Indieville
September 2009 - Posts
If movies are niche, shouldn't critics be too?
Wed, Sep 30 2009 5:50 PM
The Playlist is a useful blog that aggregates the day's major entertainment news. They're also been dabbling in reviews, which is how I came across Drew Taylor's take on the acclaimed if by no means Romanian film "Police, Adjective," which is screening at the New York Film Festival. Taylor calls it "the most boring fucking movie that's ever been filmed. Ever," as well as "pretentious nothingness," and gives it an F. At the end of the review is a curious editorial note: "Not to undermine our writer here," it begins shrinkingly, before going to point out that NYFF movies are not one size fits all: "these films can be brilliant, but they're not for everyone." Sure. What I wonder about is why you'd assign someone with no sympathy for the kind of movie under consideration to review it. Whatever you think of the Ain't It Cool crowd, they provide their...
Eight offensive quotes on the Polanski situation.
Wed, Sep 30 2009 9:30 AM
In a case as tangled with moral, legal and straight-up emotional arguments as the ongoing Roman Polanski one, there's plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree. But wherever you stand, you'd hope at least people would avoid making the debate needlessly glib. And you'd be wrong. Here are eight of my favorite stupid statements made, in the interest of being fair and balanced, by both the media's prosecution and defense of Polanski: Prosecution 1. "He raped her in a lot of different ways. We're talking sodomy and... other styles of rape." --Wendy Murphy on MSNBC's "Hardball". Without being too flippant about it, Ms. Murphy's imprecision isn't exactly making the best case; I wonder how many "styles" of rape there are, and I have to point out that sodomy can be perfectly consensual. A few sentences later, she notes that abroad, Polanski was "hanging around on the Left Bank," which...
Those 30-Second Bunnies better watch their backs.
Tue, Sep 29 2009 6:05 PM
There's a lot of garbage on College Humor (today's featured content: "Jake & Amir: Tampon"), but there's also England's Will Tribble, who's been churning out some way funny 60-second live-action parodies of famous movies that deserve your love. Tribble and his merry band of British film students are dedicated to summarizing film in one minute, in one take, with little "South Park" voices on the soundtrack blurting out key lines. The results are pretty impressive, dependent on elaborate shots that either pull backwards really fast or track sideways equally fast, with someone literally running through the plot of the movie, surrounded by impressively choreographed extras and enjoyably shoddy cardboard props. Their inaugural effort was "Forrest Gump," which makes sense since, uh, it's about a guy who runs. Next up was "Kill Bill" (both volumes!), which is timed exactly to a minute, even with inclusion of both fast- and slo-mo. But...
Keeping the barbarians at bay.
Tue, Sep 29 2009 1:20 PM
Every year someone makes a fuss over how snobbish/exclusionary/whatever the New York Film Festival is; this year's money quote came from Jeffrey Wells, who complained that the festival committee had become "a gathering of Trappist monks who've been slurping too much goat's milk with their granola." (I keep meaning to bring mine to the screenings and forgetting.) It's nothing new -- as Michael Guillen points out in his review of "Film Festival I: The Festival Circuit," a journal dedicated to, yes, film festivals -- those annual complaints haven't shifted one bit since the festival's founding in 1963. Rahul Hamid reports, in one of the journal's essays, that back in 1965, The New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann sniffed that the program descriptions were the product of a "limp mind and wrist," and that festivals were for selling movies, not art, that the good movies would make their way into the world anyway....
How to be good.
Mon, Sep 28 2009 3:45 PM
This past Friday, 60-odd representatives of indie film gathered at MoMA for a state of the nation meeting about what's going on in the world of indie film, whether there is a true crisis and how it can be fixed. Unlike earlier provocations like Mark Gill's "The Sky Is Falling" speech from last summer, the Indie Film Summit was a private gathering, unpublicized, with attendees encouraged to speak off the record. As Gill said in his speech, "it's fashionable to *** in the independent film world. It's what we do." Coming up with actionable fixes has proven more elusive. The Summit has reported on by Anne Thompson, Ira Deutchman and Scott Macaulay, whose pieces are all worth reading, since they complement and contradict each other in interesting ways. A major issue is the idea of "quality," which seems to befuddle everyone. Macaulay notes that there's "a new audience," one that...
Rob Lowe, keeper of the '80s grail.
Mon, Sep 28 2009 1:39 PM
Hell hath no fury like a British journalist scorned. Even by the notoriously scathing standards of UK interview profiles, Elizabeth Day's take on Rob Lowe is a pretty stiff read. The first sentence: "Rob Lowe announces his presence as he walks into the hotel bar by shouting across the room to order his coffee." It gets worse from there: when Lowe spouts platitudes ("I enjoy meeting people and I enjoy interacting with humanity"), Day is "left with the impression that he has been told so frequently that he is charismatic and hilarious that he no longer feels he has to make an effort." And so on. The reason for this venom only becomes apparent late in the article, when Day is ejected prematurely from her interview for asking a question on the banned topics list, which of course she didn't get. "Even if he disliked the question, is it beyond...
Free range product placement.
Mon, Sep 28 2009 12:13 PM
Brett Ratner, modelizer, man about town and hack director responsible for such fare as "X3" and the "Rush Hour" movies, has always been best at marketing himself as the face of smooth Hollywood craftsmanship. So his talent as an adman is no surprise. Speaking Thursday at New York's Advertising Week on "consumer attention in a media-saturated world," Ratner offered advice on product placement and how to do it right. Ratner's working on "Beverly Hills IV," and -- since Eddie Murphy will obviously drive a car -- he has to figure out which one. But rather than cut a deal first and then figure out a way to force a product into the film, he stresses that it's better to approach it organically, from the other wise. "What are my needs for the story? What car do I need that can become a character in the movie?" He then want on...
Alain Resnais on the death of cinema.
Mon, Sep 28 2009 11:00 AM
At age 87, Alain Resnais has produced one of his boldest films. "Wild Grass," which opened the New York Film Festival on Friday, is just wild, blending the audacity of "Punch Drunk Love" with the mindbinding qualities of Charlie Kaufman. The film's about a married man (André Dussollier) who finds a woman's (Sabine Azéma) stolen wallet and becomes obsessed with her -- it reads like farce, but it's far, far stranger, a portrait of romantic willfulness staving off death. The New Wave legend was here for a rare press conference, along with Dussollier and Mathieu Amalric, who plays a particularly goofy policeman. Film Society director Richard Pena kicked off the questioning by asking Resnais what prompted his first ever film to be adapted from a novel: "50 years ago, when I started making movies," Resnais replied, "I made a resolution to work only on original screenplays. I vowed at that...
Fantastic Fest: Nothing But Butts at "RoboGeisha"
Sun, Sep 27 2009 10:30 AM
In Fantastic Fest's famous secret screenings, the identity of the movie being shown isn't revealed until it's about to begin. While it's a gamble, it's one that prompts devotees to line up for year-in-advance VIP badges -- past secret screenings have included the first-ever looks at "There Will Be Blood," "Apocalypto" and other high profile premieres, But, as festival head/impresario Tim League remarked in his intro, this year's first secret screening, of Noboru Iguchi's "RoboGeisha," was "perhaps one of the worst-kept secrets in Fantastic Fest history." After the film appeared and disappeared from the schedule in past weeks, he told the crowd that thanks to contractual limitations, "We're not going to call this a world premiere, but a premiere of some sort where nobody else has seen it." Marc Walkow of the New York Asian Film Festival lamented that "RoboGeisha" wasn't finished in time for his own festival. They made...
Indie Rock: A Love Story.
Sun, Sep 27 2009 9:20 AM
There are people out there who leap on any chance to fling the epithet "hipster" as the ultimate insult. As a wise editor of mine once pointed out, all the adjective really means is "people in my scene who I don't like and don't want to identify with." But when a movie pops up with its title in all lower case, its lead roles cast from indie rock institutions, and its trailer kicking off with the line "Did you ever get your heart broken?" against some kind of warm ambient backdrop, it's kind of begging to have that finger pointed its way. I don't doubt that "some days are better than others," the first feature from Matt McCormick, starring Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein and The Shins' James Mercer, comes from a sincere place. But that somehow makes it worse: the acting in the trailer is wooden and confuses stuttering for realism...
David Lynch explains himself.
Fri, Sep 25 2009 8:58 AM
David Lynch has an exhibition up at the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris. Not in Paris? Writer Dennis Cooper has a useful round-up for the rest of us. On the outside are 11 windows about "Machines, Abstraction and Women," some involving 3-D elements -- Lynch is a big fan of the Alioscopy 3-D process, which he thinks could revolutionize 3-D home viewing technology. On the inside is an exhibition called "I See Myself," with Lynch's seven-year-old-comic strip images in lithograph form and a screening room for such early Lynch "gems" as "Six Men Getting Sick." Walking into the screening room is a violent shock from a room that's a luminous corona of light into total darkness; it's like being trapped in "Lost Highway." "The door is a light trap," Lynch explains in one of the videos; "because of the configuration of the opening," the theater can stay dark all...
Iranian filmmakers keep the heat on.
Fri, Sep 25 2009 1:00 AM
At the San Sebastian Film Festival yesterday, filmmakers Hana and Samira Makhmalbaf (of "Green Days") led a protest against Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presence at the UN Council. It was the latest salvo by Iranian filmmakers against their current government, and it could go on as long as there are festivals where Iranian filmmakers are in attendance, just as Jafar Panahi and his Montreal World Film Festival jury wore long green scarves earlier this year. Earlier this summer, as protesters took to the streets to contest the quite-probably-rigged re-election of Ahmadinejad, there was a lot of excited talk of how Twitter could change the world. Users were encouraged to change their avatars green in solidarity, repost links of video footage and get the word out as the Iranian government tried to clamp down on international coverage of bloody protests and repression. But when change and revolution didn't come within the...
There & Back: Joel Schumacher.
Wed, Sep 23 2009 4:08 PM
For years, Joel Schumacher's name was one to be hissed out with great venom: despite some nostalgic goodwill from '80s kids for "St. Elmo's Fire" and "The Lost Boys," unleashing "Batman and Robin" on the world made him as ripe a target as Michael Bay. But this weekend, his latest film, "Blood Creek," wasn't just dumped; it was dumped to an unspecified number of theaters under a name whose box office results can't even be tracked. This has to be some kind of new record for fastest fall from grace. Just two years ago, Schumacher was directing Jim Carrey in "The Number 23," a lousy movie, sure, but not a total financial disaster. I'd guess the plan for "Blood Creek" -- some kind of gabba about Nazi occult experiments -- was for Schumacher to reboot his cred with a little low-budget grit, a stunt he performed before, when he proudly...
Megan Fox is no Brigitte Bardot.
Wed, Sep 23 2009 1:45 PM
Brigitte Bardot, screen goddess, national icon and late-life bigot, is nearing her 75th birthday. As the Guardian notes in an audio slideshow tribute, Charles de Gaulle once compared her importance as a French export to that of Renault cars. Meanwhile, over at the Los Angeles Times, Chris Lee attempts to name her successor, a starlet on the path to becoming "a sex symbol of the highest order: a woman whose hotness has become emblematic of a specific era. Call Megan Fox the first bona fide sex symbol of the 21st century." Somehow... it's not quite the same. For one thing, these days the idea of a "sex symbol" seems anachronistic. Fox might be obsessed with Marilyn Monroe, but she's never going to date JFK or redefine blondness. Lee compares her to the late Farrah Fawcett, whose fame peaked with a poster, a kind of one-shot iconography that's no longer an...
Why Wisconsin won't be the next Hollywood.
Wed, Sep 23 2009 11:15 AM
A few years ago, states were playing tax incentive chicken with each other to see who could offer the best deals to lure film and TV productions away from the familiar confines of California and Toronto to shoot in their neck of the woods. And now they're paying for it. As the Los Angeles Times reports, some of those states are starting to find that those tax breaks don't always add up. When Wisconsin's Department of Commerce looked at the 32 days "Public Enemies" spent shooting in Oshkosh, Columbus and Madison, they concluded the production had received $4.6 in tax money and the state had only gotten back about $5 million. The numbers are arguable (advocacy groups claim Wisconsin actually got $7.4 million out of the deal), but the economics are clear: it doesn't make sense for nearly every state in the union to try to outdo the other. "The...
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