Virtually since the production of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was announced, various parties have expressed concern that the video fetishism of Collateral and Miami Vice would make a less than appropriate presentation format for a glammy gangster piece set in the 1930s. If *only* Public Enemies looked more like Miami Vice — if only Mann had brought back cinematographer Dion Beebe for a third consecutive collaboration/experiment in pushing the limits of what high quality digital video can do. Lensed by The Insider cinematographer Dante Spinotti, Public Enemies is a drab looking film, its shaky-cam aesthetic coming off as less considered — and far less explicable — than that of any number of indie dramas employing similar run-and-gun techniques on a millionth of this film’s budget. Add in a wildly uneven performance style, an unnecessarily attenuated running time and a sound mix that’s problematically muddy even after evidently excessive after-the-fact dubbing, and the result is a severely miscalculated marriage of style to subject. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Public Enemies is essentially a really expensive mumblecore film with ADR and guns — and the M-word comparison is not merited solely by its conspicuous form. It’s also a film in which the world of work and general era-appropriate social consciousness is conquered by an emphasis on love. And that, in the end, may be the only thing Public Enemies does right.

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Maybe it’s not fair for me to begin the review of a festival film with a lengthy digression on nostalgia and the death of Michael Jackson, but somehow all of these things seem to point in the same direction (and not geographically speaking, despite the connection to Westwood). So please, bear with me:

The Associated Press published an editorial this morning by Ted Anthony, titled “2 lost icons: For Generation X, a really bad day.” In it, he assesses the impact of the near-simultaneous deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson on the segment of the population who were at their most demographically desirably in the late 80s-early 90s. He attributes the following portentous quote to a 38-year-old HBO employee:

“This,” he said, “is the moment when Generation X realizes they’re grown up.”

Thanks to this article and others, “Generation X” has been bopping around Google’s Top 100 search terms all day. Which is funny, because I can’t remember the last time I even thought about the concept of Generation X … before earlier this week, when I watched Passenger Side, Matt Bissonnette’s third feature and an entry in the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Narrative Competition. Starring the director’s brother Joel Bissonnette and Adam Scott as two brothers (one a struggling novelist with an aversion to modern technology, the other a personable recovering junkie) who spend a day driving around Southern California looking for the ex-girlfriend who one of them wants to marry, Passenger Side also seems to have that age group’s reconciliation of age and nostalgia for a simpler time on its mind.

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October Country, Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s debut documentary feature describing a year in the lives of four generations of Moshers living in a depressed upstate New York suburb, is a rare work of impressionistic nonfiction. Its patchwork of visual detail often reminded me of the photographs of Gregory Crewdson (whose work you might have seen on the cover of this Yo La Tengo album, or this Six Feet Under campaign). Crewdson’s work usually imbues suburban and domestic scenes with the aura of the supernatural; nothing actually horrific is visible in the frame, but the presence of something is always implied, out of frame, in the air. With their arresting images of smoked-clogged rooms and American flags convulsing in the wind, Mosher and Palmieri demonstrate a similar knack for lighting and framing the mundane to spin it towards the surreal, suggesting an invisible but not imperceptible force altering the proceedings. The style fits because the Moshers are essentially living a ghost story, with each member so haunted by past decisions that’ve lost control of the future.

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On a panel discussion before its world premiere screening at SilverDocs last night, AJ Schnack used the phrase “Robert Altman-esque” to describe the construction of his new film, Convention. This is accurate as a reference to the stylistic tropes we classically think of when we think of Altman — shot by nine filmmaker/camerapersons, Convention tracks the interwoven stories of a number of semi-interrelated characters as they produce, participate in, protest, protect and/or report on the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver — but the film also shares what Roger Ebert, in his review of Nashville, refered to as Altman’s “humanism”, the way he “sees people with his camera in such a way as to enlarge our own experience.” The multiple cameras and the multi-faceted streams of vision that they bring to Convention accomplish two major feats in terms of altering the scale of perspective: they condense nearly an entire city’s goings-on during the biggest international event in its recent history into the managable microcosmic experiences of a few of its thoroughly “normal” citizens, while at the same time opening up spaces in the lives of strangers that the viewer can sink into, and thus sync up to a communal sense of Something Happening. It seems so simple, and yet it’s so rare that you actually find yourself in a theater, having a moment of collective transcendance that makes you think, “This is why movies exist.”

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“Why is it so hard to make a film about yourself?” asks Richard Rogers in Alexander Olch’s The Windmill Movie. He shortly thereafter unwittingly answers his own question via another question: “Is there anything to say?” Opening today at Film Forum in New York, Windmill is a kind of personal documentary by proxy. After his teacher/mentor/collaborator Rogers died of cancer, Olch was invited by Rogers’ widow, world-renowned photographer Susan Meiselas, to comb through the Harvard professor/documentarian’s vast archives of film and video, shot towards a hypothetical autobiographical movie that Rogers was never able to put together.
For Rogers, self-examination lead to a kind of tunnel-vision, embodied by an oft-seen image in Windmill of Rogers looking into the mirror from behind the camera. One of Windmill’s key ideas seems to be that the camera actually got in the way of Rogers’ ability to clearly see his own reflection. that, because of constant self-doubt as to whether he, as a white man born into money, had anything worthwhile to say, the apparatus through which he made his living filming other people couldn’t double as a tool through which to see himself. The service that Rogers provided to his subjects — of finding the truth in the raw material they offered up — Olch attempts to perform by any means necessary for his lost friend.

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If there’s a throughline to the films screening within the various competions and sidebars at CineVegas, it’s that those marked by qualities that would make them anomalies at other festivals here play as standard fare. You come here expecting to see genre hybrids (such as Alex Ross Perry’s verite-style comic WWII fantasy Impolex, or Cory McAbee’s half-animated space cowboy sci-fi musical Stingray Sam, about which much more later); stylish art films that push the boundaries of craft and form but may not offer the pleasures of a traditional narrative (see Asiel Norton’s Redland — or don’t, if gorgeous experimental cinematography isn’t enough to interest you in a story that drowns itself deep in elliptical abstraction); or superindie narratives that make up for what they lack in style with balls-out attitude (like Bob Byington’s Harmony and Me, which seems to get more anarchically funny each time I see it). At this festival, it’s the movies that you can imagine premiering on any other major festival’s lineup that seem most out of place, that have the ability to shock for the simple virtue of their traditional professionalism.

And so we come to Easier With Practice, a dramedy written and directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, based on a true story published by FOUND Magazine founder Davy Rothbart in GQ. Rothbart, who travels around the country with his brother promoting his magazine and books, answered the phone one night in a motel and eventually found himself in a long-term phone sex relationship with a mysterious stranger. Easier with Practice stars Brian Geraghty as a writer named Davy who, whilst on a roadtrip with his brother to promote his book, answers the phone in his motel one evening and allows the sultry female voice on the other end (Kathryn Aselton of The Puffy Chair) to talk him into a session of mutual masterbation, which leads to an ongoing relationship which renders Davy basically incapable of participating in real life.

What’s interesting about the film (beyond the fact that it seems to stay extremely faithful to Rothbart’s too-good-to-be-true real experience, if anything amping up the character’s social imcompentence) is the fact that Alvarez has taken material dark and difficult enough to mandate an indie production — it’s basically a movie about loneliness peppered with large doses of explicit sexual language, and as such, it simply would not get produced by a studio in its current form — and churned it into a slick crowdpleaser. Shot on the RED camera, it’s got the distinct look of a pre-video road trip indie. The story arc leads to a reveal that’s shocking in its specific details, but not in its existence — there’s a wave of surprise, but not one extreme enough to throw a viewer. Geraghty sinks so deep into nerd drag that he’s unrecognizable as the same actor who plays the third lead in The Hurt Locker. All in all, everything just works — there’s an ease to the filmmaking that allows the universal elements of the story to come through. That it’s a film without obvious rough edges or blatant challenges to and audience makes it, at CineVegas, an anomaly; in the world at large, that’s exactly what will probably make it very appealing.

The opening credits of Tony Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 are set to a remix of Jay-Z’s masterpiece pop single, “99 Problems.” Our first extreme close-up glimpse at the face of John Travolta’s goateed growler, with diamond cross stud in right ear to immediately clue us in to his Catholicism/Achilles Heel, coincides with the first burst of the song’s chorus: “I’ve got 99 Problems but a bitch ain’t one. Hit me!” When I saw the movie, I was sitting next to an older gentleman who, at the close of that first “Hit me!”, audibly groaned. This was just the beginning of his displeasure. In the film’s final scene, there’s a joke about a local New York sports team, which, I thought, worked thanks to James Gandolfini’s delivery. I laughed - not a sustained chuckle, but a single, barked “Ha!” The guy sitting next to me turned to his friend and said, in a voice far above a whisper, “That wasn’t funny! It wasn’t even funny!”

It’s hard for me to understand how someone could get so worked up about the choices made by director Scott in his completely unnecessary remake of the 70s cult classic. Aside from that laugh and a couple of others, which came virtually as knee jerk trained responses to John Travolta’s sleepwalk through his role as a crackpot train hijacker, I felt nothing whilst watching this film. It was almost a Zen thing, a level of calm non-emotion which, I must say, I have rarely experienced at a screening of a studio action film. I’d say that the ultimate affect of Pelham is like being trapped in a loop of white noise, but that sounds sort of cool and futurist, and this film is neither of those things — it’s more like swimming laps in bowl of room-temperature oatmeal. After the screening, I was 10th in line for the ladies room, which gave me time to think about the word “pointless,” and how often it’s wasted to describe endeavors that are merely so boring that they make us resent the expenditure of time, but which actually do have a goal. By the time I’ve moved up to 3rd in line, I’ve vowed to reserve my use of the word “pointless” for experiences like The Taking of Pelham 123, which are literally pointless, in that there is no point of impact. They simply do not have a reason to exist.

Well, maybe this one has *one* reason.

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Winnebago Man screens tonight at CineVegas, and next week at SilverDocs. In the interest of full disclosure: I was on the jury that awarded the film the grand prize at the Sarasota Film Festival in April.

Many documentary filmmakers have to at some point insert themselves into the lives of their subjects in order to get the story in front of the camera. Actually incorporating that blurring of boundaries between documenter and documented into the finished film is tricky business; at best, you’re David Maysles, capturing unforgettable material from Little Eddie Beale whilst engaging in shy flirtation with her from behind the microphone. At worst, you’re Michael Moore, piling the post-9/11 sick on to a boat, sailing through the seas of self-parody to Cuba, drowning your own good intentions further with each nautical mile.

Rarely is a filmmaker’s experience of becoming part of their story presented with as little artifice and self-service as in Winnebago Man, Ben Steinbauer’s document of his mission to first find Jack Rebney, the man who became a cult celebrity via a widely circulated video of his profanity-packed outtakes from a motorhome industrial video shoot, and then coax Rebney into coming to terms with his unlikely notoriety. The film works on a number of different levels: as detective story, as a no-frills work of historiography on the strange new phenomenon of accidental celebrity motivated by the rise of viral web video, and as insight into a filmmaker’s process of discovering what story he’s telling and how to tell it. Structured against a narration (spoken by Steinbauer, scripted by Steinbauer and Malcolm Pullinger, who also edited) of remarkable candor and clarity, on the whole Winnebago Man is an incredibly literate examination of YouTube culture (arguably the biggest threat to actual old-school literacy to be invented in decades), its discontents, and its half-hidden side effects.

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This review was originally published in slightly different form during the Sundance Film Festival. Moon opens in New York and LA on Friday.

A small, personal story wrapped in the trappings of classic sci-fi epic, Moon manages to be both derivative (most notably, of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001) and deliberately rebellious in its treatment of sci-fi tropes. Moving through familiar territory and yet sparked with a spirit all its own, like any great work of genre cinema Moon’s future-world scenario and super-slick techno-artistry are put to the service of a story that ultimately downplays the traumas wrought by technological possibility in order to dig deep into the trauma of being a person.
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This review was originally published during Gran Torino’s theatrical run. The movie comes out on DVD today.

Of Clint Eastwood’s two 2008 directorial efforts, Gran Torino is by far the “better” film, in that it’s the picture that’s vastly more entertaining and much less clumsy in execution . Up against the monumentally ill-conceived Changeling, that’s not saying much, but it is worth saying that the things about this end-of-year entry that are appealing are extremely appealing. In drawing the conflict in a broke-down Midwestern suburb between the white ethnic stragglers who originally gentrified it, and the non-white ethnic groups who have more recently moved in and made it their own, Nick Schenk’s script is gleefully unafraid to go to extremes. Eastwood’s starring performance, which requires him to be on-screen, often alone, for a good 90% of the picture, has been lauded as a career high, but this might stem from a kind of “Whoops –– if not now, when?” collective guilt; the fact is; the man is clearly running out of runway to be honored on. Again, what’s interesting about what Eastwood does on camera it is not nuance or technique, but the willingness to go balls out, to turn every casually racist wisecrack up to 11 and to crank out every unnecessarily externalized shard of internal monologue with the subtlety of burlesque.

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Opening on Friday in New York and expanding to other cities through the rest of the month in concert with Gay Pride, Daryl Wein’s Sex Positive is a documentary portrait of Richard Berkowitz, an early AIDS activist who helped to invent the concept of safe sex. Working as a team with writer/performer Michael Callen and doctor Joseph Sonnabend (the three collaborated on the groundbreaking 1983 pamphlet “How to Have Sex in An Epidemic: One Approach”), Berkowitz fought, largely without fanfare, to spread the word that a number of lifestyle factors (particularly, drug use and condom-free promiscuity) were responsible for the rapid-fire spread of AIDS through urban gay male communities. At his most active as an activist, Berkowitz was widely criticized (those who didn’t essentially accuse him of being a buzzkill tried to use his night job as an S&M hustler as evidence of his lack of credibility), and today his 2003 book Stayin’ Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex is out of print. Wein’s film thus seeks — and mostly succeeds — to canonize Berkowitz where history has failed to.

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“What has happened to our family? We were so promising!”

So ponders one elder member of the artistic clan at the center of Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro –– and so, one imagines, the film’s detractors will be eager to snark about the director and his filmmaking progeny. FFC is oft-mocked for having whored himself out to studios in the 90s, only to squander the generosity of an indie arm with his pretentious “return to personal filmmaking,” 2007’s Youth Without Youth. As for the younger Coppola generation, Roman went from making highly-cinematic music videos to directing the promising mod homage CQ, but has since apparently done little but shoot second until for his dad, sister and Wes Anderson. After winning an Oscar for the beyond-slight Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola made a personal gesture of her own with the masterfully stylish Marie Antoinette — which subsequently dropped her from the favor of much of the critical class.

Marie Antoinette is a useful film to talk about in the same breath as Tetro, not because they’re similar in terms of means of production (they’re not: the former was a studio-funded biopic banked on North American stars that was considered a disappointment when it failed to build on Lost’s box office and awards tally, the latter a self-financed, self-distributed late-career experiment that can substantively please or disappoint only its maker), but because the finished projects nonetheless share a common DNA. Both films are so drunk on the melding of disparate cultural references (for the daughter, corset porn and Gang of Four; for the father, partner dance musicals and Fellini) that they read as dewy confessions from the filmmaker, feature-length love letters to their own aesthetics, the specific things they personally think are beautiful.

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Downloading Nancy has become one of those films indelibly scarred by the knee-jerk reaction of the first people to see it; if you know it at all, you know that it was hated at Sundance. I wasn’t at the infamous press screening where, as Michael Lerman wrote in a piece on SpoutBlog late last year, “Audiences fled the theater mid-picture as Nancy and her new companion engaged in depressingly violent sexual activity, padded with an icky sensitivity that makes each viewer feel like they should go home and shower after just being present at the screening.” Watching it 18 months later — alone, so doubly removed from the kind of festival fever that can cause the first opinion to become the only opinion that matters — I can understand how a viewer could have been scared away by the film’s synopsis (frankly, the equation of unhappy housewife + internet + S & M = salvation is probably what kept me away from that press screening in the first place.) It’s also understandable that the film’s first scene of brutal (although by no means explicitly shot) sexually violent game-playing would send viewers to the exits, although that seems slightly less reasonable for people who watch movies for a living. What I can’t understand, is how anyone could make it through the full film and not have some kind of admiration for the way Downloading Nancy is shot, scored and staged; for the vanity-free performance by Maria Bello and the seductively morally ambiguous work of Jason Patrick; and for the magic trick it works, lending unspeakable trauma a kind of grace.

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(Spring Breakdown, a very strange film [at least, as far as studio-financed comedies go] that premiered at Sundance earlier this year, comes out on DVD today. This is a slightly edited version of a piece I published during that festival.)

Variety’s Todd McCarthy received mixed reviews for his Sundance 2009 wrap-up piece, in which he lumped together the festival’s two biggest narrative hits, Push and An Education, as part of a trend of films espousing values “emblematic” of “the start of the Obama age.” I’m not sure our recently elected president has much to do with the themes of films that no doubt were conceived years before he clinched the nomination (especially these two films, both of which were based on long pre-existing texts), but I did notice that this year’s crop of Sundance titles seemed more interested in reflecting the times than some of their solipsistic Amerindie ancestors. I saw more films at this festival that tried, earnestly or satirically, to grapple with the state of the union’s troubled-but-hopeful psyche, than I’ve seen in any single ten day stretch in my professional life.

Even better, I saw this concern with The State of Things seep into films as disparate as the tacky, raunchy Rachel Dratch/Amy Poehler comedy Spring Breakdown, and Deborah Stratman’s extremely classy, short feature-length experimental documentary feature O’er the Land –– two films which, on paper, couldn’t be more different, and yet are both heavily invested in notions of fin de siècle Americana and the peculiar ways in which Americans take advantage of our bottomless freedom. Dense, sometimes silent, always visually complex, and presented with neither binding narration nor immediately evident narrative, Land is probably the purest cinema experience I had at Sundance this year. Bizarrely, while Stratman’s film has continued to play the festival circuit, Spring Breakdown’s Sundance screenings may be the the only theatrical exposure that the studio-produced comedy is going to see.

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