Luke and Brie Are On a First Date, which world premiered in the Hamptons last weekend, is the debut feature by Chad Hartigan, a frequent collaborator of Aaron Katz, and there are definitely some superficial similarities between the two filmmakers’ work. Like Katz’sQuiet City, Luke and Brie follows two attractive young people (George Ducker and Meghan Webster) around a city as they break through awkward uncertainty to forge a tentative romantic connection, and with their dreamy, super-intimate videography, both films have a way of enveloping a viewer in the action (or what passes for action), ultimately serving as delivery vehicles for the kind of heightened realism that marks an unexpectedly life-changing night out. But Luke and Brie plays its drama much closer to the surface, and through a little bit of self-reflexivity, a film that’s virtually wall-to-wall conversation manages to avoid feeling too talky.
Hartigan, who is a Los Angeles-based box office analyst by day, said after the Hamptons screening that Luke and Brie, based structurally on his own first date with his current girlfriend, was shot in 5 days on a budget of $3000. The small scale of the project opens it up to an obvious criticism: surely, all of us could come up with a single night in our romantic lives that seems worthy of dramatization, and many of us could round up some friends and scrape together a few dollars and take a week off work to tell it. So what makes Luke and Brie special? Maybe nothing, and maybe that’s it — maybe it’s not interesting because it’s entering into unchartered territory, but because it takes us through universal, well-worn feelings and makes them feel new. With his camera often seeming to float over faces in extreme close-up, Hartigan’s micro-focus on the nerves, uncertainties, and ambiguities, the posturing and reflex self-medication and unexpected moments of honesty that fuel the night so nails the harrowing aspect of navigating modern romance — in which it’s always easier to do nothing than to do what one really wants — that he’s able to turn the film’s ultimate surrender to traditional romantic closure into something of a surprise.
I had a bit more to say about Luke and Brie on this week’s episode of FilmCouch. The trailer is above, and future screening information is here. The film is still on the festival circuit and does not have distribution.
In the 16 months or so since it first became possible to distribute full-length feature films in single viewing windows embedded in a blog post, there’s been a lot of talk as to how a film presented in this matter might function. For Four Eyed Monsters, the first feature film made available legally in a single stream on YouTube, the embed functioned as a meme spreader for the FEM brand (and the page the embed code came from served as a revenue generator for Spout.com). At Telluride last month, Annette Insdorf talked about the embed’s value as reference point within online criticism, which is something we’ve done here on SpoutBlog, most recently with Steven’s post last week on DW Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln. Also last week, Anne Thompson suggested that Wayne Wang’s Princess of Nebraska, recently made available for streaming in full on YouTube, can serve as a marketing tool for the film Wang made concurrently, A Thousand Years of Good Prayer, which is currently in theaters. In pieces in the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, John Horn and John Jurgensen both suggested that free streaming solutions for features are performing a kind of public service; Horn commended SnagFilms, the portal for ad-supported embeddable documentaries, for their ability to bring “important movies to audiences that otherwise might never have known the films existed,” while Jurgensen focused on Hulu and YouTube’s potential to help relieve the “glut of movies jockeying for theater screens.”
This is all well and good, but in most cases, up until now an argument could have be made that the “better” place to see the film in question would be on a big screen, and/or with an audience, because the assumption has been that the natural home for cinema is in a cinema, that distribution via embed is an alternative option when theatrical distribution doesn’t work out. The same can not be said for The End of America, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s non-fiction adaptation of Naomi Wolf’s book and ensuing lecture tour, which debuted on SnagFilms today. This is the first film I’ve seen that seems ideally suited to be seen as a blog embed, and not just because a good deal of the footage within was pulled from web video sources. Essentially a Top Ten list followed by a How To, it’s the first film I’ve seen that seems to have internalized the structure of the traffic-baiting blog post.
Before the Hamptons Film Festival this weekend, I wrote a post aboutThe End of America, a documentary based on Naomi Wolf’s book of the same name, which I was interested in not least because of its unusual distribution strategy: it will premiere on SnagFilms tomorrow, before debuting theatrically in New York in December before becoming available on DVD in January. I’ll have a more review-y take on the film tomorrow. In the meantime, an anonymous (but angry!) SpoutBlog reader commented on his/her experience at the film’s first screening in the Hamptons:
First, the film was late to arrive and so we sat for an hour listening to live commentary from Alec Baldwin and Naomi “Preach to You” Watts [sic]. Then the film played and we had to hear it all over again. Naomi is out for one thing… to sell books.
I can’t speak to the motives of Naomi Wolf *or* Naomi Watts, but I can confirm that some aspect of this comment is accurate: the screening did start late, because there was an accident on the highway between Manhattan and East Hampton, and the master tape was stuck in traffic with co-director Annie Sundberg. But most of those in attendance seemed to get some value out the improvised program which preceded the movie, in which Alec Baldwin moderated a conversation about The End of America’s themes with Wolf, co-director Ricki Stern, and ACLU rep Jameel Jaffer. I was there, and I recorded the bulk of the conversation and had it transcribed. That transcript, edited for clarity, can be found after the jump.
The End of America, a new documentary based on a book by Naomi Wolf and directed by Ricky Stern and Annie Sundberg (The Devil Came on Horseback), will premiere tomorrow night at the Hamptons Film Festival. And then, it’s going to be available … everywhere. It’s the first production of IndiePix Studios, and the company has developed a unique plan to get the movie out there via a ton of different means. After its festival premiere it’s going straight to streamability via Snag Films, and then, according to a press release, the doc will “flood venues around the country, from special screenings to theatrical exhibitions, from book stores and merchants that sell DVDs to internet sources for renting, streaming and downloading the film.”
As far as I know, it’s the first film to go to Snag directly from its festival premiere. Presumably, the goal is to enable the film, which “addresses issues of freedom, dictatorship, civil liberties and democracy - and warns that the United States’ claims on constitutional civil liberties are fast eroding,” to “go viral” in the days leading up to the election. It’ll be an interesting experiment; so far, most of the films on Snag have been titles that had been available in other forms for awhile, and this may be a test of whether or not, when given the oportunity to embed and discuss a brand-new political documentary, bloggers will pounce. I’m seeing the film tomorrow in the Hamptons and will have more thoughts after that.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Before the Hamptons Film Festival this weekend, I wrote 
