' with Korean Giant CJ Entertainment

South Korea's monolithic CJ Entertainment has been flirting with a stateside operation for a while now, and according to Variety, the relationship is now official: Production began Monday on the $2.4. million Koreatown gangster film West 32nd, with The Motel filmmaker Michael Kang getting the directing call and Teddy Zee (Saving Face) producing.

"So far, so good," Kang told The Reeler this morning from the set. "We've got a great cast and a great team putting this together. Teddy is producing, and John Cho [Harold and Kumar] and Grace Park [Battlestar Galactica] are in it, along with some Korean actors you probably don'r know but who are really well-known in Korea."

Which is perfect for the gang at CJ, who plan an early 2007 distribution date in both the US and South Korea Kang said he has been developing the project with the studio since last March. "They read the script, and Teddy Zee made the formal introductions," Kang said. "We went out to Korea and met with them. It just seemed like a perfect fit, and I'm really excited to direct their first American production."

Terrific news all around. Best of luck to Kang on the shoot and to CJ on its American bow.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:29 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Now They've Done It: Slate Spoils 'WTC' For All and None

Providing a mildly counterintuitive entry into its "Spoiler Special" feature, Slate on Monday featured an interesting podcast discussion of World Trade Center between critic Dana Stevens and editor Bryan Curtis. I admit that the chat offers a dearth of the pitched histrionics that attended my own WTC piece Aug. 9, but it is just as well; Stevens and Curtis lean toward liking the movie, yet never quite shake the sense of "pondrousness and sanctimoniousness" that, in Stevens's words, seems to have impelled Stone to "err on the side of feel-good patriotism."

NB: For the reactionaries keeping score at home, that is an assessment of World Trade Center's tone and not an armchair-filmmaker fusillade against the marketing campaign movie you hold so dear. Please gauge carefully where the podcast falls on the spectrum between review and commentary, and attack accordingly.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:00 AM | TrackBack

August 14, 2006

'Volver,' 'Pan's Labyrinth,' 'Reds' Announced as Early NYFF Choices

The folks at the Film Society of Lincoln Center just kicked a note under the door naming Volver, Pan's Labyrinth and Reds as the Centerpiece, Closing Night and Retrospective selections of the 44th New York Film Festival starting Sept. 29. I cannot say Pedro Almodóvar's Volver (right) is any big surprise--I had it confirmed back when The Queen was announced as the Opening Night selection--but its appearance as the Centerpiece seems somewhat generous considering how Almodóvar's previous film, Bad Education, earned similar placement in the 2004 NYFF.

At any rate, Warren Beatty's Reds is a nice choice on the 25th anniversary of the film's release, and the Film Society notes that it will indeed screen with a newly restored print. Dates for each screening and their corresponding filmmaker Q&A's have yet to be announced, but expect those and the remaining NYFF schedule to arrive at Reeler HQ later this week. You will have them as soon as I do.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 05:14 PM | TrackBack

Gosling's Tuxedo Shirt Conceivably the Only Thing Wrong with His Work on 'Half Nelson'

Pound for pound, I don't know if there is a better blog on the Web than Drunken Stepfather. It is totally pseudonymous, tasteless, fearless, juvenile and consistently funnier than anything else I read, but its oversexed proclivities toward anything but New York cinema leave few opportunities for me to ever feature editor Jesus Martinez's discriminating insights here on The Reeler.

So imagine my eye-bulging joy at this new revelation citing Half Nelson's Aug. 2 premiere in Tribeca (with star Ryan Gosling pictured at right). I admit I am throwing you right into the deep end of the cesspool here, so consider yourself warned. And then admit that at the end of the day, the guy kind of has a point:

Ryan Gosling….you are not a conformist, we get it. You are one of those guys who decided that you would never give into society by wearing a suit in your life. You became an actor so you could live the bohemian life with a lot of money in your bank and you let everyone know this by wearing a Tuxedo T-Shirt to all the black tie events you attend. You are subtle in your irony. We get it. But I would rather you be obnoxious in your irony. Instead of rocking the gayest fucking t-shirt ever manufactured, I’d like to see you hire the dirtiest looking crackwhore you can find. One who smells of piss, shit, vomit, rotten cunt and semen with no teeth and a stained party dress, a pair of mismatched shoes and who is coming down from a 3 week meth binge. That would be a better way to give the big “FUCK YOU” to the black tie events you are asked to attend. It’s much more effective than the passive aggressive “Fuck You” in the tuxedo shirt approach. What I am trying to say is that I am like this Ryan Gosling motherfucker. I don’t wear suits or like suits. I rock an old pair of jogging pants, a stained t-shirt and I don’t shower daily, but if I was asked to attend some sort of function, I would suck it up and put on a shirt and tie. It’s called having a little fucking decency. If I wanted to make a fucking statement, I would do it the right way. I hope this met your standards my reader.

Find more of Martinez's painstaking cultural criticism and fashion advice you-know-where.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 04:42 PM | TrackBack

'Jesus Camp' Joins Reeler Screening Series Sept. 18 at Makor

The way I see it, if nothing conventionally newsy is going to happen in New York today, I am just going to have keep pressing on with updates about the Reeler Screening Series. And this is some kind of update: Word just over the transom confirms filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady will be on hand Sept. 18 at Makor to preview their controversial new documentary Jesus Camp.

Happy Camp-er: One of the subjects of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's Jesus Camp, featured Sept. 18 at Makor as part of the Reeler Screening Series (Photo: Loki Films)

An acclaimed look at the journeys of three kids to an evangelical Christian camp in North Dakota, Jesus Camp has followed perhaps one of the more turbulent roads of any documentary featured at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. After drawing praise and stirring debate among religious conservatives, secular liberals and pretty much anyone yielding any ideology inbetween, distributor Magnolia Pictures sought to preserve the film's nonpartisan cred by yanking it from Michael Moore's Traverse City Film Festival.

We know how that turned out, but hey: It's in the past, and I am thrilled to bring it back to New York for a sneak preview and Q&A/discussion. Tickets should be available at the Makor Web site later this week; I'll point you in that direction when time comes. Meanwhile, save this date and the following night's Heights screening at the Pioneer Theater to your calendars--I hope to see you at both.

(Thanks to Alexandra Siegler at Makor and Eamonn Bowles and Jeff Reichert at Magnolia Pictures for their help in organizing this event.)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 03:30 PM | TrackBack

'His Spikiness': Lee Gets Exhaustive NYM Treatment

Almost 20 years to the day after Spike Lee released his seismic feature breakthrough She's Gotta Have It, the filmmaker sits for a pair of in-depth profiles anticipating his upcoming Hurricane Katrina documentary, When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. And while Newsweek's Allison Samuels might echo a bit too much of the Lee profile that owned the front page of the Observer last March, check out Ariel Levy with the 4,800-word Lee family opus in this week's New York Magazine--its own epic adventure bounding from New York to New Orleans and headlong into Lee's cinema:

The heavy-handedness that critics have objected to in some of Lee’s movies is absent from his documentaries. In Lee’s fictional films, you can sometimes feel the case of kingitis that [Jungle Fever actress] Veronica Webb diagnosed in action: Lee just can’t seem to get enough of himself. ... To be fully affected by Lee’s fictional films, you have be into his vision, his aesthetic, his Spikiness. To be fully affected by his documentaries, you really just need to have eyes. The four hours of When the Levees Broke fly by. It is an astounding piece of work. The full nightmare of Katrina becomes palpable and unavoidable in a way it hasn’t yet in art. I tell Lee this, and he offers me a first and final pleasantry. A text message that says THANKS.

The only thing Levy doesn't ask is why Lee no longer appears in his films--a character void you can't say did not nag at you while watching 25th Hour. Or maybe she did ask, and I just have to go back through the story with a flashlight and a canary. Does anybody else know? This question does not rank especially high on HBO publicity's present-day list of unsolved auteur mysteries.

At any rate, When the Levees Broke premieres Aug. 21 and 22, followed by a full four-hour airing on the Aug. 29 anniversary of Katrina's landfall.

(NYM photo: Tim Richardson)

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From Premiere Trenches, Valiant Carr Takes Up Battle for Journalists' Honor

Following up on The Reeler's indignance at the journalistic indiscretions splattered all over Woody Allen's Scoop, David Carr today has a more comprehensive look at the cinematic trend pegging us reporters as "tarts, drunks or crooks." Clearly not as optimistic about this portrayal as The Washington Post's Paul Farhi was two weeks ago, the Father of The Reeler took his outrage a step further than my recent grilling of Scarlett Johansson: He went straight for the money man and demanded answers, just like they taught us in J-school:

At (Scoop)’s New York premiere last month, I buttonholed James Schamus of Focus Features, which distributed the film, and asked him why journalists generally ended up cast in movies as tarts, drunks or crooks. He slowly backed away from me, smiling all the while, saying that the film “had a good heart.”

Easy for him to say. Movie producers are generally cast by their own industry as philistines or cokeheads — usually both — but they are compensated by all that glamour and, well, all that money.

For decades, journalists, whose pay is generally as low as the regard they are held in, have been largely depicted as moral and ethical eunuchs.

Ouch! But if you think that is bad, wait until the spectrum of pajamas and pasty, unwashed flesh that will attend the first wave of blogger films. If mainstream journalists are eunuchs, then we new media types must be rocking an extra chromosome and a monthly bus pass. Where is Alan Pakula when we need him?

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:53 AM | TrackBack

August 11, 2006

Screening Gotham: Aug. 11-13, 2006

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

--This weekend, Sony Classics begins warming up audiences for Pedro Almodovar's exquisite new Volver by launching Viva Pedro, an eight-film touring retrospective of some of the director's best-loved work. In lieu of his incomparable early triumph What Have I Done to Deserve This?, a few only slightly inferior titles are planned for the next two months at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, among them the perverse, brilliant sex-and-death romp Matador, the gorgeous coma-soap Talk to Her, and this weekend's melodrama-of-choice, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Talk to him: Antonio Banderas and Nacho Martinez in Matador, one of eight films selected as part of Sony Classics' Viva Pedro series, opening this weekend in New York.

Viva Pedro is too immense and marvelous (and, yes, flawed) a program to profile in this space--or in any space, for that matter--but for all its unsurpassed technique, narrative ambition and humanity, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better summer offering. Art on this level feels like a privilege.

--It wasn't so long ago I urged you to take in Margaret Brown's documentary about Townes Van Zandt, Be Here to Love Me. Everything nine months old is new again, I guess, as the spare, intimate doc gets a revival at Makor. The bad news is that you won't find one of Makor's customary director Q&A's (Brown is based in Austin), but on the bright side, you have two weekends to get over to the Upper West Side for a look. Procrastinators, rejoice.

--For the four or five of you who did not pile into BAM the other night to check out The Reeler's Half Nelson preview, you are also in luck: It hits theaters today. Be the first on your block to forecast an Oscar nomination for Ryan Gosling; somebody seems to think it's that time again.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 04:01 PM | TrackBack

Reeler Link Dump: 'The Week That Wasn't' Edition

Wherein the editor rubs his eyes and begs your forgiveness for everything he is not and can never be. Or at least for not playing close enough attention to these news nuggets when they were actually news:

--James Gray inches ever closer to ownership of New York's all-time crime-cinema pathology with his next project, the undercover-journalist saga Alphabet City. Gray, who just wrapped the mob flick We Own the Night for 2929 Entertainment, will rewrite Steven Knight's script (based on his novel) and shoot next spring for the Strike Entertainment and Universal Pictures.

--Speaking of journalists, Roger Friedman is a bad one.

--The Tribeca Film Festival announced Thursday that it will partner with the brand-new RomaCinemaFest for a film-exchange program at its debut in October. Next spring, we get a slate of premieres from Rome. This is an incalculably shrewd move: I hear Italian cheese importing is huge in these parts.

--Matt Dillon was at his monosyllabic best a week ago at Lincoln Center, where the Film Society's Young Friends of Film screened Factotum and welcomed him for a Q&A. A few displeased fans told Page Six "he didn't even say 'thank you'" for individual praise that followed the screening. Take it from someone who knows: Matt Dillon can only love one man. Drink your $60 wine and shut up.

--Holy shit: I guess Lou Diamond Phillips can get arrested in Hollywood after all.

--The lovely folks over at the upstart blog Blank Screen direct us to Home Movie Day, a national event enjoying its New York incarnation Saturday, Aug. 12, at Anthology Film Archives. The bad news: No video allowed, so your amateur porn is of no use. The good news: Your parents' 8mm sex footage from 1975 might have just enough grainy, ironic value to pass muster.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:38 PM | TrackBack

This Week in Weinstein: 'Sicko' Promises, Paltry 'Feast'

Perhaps the most conspicuous and devastating casualty of my pathetic time-management skills has been the maintenance of my Weinstein Company Infancy Scrapbook, which has attenuated to nearly nothing as the fledgling shingle approaches its first birthday. No single post can make up for such lost time, but Harvey and Bob's recent activity indicates the summertime blahs are over and the baby teeth are coming in:

--Variety reported Sunday that the brothers are touting Michael Moore's upcoming Sicko to potential financiers as a $40 million earner. Not only did Moore hint that he was flattered yet dismayed by the resulting high expectations, but he also intimated that all the fun has gone out of muckraking: "There has been a 100% success rate of the people we're filming of getting whatever they need from the HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, whatever." Yes, indeed--that's entertainment.

--Screen Daily (via Cinematical) reported Tuesday that TWC picked up distribution rights to the $35 million "Kazakh epic" Nomad. The jokes here make themselves: In a fit of Borat counteractivity, the government of Kazakhstan ponied up 80 or so percent of its gross domestic product for the sweeping film's budget, resulting in what insiders have referred to as the "Kazakh Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Fittingly, the producers brought in Jay Hernandez and Jason Scott Lee to act alongside Kazakhstars like Dilnaz Akhmadieva and Ayana Yesmagambetova. Much dubbing ensues, and maybe distribution--The Reeler hears Chen Kaige already has a release date pool going on this one.

--John Gulager, whose horror film Feast was the subject of Project Greenlight's third season, will get the ultimate TWC tribute next month: A Las Vegas casino premiere, two nights of large-market midnight screenings and an unceremonius dump onto DVD Oct. 12. "We are thrilled to be able to bring this film -- an incredible accomplishment for a first time filmmaker -- to audiences everywhere," said Bob Weinstein in a statement released Tuesday, pausing momentarily to swallow Gulager's ego before indulging a deep, satisfied laugh and a two-hour nap.

--Finally, we learn what a billion dollars in venture capital really gets you in 2006: Peter Weller running from lions. "What a gyp," cries Wall Street, turning its framed photo of Harvey 180 degrees and sizing up the window ledge.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:53 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Longley vs. Atkinson: Flyweight Film-Wonk Fisticuffs Entertaining Nevertheless

Lest you could not tell, Thursday was something of a catch-up day around Reeler HQ: Fend off hate mail from World Trade Center apologists; organize screeners I am about three weeks behind in viewing; and read through all the usual film coverage I happened to miss with everything else going on this week. In the latter category of things-to-do, I glimpsed a D-list but intriguingly nasty contretemps in the letters section of the Voice.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you James Longley and Michael Atkinson:

It's one thing for Michael Atkinson to give a positive review of the excellent documentary My Country, My Country ["Unembedded," August 2–8]; it's quite another for him to make the baseless and false accusation that my film, Iraq in Fragments, is an embedded prevarication. I certainly never embedded while making the film, and if I am to be charged with making a prevarication I think I deserve some explanation. After spending two years of my life in Iraq making my film, I find it more than a little disturbing that the Voice would publish such a libelous accusation without a shred of substance to back it up. In the world of nonfiction, war zone filmmaking it is not a trivial thing to accuse a director of lying—it's much the same as accusing a journalist of inventing sources. If you make the charge of prevarication regarding a documentary film it is not sufficient to argue that the director didn't follow what you wanted him to follow in the aesthetic style you would have liked; you have to show that the actual content itself is dishonestly portrayed.

James Longley
Seattle, Washington

Michael Atkinson replies: I'll admit that the use of "embedded" in this context was both generalized and suggestive of the film's attitude, not an explicit accusation about Longley's activities. But prevarication (not lying per se; see Webster's) pervades the film, each and every time Longley invents a reaction shot he could not have had the additional cameras to capture. (Multiple cameras hovering around Iraqi children would have entailed its own compromises.) Robert Flaherty and Walt Disney did it too, and it's dishonest.

Leave it to Atkinson to put the "dis" back in "Disney"; he invoked The Living Desert in his last excoriation of Iraq In Fragments a few months ago, and he clearly has a few months of therapy to go before the film's "cheap narrative-building suture(s)" no longer stink up his sweet dreams of Laura Poitras. I look forward to the next epistolary volley, in which the aggrieved Longley fires back with the default auteur war cry, "Well, where is your Iraq documentary, mister?" Followed, of course, by Atkinson's reply threatening various permutations of "lying filmmakers in fragments" and any number of intellectual implements "embedded in Longley's ass." It's almost enough to make me miss Kevin Smith and Joel Siegel. But just almost.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:23 AM | TrackBack

August 10, 2006

'Half Nelson,' Full House: Film's Brooklyn Homecoming Packs Them In

Well, that went well. Last night's installment of the Reeler Screeing Series welcomed a packed house to BAM for the Brooklyn premiere of Half Nelson, following which filmmakers and local heroes Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden joined the film's producers Jamie Patricof and Alex Orlovsky for an audience Q&A. Between the spirited debate on dialectics, hope vs. hopelessness and teacher/student relations, we actually did get some nuts and bolts insights from the Half Nelson gang, including the following:

Your humble editor looks on as (L-R) Half Nelson producers Alex Orlovsky and Jamie Patricof, co-writer/editor Anna Boden and co-writer/director Ryan Fleck take questions Wednesday night at BAM (Photo: Jennifer VanAirsdale)

FLECK ON DIRECTING RYAN GOSLING AND THE REST OF HIS GREAT CAST: "I mostly just tried to stay out of the way and cast good actors who we knew could deliver. We at least made sure we were aware of their work in some way and had seen a glimpse of something they could do, because I'm not going to tell them how to do it. I don't know how to do it. So they were good. We did it in a bunch of ways and gave them the freedom in a loose style that allowed them to move around on the set without bumping into some kind of crazy lighting rig. And our DP also had freedom to follow them... That was the only plan we had going in."

BODEN ON THE EDITING PROCESS: "It was very organic, because I approached it first as a writer. And then being able to write the final draft as an editor was really exciting and not exactly what we expected it to be. A lot of material wound up on the cutting room floor that we really loved and that, when we were shooting, made us say, 'Oh my God--this is amazing.' It just didn't end up being right. But I don't know. We assembled it, and the first assembly was three hours long, and we were like, 'Nobody's going to sit and watch this whole thing.' What ended up not in the movie is another full movie."

ORLOVSKY AND PATRICOF ON SHOOTING IN NEW YORK: O: "Everyone was from here, and you can't get better crews, especially when you're working on a small budget. It's just true. We figured out at one point that the average age of our crew was 27, and I think it's one of the only places you can find people who are so dedicated, so talented and committed and who can make a smaller project like this possible." P: "We couldn't have made this film for this budget anywhere but in New York. It's just one of those strange things." O: "Having shot stuff in other places, it just makes you miss working in New York because you just notice how special everyone is. It's true."

And... scene. The Reeler owes a debt of gratitude to ThinkFilm's Mark Urman and Alex Klenert for the opportunity to screen the film, and huge thanks go out to BAMcinématek's Florence Almozini and Molly Gross for so graciously welcoming this event on short notice. Brooklyn Brewery was kind enough to sponsor our after-party, and Moe's bar in Fort Greene was kind enough to host it. Thanks as well to Fleck, Boden, Patricof and Orlovsky for dropping by, and best of luck to them as Half Nelson opens Friday at the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza cinemas.

Meanwhile, the next Reeler Screening Series event takes place Sept. 19 at the Pioneer Theater, with director Chris Terrio stopping in for a presentation of his marvelous 2005 film, Heights. More information will be forthcoming, but go ahead and save the date.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:51 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 09, 2006

Reeler Screening Series Continues Tonight With 'Half Nelson,' Brooklyn Beer

I know most of you good-hearted readers within a 100-or-so-mile radius of Brooklyn have already penciled tonight's Reeler Screening Series event into your calendars, but for those of you non-committal types who keep their nights open until the last minute, here is my last bit of nagging: Please drop by BAM tonight for a preview of Ryan Fleck's superb Half Nelson. Fleck and partner Anna Boden will be on hand afterward for a discussion and Q&A, and the whole evening wraps up with an after-party down the street at Moe's. Bring your ticket stub, get a pint (courtesy of our sponsors at Brooklyn Brewery) and toast this terrific film's homecoming.

Event and ticketing details follow the jump; as always, I look forward to seeing you there.

__

Sneak Preview:
HALF NELSON
Directed by Ryan Fleck
With Ryan Gosling, Shareeka Epps, Anthony Mackie

Weds., Aug. 9 -- 7 p.m.
http://www.bam.org/film/series.aspx?id=92

"Sardonic yet moving, Half Nelson deftly outlines the perils of youthful idealism without lapsing into knee-jerk cynicism."—The Village Voice

A big hit at both Sundance and New Directors/New Films, Half Nelson is a breakthrough work from the Brooklyn filmmaking team of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden. A young teacher in a Brooklyn junior high (Gosling, in a revelatory performance) must confront his own alcohol and drug problems when a student (Epps) discovers them. A Q&A with Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden, moderated by Stu VanAirsdale of TheReeler.com follows the screening.

AFTER-PARTY at Moe's -- 80 Lafayette Ave. (at Portland)
Sponsored by BROOKLYN BREWERY

###

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:38 PM | TrackBack

Stone Unturned: The Irresponsibility of 'World Trade Center'

I think I am at peace with World Trade Center being a bad film. God knows I wanted it to be more than the treacly mess Oliver Stone made, but I have spent the last couple of days working through my issues of what Stone intended and what I craved. As the Wall Street Journal's Brian Carney wrote last weekend (before eviscerating it anyway), "Mr. Stone set out to make a narrowly focused film... He has done that well, and it would be foolish to argue that he should have made some other movie instead."

No, Nic, seriously, it is not political: Stone and Cage on the set of World Trade Center (Photos: Francois Duhamel/Paramount Pictures)

That is kind of where I sit with World Trade Center, and the best criticism of Stone's film I have yet read (Jim Hoberman's, in particular) applies pretty much the same standards of evaluation. I would say, however, that Stone's claim to have not made a political film is disingenuous at best--everything about this film is political, from the Brooks & Dunn jangle exhorting American virtue over the radio to a former Marine's claim that "this country is at war" to President Bush's telegenic resolve to avenge the dead at the WTC, the Pentagon and on Flight 93. As the portrait of a moment--the rescue of two Port Authority cops from the WTC rubble--the film strives for more than authenticity; it clamors for atavism. It does not want to recreate Sept. 11, 2001. It wants to relive it--but only the best parts, the humane parts--over and over and over again.

But to the extent it wallows in denial, World Trade Center is call-and-response filmmaking of the most egregious kind. Church-pew epiphanies are patronizing. Flashbacks of domestic bliss are patronizing. Wisconsin cops cooking bratwurst and uttering actual dialogue like, "That's a guarantee you can take to the bank, mister" are patronizing. A hallucination of Jesus offering a bottle of water is patronizing and absurd. Their literal translation to the screen is not immune to aesthetic judgment simply by virtue of their roots in people's real lives. Nor does Stone's decontextualization honor the fallen to whom he dedicates his film: They suffered because of a political act, which Stone freely acknowledged last weekend in an interview with Newsday's Lewis Beale. Yet, as alluded to in Andrea Berloff's script, they were casualties of "evil." Survivors John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno emerged by the grace of "goodness."

Therein lies an even more heartbreaking failure: Stone spends $65 million on a stunning, genuinely terrifying introduction and production design only to pin their psychic impact on a pair of abstractions. (Obviously, the rescue effort was indeed quite good, but as Carney writes, that hardly squares up with the attacks that necessitated them.) The filmmaker told Beale of his decision to make a 9/11 film, "Learn the skilled art of fearlessness." Alas, Stone's work exudes fear--mostly of himself. Even if we take at face value his proclamation that he made the movie he wanted to make, what does that say about Oliver Stone the thinker? The moviegoing public seems almost less prepared for a neutral Stone film than anything addressing 9/11. As such, the accolades for World Trade Center resonate more as acclaim for its director's thematic risk-taking than his execution--neither of which necessarily reflect the more powerful intellectual risks or craftsmanship Stone is capable of.

He knows it, you know it, even his most vehement career detractors know it. And as the adage goes, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer": The head-patting, patronizing cocksuckers rewarded him with near-universal praise. The group responsible for 2004's "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" campaign against John Kerry has taken on the share of Paramount's marketing burden not expended on teens (whose manufactured hypersensitivity to 9/11 has been swallowed hook, line and sinker by the press). Cal Thomas infamously pegged it as "one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-faith, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you will ever see." Which is great for the unassailable right-wing ego but just as certainly confirms that in 2006, this film makes no sense. Not only does it say nothing about what we knew then, but it also denies everything we know now--particularly by including an epilogue that takes place in mid-2003 and explicitly invokes the war in Iraq. Am I the only one who finds this a grotesque omission?

Still, I think I am at peace with World Trade Center being a bad film. I just have some work to do before I can abide its irresponsibility.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 12:14 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

'Factotum': Dillon Does Bukowski (But Only Sort Of)

IFC Center welcomed a (literally) standing-room-only crowd to Tuesday night's Factotum premiere, where Matt Dillon, co-star Lily Taylor and director Bent Hamer were more than warmly received for their adaptation of Charles Bukowski's 1975 novel. The packed-house chaos spilled over to the after-party on the Bowery's Blvd. nightclub--not quite Bukowski's skid row, but where "25-year-old new owner of the NY Observer" (per the tip sheet) Jared Kushner hosted and where the IFC family's new addition, one Abel Ferrara, joyfully reconnected with Dillon (at right) in the VIP area.

Dillon is solid in Factotum as Henry Chinaski, the Bukowski alter-ego who bumps around Minneapolis drinking, gambling and getting fired from any number of low-wage hack jobs that cannot sustain his interest. He fancies himself a writer, drafting pages of copy he sends to publishers who never respond. After falling in love with fellow drunk Jan (Taylor), Henry glimpses a hint of his soul that confirms his destiny as a "bum"; his resolution to avoid regular work, family or commitment becomes a torpid responsibility of its own. Henry's mediations between the two fuel Hamer's narrative, and as such, the jaundiced, hollow spaces these characters occupy physically and emotionally are anything but desolate. Bars, flophouses and bus benches all attain the flavor of home, where Henry readily accepts his acute, squalid solitude.

Dillon spoke to reporters Tuesday afternoon about how a charter member of the Teen Idol Hall of Fame wound up riffing on a guy like Charles Bukowski."I first read Hot Water Music, I think, in 1983," Dillon said. "Or '84, maybe? This book of short stories that my friend gave me. I read the first story and I kind of got hooked right away. I don't remember which short story it was; I think it was called The Great Poet or something. Anyway, I liked it right away because it was so irreverent. The humor? I think it definitely really appeals to guys in their early 20s, and I was just, like, 21 or 22 or something. And then I read most of the short stories and novels--none of the poetry--in a four-year period or something like that. It was right around the time Barfly came out that I just stopped reading them and moved on to other writers or whatever. And then all these years later, you know, Jim Stark, the producer of the film, approached me and told me that Bent--and I didn't know who Bent was--had done an adaptation of Factotum. I was like, 'Oh, wow.' And they wanted me to play Hank, or they were interested in me doing it. And my first reaction was like, 'Are you sure you've got the right guy?' I mean, first of all, after I read him, I never thought about me playing anybody in the film. I'm so physically not the type--especially at that age, because he achieved success so late in the game. I always knew him as the white-haired guy who wrote Notes of a Dirty Old Man, you know?"

At that point Stark referred Dillon on to Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, where Hamer's Kitchen Stories was screening in its New York release. Dillon said he immediately knew Hamer was for real, but he still could not get his head around the prospect of playing Chinaski. Stark reassured him that Chinaski was, in fact, just about Dillon's age in Factotum. The role (and its challenges) acquired increasing appeal for the actor, who said his ultimate concern was to do justice to Bukowski without succumbing to long-standing impressions or myths.

"What I knew from Bukowski--and I knew a fair amount--was that he was very, you know... Almost..." Dillon paused. "The persona he has in the book sounds more like... I want to say it sounds more grizzled. Like Ben Gazarra or Warren Oates or someone. It sounds more gravelly-voiced. Then when you hear real Bukowski, he's kind of got this almost-effeminate, sort of sing-songy delivery. Which is interesting, and I think in a lot of ways it was a little bit of an affectation, you know? And I think he did that because he didn't like to read--he didn't like to do readings and stuff. And so I kind of wanted to avoid that; I didn't want to get involved in an impersonation of doing Bukowski. And they said, 'Well, we don't want that either, because, you know, it's Henry Chinaski. It's an alter ego.' And that actually gave me a real latitude, and I felt more comfortable then. And then I could go about, and I decided to do it. And then I spoke to Linda Bukowski, and she said, 'Well, of course, you know it's autobiographical.' So now I'm back--inevitably, all roads lead to Bukowski."

Factotum opens Aug. 18 in New York.

(Photo: STV)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:09 AM | TrackBack

August 08, 2006

For Christ's Sake: IFC Films Picks Up Ferrara's 'Mary'

The Reeler hears this afternoon that IFC Films has picked up rights to Abel Ferrara's long-languishing Mary. Featuring Juliette Binoche as an actress transformed by her portrayal of Mary Magdalene, you might recall the film earning its recent local buzz via co-star Matthew Modine's late-night phone calls to Cindy Adams and a particularly spirited Ferrara appearance at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. It probably bears mentioning Mary won a Special Jury Prize at Venice in 2005 as well, and the pick-up coincides with the upcoming Sarajevo Film Festival's plans to honor Ferrara and Béla Tarr with career retrospectives.

No word yet on a release date, and the details do not specify whether or not IFC will be releasing via its First Take day-and-date arm. Look for those specifics eventually as official announcements are made this week.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:10 PM | TrackBack

Can We 'Trust the Man' Freundlich's New York?

Bart Freundlich's new romantic "comedy" Trust the Man premiered Monday night in Chelsea, where the filmmaker and his wife/star Julianne Moore (right) were on hand to have a look with a few hundred friends. Anchored deep in bourgeoisie crisis, scatology and the existential black hole of the West Village, Trust the Man follows the exploits of two New York couples who just cannot seem to get their relationships in working order: Unemployed Tom and actress Rebecca (David Duchovny and Moore), frazzled parents who chum around/commisserate with Rebecca's underachieving brother Tobey and his long-time girlfriend Elaine (Billy Crudup and Maggie Gyllenhaal).

The story is not complex: Rebecca will not give Tom sex, so he cheats. Tobey will not give Elaine a baby, so she makes him leave. Everybody meets somebody else, and in fairness, I should acknowledge that Freundlich does offer a mildly refreshing, matter-of-fact view of infidelity. Followed, of course, by the singer-songwriter-accompanied moving-out montage. And then by the equally cloying coming-around montage. Estrogen-drunk monologues and men who actually say "boo-yah." A climactic, slow-motion moment of romantic truth onstage at Lincoln Center. It is all just.... so... easy.

As such, with all of this nagging conventionality in mind, I had to ask him and Moore during a chat last weekend: Who the hell are these people? And 25 years after Woody Allen's prime, with artistic heirs ranging from Ed Burns to Noah Baumbach contorting his legacy with various degrees of success, is the "crazy-ass-middle-class-white-New-Yorker-in-trouble" genre possess even half the intrigue for anybody outside New York as it (theoretically) yields for us?

"That's something I thought a lot about, and I think it does," said Freundlich, who ackowledged the autobiographical elements--friends, family, geography--that influenced his film. "Becuase I think people in New York are fascinated to see the place they live painted in a real way, but I think that New York is kind of this beacon, and that everyone is fascinated by it. And I like the idea of showing it as a small town, and hopefully although people may have kind of high class problems in the movie, showing that they have the same type of issues people have anywhere else. I didn't think too much where it was going to fit in; I just tried to be as true as I could to what I knew New York to be. ... I tried to stay true to it because there's something very unconscious that goes on when you know that it's real."

Which indeed is kind of fascinating in one way: Semi-conscious New Yorkers couldn't care less about seeing close-ups of the façades at Barney's or Magnolia Bakery or Da Silvano, and people unfamiliar with New York know little to nothing about the relation of retail landmarks to a filmmaker's "real" New York. They are status symbols without status.

Moore employed a more historic view of Trust the Man's milieu. "When you remember all of those Doris Day movies that were set in New York?" she said. "Sabrina was set in New York. ... All those so-called 'sophisticated' romantic comedies or comedies--The Apartment, all that stuff--were set in New York City. The thing that's appealing to me about New York, actually, and that people don't always understand until they've spent some time here is how community-oriented the city is. You can feel very, very lost if set up in Midtown somewhere and you're like, 'I don't have any friends and I don't know where to go.' But once you figure out New York and you realize it's just a group of little villages and you get to know everybody--you know the magazine guy, you know the deli guy, you know the other restaurants and you have your friends on the street and the laundromat you go to and all that--you feel very supported."

Then she went further macro: "You have two kinds of American movies: You have the small-town American movie and you have the big-city American movie," Moore said. "And in both of them, you realize they kind of celebrate whatever community these people belong to. So I think it does play."

If she says so. In any event, it is everyone's city, so you tell us. Judge for yourself when Fox Searchlight opens Trust the Man Aug. 18.

(Photo: Dennis Van Tine / Open All Night)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 12:45 PM | TrackBack

Closure at Last as Hollywood Christians Forgive Mel Gibson

I had resolved to sit out Mel Gibson's bloody celebrity abortion for a number of reasons: Obviously it has nothing to do with New York, and to the extent that Hollywood has emphasized its jurisdiction over such affairs, Nikki Finke and Jeff Wells were enjoying too beautiful a gossip mating ritual for me to do anything but sit back and watch. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

But things changed yesterday--all the hearsay and supposition and anguish toned down as former Paramount and Disney exec David Kirkpatrick chimed in from his current front office at Good News Ministries, offering desperately needed perspective and perhaps even hinting at Gibson's possible comeback vehicle:

Good News Holdings Asks, Is Mel Gibson the Modern Day George Bailey and Is This His 'Wonderful Life'?

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 7 -- Good News Holdings, a Christian entertainment company, spoke out in support of Mel Gibson's statement of accountability and apology following his arrest last week.

"The American Film Institute named It's a Wonderful Life the most inspiring picture of all time," said David Kirkpatrick, Co-Founder of Good News Holdings and former Production Chief of Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney Pictures. "In that movie, while drunk on Christmas Eve, decent man George Bailey chastises his wife, reduces his children to tears, and destroys the living room of his home with his own hands. Suicidal, Bailey prays to God for help, seeks his family's forgiveness, and finds redemption. AFI voted George Bailey one of the top ten movie heroes of our time."

"Mel Gibson is the gifted film-maker of both Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ," added Kirkpatrick. "Sometimes when the gift shines brightly, we overlook the raw reality of our humanity. Like each of us, Mr. Gibson struggles with personal challenges, but his journey is highly visible. We cannot condone the behavior or language that led to his arrest. But in the aftermath, what more could a repentant person do than acknowledge his wrongdoing, sincerely apologize, ask for forgiveness, seek medical help for his disease, and initiate dialogue with those whom he has hurt?"

A shrewd, beautiful statement, to be certain. But surely no defensive-minded Christian organization worth its salt would issue an entire press release without blaming the victim? Or better yet: Getting a victim to blame himself?

The Company quoted Rabbi Daniel Lapin, broadcaster and author, "He (Mel Gibson) has never supported organizations that encourage the murder of Jews ... and has utterly resisted the natural human temptation to snap back at the so-called 'Jewish Establishment' for its vicious assaults on The Passion."

Right. Now if only a spokesperson for the long-suffering "Sugar Tits" contingent would speak up on Gibson's behalf, we could finally let bygones be bygones.

Follow the jump for the full press release.

__

Good News Holdings Asks, Is Mel Gibson the Modern Day George Bailey and Is This His 'Wonderful Life'?

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 7 -- Good News Holdings, a Christian entertainment company, spoke out in support of Mel Gibson's statement of accountability and apology following his arrest last week.

"The American Film Institute named It's a Wonderful Life the most inspiring picture of all time," said David Kirkpatrick, Co-Founder of Good News Holdings and former Production Chief of Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney Pictures. "In that movie, while drunk on Christmas Eve, decent man George Bailey chastises his wife, reduces his children to tears, and destroys the living room of his home with his own hands. Suicidal, Bailey prays to God for help, seeks his family's forgiveness, and finds redemption. AFI voted George Bailey one of the top ten movie heroes of our time."

"Mel Gibson is the gifted film-maker of both Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ," added Kirkpatrick. "Sometimes when the gift shines brightly, we overlook the raw reality of our humanity. Like each of us, Mr. Gibson struggles with personal challenges, but his journey is highly visible. We cannot condone the behavior or language that led to his arrest. But in the aftermath, what more could a repentant person do than acknowledge his wrongdoing, sincerely apologize, ask for forgiveness, seek medical help for his disease, and initiate dialogue with those whom he has hurt?"

George Barna, Chairman of the company, stated, "How unfortunate that many are now judging Mr. Gibson for the effects of his disease. This is the time for good and compassionate people to help the one who is ill, by participating in his restoration and praying for God's healing grace."

The Company quoted Rabbi Daniel Lapin, broadcaster and author, "He (Mel Gibson) has never supported organizations that encourage the murder of Jews ... and has utterly resisted the natural human temptation to snap back at the so-called 'Jewish Establishment' for its vicious assaults on The Passion."

Thom Black, also a Co-Founder of Good News, noted, "King Solomon wrote in Proverbs, 'A righteous man falls seven times and gets up again.' Mr. Gibson is like the rest of us, trying to get his life in sync with what he believes in his heart. For many of us, that takes a lifetime."

###

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:04 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

August 07, 2006

Screening Gotham Special Edition: The Reeler's Guide to Outdoor Cinema in NYC

The heat wave has broken, the Yankees are pretending to care and pictures of kids playing with fire hydrants have reached critical mass. It can only mean one thing: Summer is on the downturn in New York. But there is still plenty of seasonal pleasure to be had at the half-dozen film series unspooling in parks and outdoor venues around the city, which The Reeler has tested, tire-kicked and/or endured so that you may make the most of your August movie expeditions.

Screen test: Movies With a View at Empire-Fulton Ferry Park, one of a half-dozen outdoor screening series continuing this month around New York (Photos [except where noted]: STV)

I know what you're thinking: "But STV, why did you hold out until summer was two-thirds over to review all of these?" A great and answerable question: Some of these series--Summerscreen, for example--only started two weeks ago. Others will not start for another few weeks to come (Solar 1's annual solar-powered screening series launches Aug. 18). I also thought I would wait until the worst of the summer weather hit to see how manageable the settings were in the shittiest, most humid and inhospitable of urban conditions. And there is a difference, as you can probably intuit: Riverfront lawns fare a little better than heat-radiating empty pools on a 90-degree night. Such series present rare examples of moviegoing that is not necessarily "all about the films"; if it was, the 40-minute round-trip walk from the N/W train to see The Straight Story at Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria would feel much breezier than it actually is.

But I digress. Listed by their respective days of the week--and with typically hyperactive subjectivity--follow the jump for August's remaining cinematic goings-on outdoors around New York.

MONDAYS: HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival; Bryant Park

Cost: Free.

Program: Crowd-pleasing, with an emphasis on classical. Nothing here is less than 30 years old, with Rocky (Aug. 21) being the most recently released film on the sked. Tonight's screening of John Frankenheimer's original The Manchurian Candidate is about as challenging as it gets.

View/Location: Convenient to every train in the city, which has its advantages and disadvatages. The ease and popularity of visiting Bryant Park means everyone goes there, and the place is packed well before sundown. There is no "view," per se, unless you count people-watching, which can be wildly entertaining as the lawn fills up and latecomers futz about with blankets three times too big for the patch of dirt their tardiness entitles them to.

Seating: As noted above, plenty of lawn seating is available--provided you arrive sometime between 6 and 7 p.m for films that start close to 9. Lawn chairs are prohibited. Seats situated 10-15 feet inside the lawn are probably best, allowing for easy aisle access without being the poor sucker across whose blanket everyone tracks their scuzzy flip-flops on their ways to and from the restroom.

The lawn fills up early at the HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival

The park's ubiquitous green-slat chairs can usually still be had before 8 p.m. if you don't mind sitting way off to the side. After that, consider it a crap shoot. TIP: Set up to the left of the screen; the further right (and closer) you get, the more conspicuous the space between the screen panels becomes at showtime.

Picture/Sound: The films are projected in crisp 35 mm., and the screen is large enough and the sound moderated enough for anyone seated back near the library to have an enjoyable time without worrying about too much fuzz or reverb. Surrounding trees block more light than you would expect, but they cannot block traffic noise or sirens, both of which annoy reliably every 30-45 minutes.

Restrooms: Ladies have a permanent (and busy) facility on 42nd Street, while a wall of unisex porta-potties lining 40th Street are there for whoever needs them.

Food/Drink: Bring your own, or pick up a $7 sandwich and $2 or $3 beverage from the two 'Wichcraft stands on the Sixth Avenue side of the park. A 'Wichcraft vendor also tours the grounds taking orders on a laptop, but the wait looked longer than you would want to withstand if you were hungry.

TUESDAYS: Summerscreen; McCarren Park Pool

Cost: $3 suggested donation.

Program: Earnest, with a dash of headscratching. Brooklyn classic Do the Right Thing launched the series July 25, followed by the typically Williamsburg-y quirk parade Bottle Rocket. The French Connection screens Aug. 8, with the unusual but admirable selections The Swimmer, Love Streams and Style Wars concluding the series this month. Even more outlandish is the live music selected to open the shows: "Koto with computer, lasers"? "Theremin & thrown voice"? It is like Broadway Danny Rose's client roster brought to life.

View/Location: No view to speak of, unless you count the high-rise under construction across Lorimer. The pool is directly across the street from McCarren Park proper and is roughly equidistant to the Bedford and Lorimer L stops--about a 10-minute walk from either.

Seating: Chairs are not only allowed but heartily encouraged for the pool, which is exactly the kind of hard, dirty, heat-radiating concrete basin you would expect to find at an empty city pool in Williamsburg. You can show up anytime and find a place to set up, but the further back you go, the less likely you are to actually enjoy the screening. Why? Well...

Picture/Sound: ... I will give you the McCarren Park Pool for rock shows--a perfect venue, really (unless you are at the deep end looking up through the crowd, I suppose). In theory, it should work for films, but between a screen too small for the venue, 35 millimeter projections too dark for the setting and the acoustically unfriendly concrete surroundings, the whole experience can be kind of unpleasant. Maybe it was just the 90-percent humidity getting me down. But I doubt it.

Restrooms: An abundance of portable stalls are available within a stone's throw of the pool.

Food/Drink: Extremely casual, but in a good way. The MC preceded the Bottle Rocket screening with the announcement that $2 pizza slices ("There's more on the way," he added comfortingly) and free Red Bull were available, while a Mister Softee knock-off parked just inside the gates. The only drinks for sale are water ($2), sparkling water and Vitamin Water ($3 each), so consider packing a bottle or two of whatever else you prefer.

WEDNESDAYS: Outdoor Cinema, Socrates Sculpture Park

Cost: Free.

Program: World cinema, with liberal dose of "Huh?" You know I love Museum of the Moving Image curator David Schwartz to death, but his best intentions seem to have gotten the better of him with this series including Stolen Children, Kikujiro and Wild Strawberries. I am all for bringing art cinema to the Astoria riverfront, but from an audience point of view, this might be overdoing it. The live music before each show is usually tied to the nationality of the film it precedes.

Not a pretty picture: Outdoor Cinema at Socrates Sculpture Park

View/Location: Brutal. The sculpture park is about a 20-minute walk each way from the N/W stop at Broadway, which, as I noted above, feels like an hour after you factor in the humidity. Once there, the terrain is part-lawn, part-mud, all concealed rocks; one viewer near me suffered a bruised elbow just from leaning back on a stone under his blanket. The backdrop comprises Harlem, the Bronx, the Triborough Bridge and the uppermost tip of Roosevelt Island, all flickering over the swirling pitch black of the East River.

Seating: Again, sit on the ground at your own peril. I did not note any prohibitions against chairs, but even so, the turf is not quite level and the wobble potential is disproportionately high. Summer rain turns the area closest to the screen into a vast expanse of mud, wiping out what is probably the best seating in the park.

Picture/Sound: The biggest problem with Outdoor Cinema's programming is that the way the venue is set up, you cannot read the foreign-language films' subtitles: The screen is too small, the seating is too distant and the image quality is too poor. The sound is all right, and the park is relatively quiet, both factors which make the events' substantial chatter-and-kids factor virtually unbearable.

Restrooms: I was so turned off that I left without checking. My bad.

Food/Drink: You are welcome to bring your own, and with the variety of take-out available along Broadway, it can be tempting. Decent grub is available on-site as well, including Caesar salad, pasta or wraps at $4 apiece and hot dogs at $1.50.

WEDNESDAYS/FRIDAYS: One Mean Summer and Big Adventures; Hudson River Park

Cost: Free.

Program: Well, it depends. What Wednesday's programmers call a "Quirky-Themed Movie Series" I would call more of a "Celebrate Vicious Urban Sociopathy Series": Goodfellas and A Clockwork Orange wrap up the schedule at Pier 54 Aug. 16 and 23 respectively. They make it up to families Friday nights at Pier 46 with a program featuring Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Aug. 18) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Aug. 25).

As close as you're going to get: Arrive early for Hudson River Park's screenings

View/Location: About a 15-minute walk from the nearest subway station (the 1 stop at Christopher St.--another hot family spot for Friday night), but worth the trek. Granted, the skyline belongs to Jersey City, but as they say in brothels: In the dark, all cats are gray. The Hudson also yields a little friendlier breeze than its cousin to the East. Or at least it did the nights I was there.

Seating: Challenging, especially on Fridays. The piers naturally possess a higher space premium, and when it fills up, don't count on leaving unless you can camp on the center emergency row or near the side walkways. That said, the artificial turf is reasonably comfy if you can claim it. Chairs are allowed, but don't be a dick: Set up to the sides or in the back. Some benches are available on the piers' edges, but trees obscure a good portion of their views.

Picture/Sound: The screen is about the right size for the piers, but the further back you are, the less likely you are to enjoy what you are attempting to watch. Sound is dodgy at best: The West Side Highway is a loud neighbor, and it is not uncommon to sense an odd disconnection between the movie's sound and picture--as thought someone is syncing them on the spot. It also improves--but does not necessarily abate--the closer you are to the screen.

Restrooms: Not a good situation. Walk off the pier, down the boardwalk a few hundred feet, and use one of three portable stalls set up right next to the locked public restrooms. Guys should bring a piss bottle. Ladies... I don't know what to say. Don't drink anything, I guess.

Food/Drink: Besides free popcorn (available after 8:45), and a bare-bones snack-cart vendor (soda, water and hot dogs for under $2) there's nothing on-site or even close to on-site. I would recommend bringing dinner and your own bottle.

THURSDAYS: Movies With a View; Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park

Cost: $3 suggested donation.

Program: Eclectic, with a dash of transgressive. If you missed The Warriors' screening and cast reunion that swamped Coney Island last week, you can always make it up here when the series wraps up Aug. 24. Also playing: Bonnie and Clyde and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

View/Location: Pretty much the best out there. Plunked in the grassy expanse between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, you cannot really improve on a backdrop of Manhattan at dusk. About a 10-minute walk from the A/C stop at High St. station and the F stop at York St.

Seating: Plenty of lawn space still remained when I dropped in at 8 p.m. A hill near the back of the lawn affords perhaps the best overall view of screen and skyline, but arrive early--it fills up fast. You can rent essentially legless lawn chairs for $5 (plus a $5 deposit) from the Park Conservancy. Tip: If you can, set up camp behind the Conservancy's reserved seating near the front of the lawn. It's right on an aisle, and in the frequent instances when BBPC officials don't show up, you have clear sightlines to the screen

Picture/Sound: Just OK, really. The screen is too small and the seating area too wide to get the nuance of a film like July 20's Strangers on a Train. Light pollution from across the river is less than you might think, but the bridges' traffic (particularly the trains on the Manhattan Bridge) generates a stereophonic clamor that you never quite get used to.

Restrooms: Disastrous--at least on the night I was there. A wall of porta-potties outside the screening area never opened up, leaving a line of frustrated filmgoers (sometimes 20 people deep) waiting for three restrooms out of viewing range of the screen.

Food/Drink: Upscale, with Rice Restaurant offering a mix of dishes leaning Southwest by way of SoHo. BBQ dinners start at $8, with gazpacho, ginger lemonade and even smores rounding out the menu. Oh, and there is popcorn, soda and water across the way for the more conventionally minded.

A customary live act before one of Rooftop Films' programs (Photo: Rooftop Films)

FRIDAYS/SATURDAYS: Rooftop Films

Cost: Varies; events at Fort Greene Park and the Brooklyn Navy Yard are free, while most others range from $8-$10.

Program: International indie, with a heavy New York flavor. And not "indie" as in "eventually sells for $10 million at Sundance," but rather "made with distribution as an afterthought." Founder Mark Rosenberg and partners Dan Nuxoll and Sarah Palmer possess keen and somewhat fearless eyes for short films in particular, unspooling rich programs like This is What We Mean... by ROMANCE and New York Non-Fiction every weekend alongside strong documentaries like Andrew Berends' When Adnan Comes Home and the wildly amusing Czech Dream. Live music precedes most shows.

View/Location: The default venue is the roof of Williamsburg's Automotive High School, a serviceable site offering both convenience to the G and L trains as well as a decent view of the city. East Williamsburg, Gowanus and Red Hook are represented as well, while increasingly more Rooftop Films events (motto: "Movies on a roof in Brooklyn") take place at ground level or in Manhattan.

Seating: The organizers generally provide chairs. Provided there is room, couples or groups can usually throw down a blanket and view the films without any obstructions.

Picture/Sound: I have never been too impressed by the image quality of Rooftop's video projector, which imposes a mildly fuzzy big-screen-TV mist on its films. Surrounding light sources can be a problem, especially in Manhattan. On the bright side, the sound is well-calibrated for its respective venues' sizes.

Restrooms: Depends on the venue, but the restrooms are never so far away and the attendance so out of control that a bathroom break takes longer than 10 minutes.

Food/Drink: A limited selection of beverages (read: water) is available for purchase. You are welcome to bring your own, however, and on a pleasant night, a picnic-style rooftop dinner with a bottle of wine is arguably the best movie date in town. Just pack light--you still have to lug it up the stairs.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:38 AM | TrackBack

August 04, 2006

Screening Gotham: August 4-6, 2006

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

--It would be awfully easy to dismiss director Hans Canosa's latest film, Conversations With Other Women, as a pretentious conceptual stunt even without it being edited entirely in split-screen (or "dual-frame," as the director is wont to call it). Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart portray star-crossed old flames reunited at a wedding in a New York hotel; they talk deep, retreat to a room upstairs, and you can probably imagine the attenuated talkiness and groping that follows.

Dual-image? Split-screen? Whatever--Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart in Conversations With Other Women, previewed this weekend at the SoHo Apple Store.

But in the end, Canosa's split-screen stunt does what it needs to do: allows simultaneous flashbacks; close-ups as two-shots; and a redistribution of space that bestows an oddly comforting theatricality on the tired old hotel-room set. And though Conversations does not open for another week, Canosa will be at the SoHo Apple Store on Saturday afternoon to explain how (and why) pulled the whole thing off on a Mac. If only Apple could have written his script.

--RockDocs continues at Lincoln Center this weekend, showcasing Stewart Copeland's Everyone Stares: The Story of the Police Saturday night. This was perhaps my least favorite film from Sundance '06, but considering what it could have been--assembled from seemingly miles' worth of unseen Super 8 concert and backstage footage from the great rock trio's doomed run--Copeland's autoerotic failure makes the film the type of unironic, delicious disaster that has CULT FUCKING CLASSIC written all over it. Dig his narration, and then feed it back to the filmmaker/former drummer during the post-screening Q&A to see if he laughs as hard as you did.

--Fix your lipstick and get your best groupie sneer on: Magnolia boss Eamonn Bowles takes a breather from the Jesus Camp snafu to rock with the Staggering Gents tonight at Magnetic Field in Brooklyn.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 04:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

'Runnin' ' Into Montiel: More About Dito's New Project

One thing led to another Thursday and I found myself on the phone with Dito Montiel, whose recently announced project Runnin' came up in this spot earlier this week. Montiel, whose writing/directing debut A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints hits theaters Sept. 29, is rewriting Robert Munic's original script about what Variety describes as "the underground world of sports betting"; producers Kevin Misher and Patrick Baker brought him to their little corner of Paramount after falling in love with Saints.

"It's fun, you know?" said the ever-ebullient Montiel of the rewrite process, not too many degrees removed from his adaptation of his own novel for Saints. "There's like a blueprint. I always enjoy getting into the characters more than the entire story. They already have their thing, but now it's just making sure that the people are people that I think are worth meeting for two hours in a movie theater. So that's kind of fun for me."

But after crafting his first film's characters from the dysfunctional tapestry of his youth in Astoria, Queens, is there any research Montiel is doing to affirm his new project's authenticity? Digging into bookies, gambling cons, so on and so forth?

He half-laughed, half-hedged.

"I've been around," he replied. "I just kind of roam around and feel it out. I'm not going to gain 70 pounds to direct a film, you know? I kind of just feel my way around. It's more about people being able to relate to the characters than to get too into that. It'll be real, and that's key. Too much research makes things unreal."

Obviously, I still have no production dates to pass along--the guy is still slashing through old drafts--but again, you will know more when I do.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 02:16 PM | TrackBack

Yo-Ho No 'Mo: Lumenick Review Enters No-Faggot Zone

You know what Friday in New York means: Time for Lou Lumenick to dose up his sturdy, workmanlike aesthetic authority for another round of Post film criticism. Today's highlight does not quite reflect the mouth-breathing conserva-twat paranoia of last week's anti-Communist screed, but it nevertheless presents the pleasingly abrasive antidote to good taste you have come to expect for your 25 cents:

"I want the man to look like a pirate, not a mollycoddle," went a studio memo. "You have him standing up here dealing with a lot of hard-boiled characters and you've got him dressed up like a goddamned faggot."

No, it wasn't a Disney executive complaining about Johnny Depp's swishy Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean - these words came from Warner Bros. production chief Hal Wallis, grousing to director Michael Curtiz about Errol Flynn's frilly costumes in 1935's Captain Blood.

Flynn's Captain Blood and Leslie Howard's equally foppish (and rousing) The Scarlet Pimpernel - along with the Warner Bros. cartoon The Scarlet Pumpernickel - lead off a series of Summer Swashbucklers that make Depp look like, well, a mollycoddle, beginning today at Film Forum.

For those of you keeping score at home, Lumenick indeed went the long way around to call Johnny Depp a "goddamned faggot"--such a long way, in fact, that this anecdote occupies about a third of his entire Swashbuckler preview. But it is small price to pay, really, for the understanding that faggots and their Communist brethren know the Post is onto their mainstream scams. Not to be outdone, expect Kyle Smith to fire back next week with a 10-point plan to retrieve America's $366 million from "that limp-wristed bagelmaker" Jerry Bruckheimer.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:52 AM | TrackBack

August 03, 2006

BREAKING: Wong Kar Wai Captured in NYC Bakery Shooting

For those of you for whom production of Ridley Scott's American Gangster here in town just does not possess the glimmering urbane fabulousness of, say, Jodie Foster's fleet of tow trucks, IndieWIRE kingpin Eugene Hernandez offers up this tantalizing dispatch on his blog:

Walking around hot and humid downtown Manhattan tonight, I was frankly stunned to spot filmmaker Wong Kar Wai (pictured center). It turns out that movie shooting near Canal St. is My Blueberry Nights, Wong's first English-language film. After midnight, I observed for a bit and then snapped a quick pic from across the street as WKW leaned up against a doorway to plan a shot inside a bakery.

For a larger glimpse at the pic above right, pay Eug a visit. Then drop back by here over the next few days to see if The Reeler's own eventual WKW stalking expedition yields any berries of its own.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Happy Ending: Pioneer Screens Jarecki's 'Outsider,' Showtime Buys It

Big ups to the gang that turned out for last night's screening of The Outsider at the Pioneer Theater. I was too busy moderating the post-screening Q&A with James Toback and Nick Jarecki to get a picture (God, do I have to do everything around here?), but at any rate, the scoop of the evening came early when Jarecki announced he had sold the film to Showtime.

Jarecki said the cable network will package his documentary with selections from its rather deep Toback catalog; pending The Outsider's planned theatrical runs outside New York this fall, however, no network premiere date has yet been announced. Look for it here soon, hopefully. Meanwhile, congrats to Jarecki, who has been at this thing for about three years now, from the set of Toback's When Will I Be Loved to Tribeca '05 to last night's screening. He worked for this one, and it's great to see it come through for him.

All right, all right--enough warm fuzziness. Back to the whip: The Reeler Screening Series resumes at BAM next Wednesday, Aug. 9, with a preview of Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson. Click here for more information, call in sick to the night job, hire a sitter, whatever you have to do. Just make the plans now and be there. Many thanks in advance.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:57 AM | TrackBack

Five Out of Seven Ain't Bad: New Yorkers Win Big in Sundance/Annenberg Fellowships

New York's Sundance dominance continued Wednesday when the Institute announced its Annenberg Film Fellows for 2006. Five of the seven selected projects have stories or filmmakers from the city, including Sundance '06 alum So Yong Kim (Treeless Mountain) and Tribeca/Cannes '05 veteran Kit Hui (pictured at right; A Breath Away).

Along with Kirsten Johnson (My Habibi) and the duos Cruz Angeles and Maria Topate (Don't Let Me Drown) and Andrew Dosunmu and Darci Picoult (Mother of George), the fellows receive an initial grant of $10,000 and "extended creative and financial support over a two-year period to facilitate the continued development of their projects." In other words: More labs, more money and a virtual guarantee that these films will not only get made, but also bow at Sundance in the next year or two.

So tip your cap or raise your coffee or whatever else you are drinking this morning and wish them luck. Full filmmaker bios and project descriptions follow the jump.

Kit Hui (writer/director) / A BREATH AWAY

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Kit Hui immigrated to the United States at age 16. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s Graduate Film Program. Her short film MISSING screened at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival and the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, and she recently participated in the 2006 Hong Kong Asian Financing Film Forum (HAF) and the Cannes Résidence du Festival de Cannes with A BREATH AWAY. Kit Hui attended the 2006 January Screenwriters Lab and the 2006 June Directors and Screenwriters Lab.

A BREATH AWAY: As a typhoon approaches Hong Kong, the residents of a high-rise apartment explore their need for human connection, family, and cultural identity in their increasingly isolated worlds.

Cruz Angeles (co-writer/director) & Maria Topete (co-writer) / DON’T LET ME DROWN

Born in Mexico City and raised in Los Angeles, Cruz Angeles is an award-winning student filmmaker from the graduate film program at NYU. A Bay Area native, Maria Topete began her film career while studying at U.C. Berkeley, and has collaborated as co-writer and producer on several award-winning short films. Their project DON’T LET ME DROWN was the 2006 American winner of the Sundance/ NHK International Filmmakers Award. Both Cruz Angeles and Maria Topete attended the 2005 January Screenwriters Lab and the 2005 June Directors and Screenwriters Lab.

DON’T LET ME DROWN portrays a post-September 11th world overflowing with fear and hate, where two Latino teens discover that the only thing that can keep them from drowning is each other.

Andrew Dosunmu (director) and Darci Picoult (writer) / MOTHER OF GEORGE

Originally from Nigeria, Andrew Dosunmu has worked as a fashion creative director and photographer for international editorial magazines, having photographed the artists Outkast, Eryka Badu, and Mos Def, among others. His documentary HOT IRONS won Best Documentary at FESPACO in Ouagaudougou and a Reel Award at the Toronto Film Festival, and he also directed several episodes of the highly-acclaimed South African television series Yizo Yizo 3. Darci Picoult’s one woman show, MY VIRGINIA, was presented in theatres and solo festivals both nationally and internationally. Her play ANCIENT LIGHTS was workshopped at New York Theatre Workshop and read at Lincoln Center, and her newest play, JAYSON WITH A Y, recently premiered at The New Group (naked) and has been optioned by commercial producers. Both Dosunmu and Picoult attended the 2005 January Screenwriters Lab and the 2005 June Directors and Screenwriters Lab.

In MOTHER OF GEORGE, a woman torn between her African culture and her new life in America struggles to please her husband and give him the son that will carry on his family’s legacy.

Kirsten Johnson (writer/director) / MY HABIBI

Kirsten Johnson’s most recent film, DEADLINE, (co-directed with Katy Chevigny), premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on NBC, and is the winner of a Thurgood Marshall Award. Her cinematography is featured in FARENHEIT 9/11, the Academy Award-nominated ASYLUM, and the Sundance Film Festival documentaries AMERICAN STANDOFF, TWO TOWNS OF JASPER, and DERRIDA. Johnson attended the 2006 January Screenwriters Lab and the 2006 June Directors and Screenwriters Lab.

MY HABIBI: In post-9/11 New York, a Moroccan immigrant finds his reckless past catching up with him just as he is falling in love with an American photographer, forcing each of them to choose whom they must betray.

So Yong Kim (writer/director) / TREELESS MOUNTAIN

So Yong Kim was born and raised in Pusan, Korea, then immigrated to the United States when she was 12. She studied painting, performance, and video art at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she earned her MFA. Her directorial debut IN BETWEEN DAYS premiered in the Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Prize for independent vision, and screened at the Berlin Film Festival's International Forum in 2006, where the film won the FIPRESCI Prize. So Yong Kim attended the 2006 January Screenwriters Lab and the 2006 June Directors and Screenwriters Lab.

TREELESS MOUNTAIN: Left by her mother in the care of their unsympathetic aunt, five-year-old Ling must take care of her younger sister as they adjust to a harsher life in the rural countryside of South Korea.

And I guess the non-New Yorkers deserve some sort of wink as well:

Jake Mahaffy (writer/director) / FREE IN DEED

Born and raised in Ohio, Jake Mahaffy has made a handful of short films and the feature-length WAR , which screened in the Frontier section of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Mahaffy studied filmmaking in Russia and co-founded the Handcranked Film collaborative in Boston in 2001. Mahaffy has received a grant from Creative Capital, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Sundance Institute’s inaugural Lynn Auerbach Screenwriting Fellowship for FREE IN DEED. Jake Mahaffy attended the 2005 June Screenwriters Lab and the 2006 June Directors and Screenwriters Lab.

FREE IN DEED: In order to tend for his own ill son, an intensely religious man secretly returns to his hometown where, years ago, his attempt at a miraculous healing became a criminal act.

Milford Thomas (co-writer/director) / UNCLOUDY DAY

Milford Thomas was raised in the North Alabama foothills of the Appalachians and worked as a production coordinator for Japanese television in Atlanta and Japan. His award-winning first film, CLAIRE, is a silent featurette shot entirely on an antique 35 mm hand-crank camera which has opened several major international festivals. Milford Thomas attended the 2006 January Screenwriters Lab and the 2006 June Directors and Screenwriters Lab.

In UNCLOUDY DAY, a black and white “early talkie” fantasy, a dangerous animal spirit returns home to 1930’s North Alabama, wreaking havoc on a rural community before she finds redemption and final peace through a handicapped girl’s magical vocal talent.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:38 AM | TrackBack

August 02, 2006

'Rani Mukherjee Fucking': The Joys of Discovering The Reeler, Part III

It is that time again at Reeler HQ: The monthly rummage through the Googlified debris strewn about the blog's Site Meter history. As always, my readers' imagination and resourcefulness in finding this site inspires a heartwarming sensation that brings tears to my eyes. Not because it feels good or anything, but because it requires an antibiotics prescription.

To wit (and, as usual, heavy on the sic):

--Rani Mukherjee fucking

--Steven Seagal Wallpaper

--Katie Holmes hermaphrodite

--bigger cum shot pills

--shittiest fucking website ever

--who designed the eyeglass frames worn by stanley tucci

--shirley temple blackface

--why do puerto ricans act black

--why dominican citizen are citizen like puerto rican

--Mike Nichols fucks in front of fire place

--llana's latex closet

--in the movie i am sam was he respected in the film

--Vin Diesel hairpiece

--willowy blond nudes

--das lied klar von jane daley

--best videos to seduce a man

--helen mirren, do no wrong

--robbery attempt on audie murphy

--Cute ways to say goodnight

--girls xxx Perspective we contacted syracuse

--karina natalia world renowned psychic healer

--festival of orgy

--top 10 shits

PREVIOUSLY: 'Famke Janssen Fucking': The Joys of Discovering The Reeler, Part I (June 1, 2006)
'Anne Hathaway Fucking': The Joys of Discovering The Reeler, Part II (July 3, 2006)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:43 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Today In Movie Marketing Milestones: 'WTC' and 'John Lennon' Take the Internet For a Spin

Following on the broken heels of yesterday's momentous LiveMansion: The Movie profile, a few higher-end distributors have established "new" and "interesting" ways to market their wares online. For starters (via Defamer), Paramount has booked a MySpace profile for World Trade Center, complete with a trailer, official links and 138 friends as of this writing. Of course, WTC represents a perfectly natural basis for so many of these budding friendships--especially that of one "mmmBUTTER =]", who enthused, "thys movie l0oks pimp. ima definitely see it!!" And knowing how the 'Mount has so relentlessly (and intelligently) targeted teens and young adults in its WTC campaign, count on Miss Butter to bring her posse. Tight!

Not to be outdone, the evil geniuses at Lionsgate this morning launched their own offensive for David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's documentary The US vs John Lennon, slated for a Sept. 15 release in New York. Beyond the easy revival of Lennon's famous War is Over! billboard in Lower Manhattan, Lionsgate also whipped up this mildly clever official Web site (above) playing on the overt, hippie-phobic reactions to Lennon's political protests. Frankly, though, it is not a real Drudge Report mockup without the omnipresent Flashing Light of Imminent Doom and the musty, closet-dwelling smell of a certain chapeaued editor.

But hey--this is the studio that brought you Crash. Authenticity is a small price to pay for hype.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 12:39 PM | TrackBack

One Night Only: Toback, Jarecki and 'The Outsider' at the Pioneer

I know what you are thinking, and I can even kind of sympathize: "Gosh, it would be nifty to check out The Warriors screening and cast reunion tonight at Coney Island, or maybe if I favored the indoors, I could go to opening night of Lincoln Center's RockDocs series, featuring the Pixies documentary loudQUIETloud." Or, "I don't want to leave Brooklyn; I think I'll take in the Peckinpah series at BAM."

I understand all of these inclinations, and I can tell you I would be facing the same tough decisions--if I were not hosting a special screening of The Outsider tonight at the Pioneer Theater and if I did not expect you to forgo these events to join me, director Nicholas Jarecki and Outsider subject (and Reeler Hall of Famer) James Toback for a post-screening discussion and Q&A. I would like to think that Toback and air conditioning trump any (ahem) silly '70s gang flick, and I am relying on you to prove me right.

Check out The Reeler's podcast interviews with Jarecki and Toback, and follow the jump for information about tonight's screening. Be sure to introduce yourself afterward, even if it means putting a guilt trip on me.

The Reeler presents
THE OUTSIDER
(dir. Nicholas Jarecki, 85 mins, 2005)

Weds., Aug. 2 -- 6:30 p.m.
http://pioneertheater.tix.com/Event.asp?Event=63080

"**** Riveting... Shows the highs and lows of making films outside the system."
- Mick LaSalle, SF Chronicle

"One of the great documentaries about filmmaking; you'd compare it to HEARTS OF DARKNESS. . ."
- Rob Nelson, Village Voice

Few American filmmakers of the last 30 years have navigated in and out of the mainstream as fearlessly as James Toback (Fingers, Exposed, Black and White), whose life and work provides the basis for Nicholas Jarecki's documentary The Outsider. Half making-of documentary and half all-access biography, The Outsider views Toback through the oversexed, intellectualized, cosmopolitan prism of his most recent film, When Will I Be Loved --a spectrum that reflects Toback's compulsions as effectively as it challenges his colleagues to consider their own.

And as Jarecki discovers, Toback has plenty of colleagues; the film features interviews with Woody Allen, Barry Levinson, Roger Ebert, Brett Ratner, Brooke Shields, Jim Brown and a trenchant conversation with longtime Toback collaborator (and kindred spirit in debauchery) Robert Downey Jr. The Outsider reveals a man about whom everybody has an opinion, but also an enigma whom nobody--perhaps even Toback himself--can ever really know.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:30 AM | TrackBack

August 01, 2006

Now In the Works: 'Directionless, Anonymous Social Networking Free-For-All: The Movie'

My ambivalence about MySpace, Friendster, indieLOOP and whatever other social networking sites are overtaking the Web often has me on the outside looking into conversations with many of my friends and colleagues. It always seems like too much data on too infinite a scale, provoking the equivalent of vertigo every time I visit each site.

So imagine my migraine nausea today as I force my head around this latest gimmick, which runs straight through New York and should ostensibly yield something resembling a movie. Via CHUD:

Ckrush, Inc., announced the launch today of a new website designed to take social networking to a whole new level, fusing the strength of internet peer-to-peer networks with the power of being a studio mogul. LiveMansion.com – a participatory creative community in which the members call the shots – will function as a producer on Ckrush’s next feature film, LIVE MANSION: THE MOVIE, a thriller set in the underground world of mega-mansion, rave-style parties. Members of the social network will cast the film, choose the director and play a major decision-making role throughout the entire production process. The effort marks the first time most of the major production decisions on a film have been made through an online social network.

Never mind its seizure-inducing "underground-rave-thriller" concept--LiveMansion's hyperselectivity means that the film world will finally get the showdown it demands between directing hopefuls "meanunsane" and "grrlksser," and the open casting call presents the opportunity of a lifetime for contestants like "DrugAddictedHomosexualAIDScase" and "never2late4joy37."

At any rate, finalists in each category will travel to New York for a once-over with the money folks at Ckrush Entertainment (the Mensa crew that brought you Artie Lange's Beer League) and then a climactic online vote with LiveMansion members. Social networkers too anti-social to even fake a contest entry can receive "producer points" for every film-related vote they make on the site, from pre-production all the way through Ecstasy-hallucination-orgy color correction. Read the rules and regulations at LiveMansion--there are a lot of them, but again, this is "social networking." Think of it as quality time spent making friends. Even if they are imaginary.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 02:33 PM | TrackBack

'Crossing Arizona': Controversial Immigration Doc Plays Makor

Desert storm: Joseph Mathew's and Dan DeVivo's Crossing Arizona (Photo: CrossingAz.com)

New Yorkers Joseph Mathew and Daniel DeVivo will be dropping by Makor tonight to chat up their controversial immigration doc (and Brooklyn Int. Film Festival audience award winner) Crossing Arizona, which screens at the Steinhardt Building at 7 p.m. All kinds of hell broke loose at some of Arizona's screenings last January at Sundance; I presume the debate will be more civil (if not one-sided) tonight on the Upper West Side. Nevertheless, I encourage shouting, trash-talking, chair-throwing, choking, bludgeoning and any other indelicate behavior that will liven up the post-screening reception hosted by Indiepix. And by all means, take pictures and get quotes; I cannot make it tonight and I could defintely use the content.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:46 AM | TrackBack

Glamour's 'Reel Moments': Hollywood Underdogs Aniston, Howard Follow Paltrow to Director's Chair

Conventional wisdom typically casts August as a slow movie news month, but there is always one story by which we can set our watches (or at least by which Times staffers can set theirs): Glamour's Reel Moments series, comprising short films directed by various levels of female celebrities from stories submitted by the magazine's readers.

Ostensibly "by women [and] about women," Reel Moments made its first splash around this time last year, when hard-luck rookie director Gwyneth Paltrow told the NYT that women's experiences "get so kind of homogenized and put through the studio system that what started as a core idea from somebody's life often gets turned in a movie that you've seen a number of times." And following in the Brad Pitt Cast-Off tradition, Jennifer Aniston carries on the struggle in 2006:

The project also satisfied her urge to correct what she called “a big beef”--the small number of female directors working in Hollywood. “I’m not like a bleeding heart feminist or a bleeding heart anything,” Ms. Aniston said. “But I think I like women. I support women.”

The other two directors are veteran comedian Carol Leifer and--wait for it--Bryce Dallas Howard, another struggling young Hollywood upstart for whom Reel Moments may yet supply the break she has sought for years:

Howard, the star of M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water and a daughter of Ron Howard, said she had harbored writing ambitions but only recently summoned the courage to tell her agent.

“I was a secret closet writer who would never show anyone anything that I wrote,” she said. She is the co-writer and director of Orchids for Glamour.

Perfect! There is a separate marketing campaign for that--someone sign her up.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:45 AM | TrackBack