Ti West’s The House of the Devil finds its sweet spot in the paranoid shadow of misdirection, so it’s best not to reveal much of the plot beyond what you’ll know from watching the trailer: it’s the 80s, and a sleepy college town is obsessed with an impending eclipse, and a young, pretty co-ed in desperate need of some quick cash takes a mysterious babysitting job in a big, secluded manse, for a creepy couple who don’t actually have a kid. What actually happens after that is less important than what West’s tease of what could happen. Duality is the order of the day: there are two houses that could potentially be devilish, two girls — serious brunette Sam (Jocelin Donahue) and the more playful blonde Megan (Greta Gerwig) –– at the mercy of two men (Tom Noonan and AJ Bowen), each of them with two evident personalities. The final punchline even sets up a new twosome whose story could easily fuel a sequel.
It would be easy to peg Devil as a superficial exercise in vintage pastiche –– the film non-ironically borrows the look and feel of the horror produced in the era in which it’s set — but West’s more impressive nod at classic horror is his mastery of misdirection. I was recently asked to make a list of my favorite horror films of all time, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to readers of this blog that all five films I chose were made before 1980, and three of them before 1950. If horror films weren’t actually better before gore and graphic violence were standard practices available to makers of mainstream scary films, a lot of the Code-restricted frighteners that have survived to become classics (cult or otherwise) are richer in subtext, more evocative of base human fears, and more effective politically and/or philosophically provocative. In other words, in the classic horror and sci-fi films that I love, there tends to be more than one thing going on: there’s what we see, there’s what we don’t see but imagine or infer is also happening, and, as a product of the clash between the actual visible evidence and what our psyches produce as an extension or embroidery on what we see, there’s what we leave believing it all really means.
Did you see Paranormal Activity? Did you like it? If you answered yes to the second question, you mostly have writer-director Oren Pelito thank. But if you didn’t like it, you can thank Paramount for at least getting you in the movie theater. And the studio’s shareholders have Paramount’s marketing department to thank for the humongous profits the movie has been making — from people buying tickets, not from people liking what they paid for.
Obviously it’s more important to make money than a good movie, which may explain why Peli is reportedly having trouble securing distribution (and his asking price) for his follow-up, a sci-fi horror flick titled Area 51, despite the fact that his film just topped the weekend box office, has earned more than $60 million over five weeks of limited release and has been a Twitter trending topic consistently for about a month now. Neither of those things is at all thanks to him, right?
Maybe it isn’t helping him that his film looks like it was a piece of cake to make, and he kind of makes it seem that it was in fact easy peasy. But this was no Blair Witch Project, which was good in concept but not so much in execution. Paranormal Activity is structured terrifically and there’s nary a dull moment, even during the non-scary daytime scenes, which deserve a lot of credit for providing some very natural humor to balance with the sometimes silly paranormal thrills. Peli may not be a master filmmaker, but he did a pretty good job.
But whatever. Since when does Hollywood care if a filmmaker is actually great at making films, anyway? Didn’t I just hear that Steve Carrlanded another gig? Did Paul Blart: Mall Copmake so much money because of his talent or because of Sony’s ability to sell stupid comedies to the masses?
Who wants to set up an Eventful “Demand It!” campaign for Area 51?
Check out what other film blogs are saying about Oren Peli’s troubles after the jump: …Read more
Medicine for Melancholy, which you’ve had to endure me raving about since virtually the beginning of this blog, comes out on DVD today. Here’s another look at my review…
Visually more sophisticated than the bulk of features to yet come out of the new wave of DIY independent American cinema, narratively smoother and yet still boundless in mold-breaking ambition, triple-Independent Spirit Award nominee Medicine for Melancholy offers a self-contained rebuttal to claims that precious, naturalistic dramas about the existential dilemmas of hipster singles are exclusively a white man’s game. But the most exciting thing about the film is that director Barry Jenkins doesn’t seem interested in rebutting anything, or in playing any sort of game but his own. His mission: to talk about what it feels like to be young, black and artsy in a city in which people who fit that description make up a minuscule fraction of the population.
This post is a response to a query posed by gokinsmen in the Ask Karina thread: “Avant-garde and short films. Your favorites, ‘the state of…’”
I’m not sure I know what “avant-garde” means anymore, and the only reason I admit that is because the very haziness of the concept seems to be the crux of the issue. What could avant garde possibly mean, in an time and place where Jonas Mekas takes to his video blog to drop wisdom from the Kabballah and defend Paris Hilton, and anyone can watch clips of Out 1 on YouTube (which is pretty much the only place to watch music videos such as the above), and an incest-heavy work of poorsploitation with riffs on Italian neorealism is poised for major mainstream success –– and all the while the general public shows little to no interest in movies starring movie stars, over and over and overagain?
Antichrist stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a married couple (they’re never named) who lose their only child in a freak accident, which they were present for but failed to stop; the operatic sex they were having at the time was something of a distraction. After she spends some time in a psychiatric ward dealing with her grief, Dafoe, a therapist, convinces Gainsbourg they should retreat to their house deep in secluded woods (they call it “Eden”) so that he can teach her how to face her fears. Totally coincidentally, this house is where the wife used to go to work on an academic thesis on Gynocide — which the film defines as archaic and semi-mythic violence against women, witch hunting and like practices through which, as Gainsbourg’s character puts it, “nature causes people to do evil things to women” — before her husband dismissed her subject and thereby discouraged her ambition. Overcome with the guilty feeling that her own sexuality caused her son to die, the woman essentially internalizes the texts she’s studied and becomes an embodiment of the “evil,” manifested mainly through total sexual hysteria, that she once dedicated her life to critiquing. And hilarity sort of ensues!
Hey, good news! The Exploding Girl, directed by Bradley Rust Gray and produced by So Yong Kim, will be distributed in North America by Adam Yauch’s Oscilloscope Films. O-scope previously released Treeless Mountain, directed by Kim and produced by Gray, who are also husband and wife (Kevin Lee interviewed Kim for us earlier this year).
When I saw the film last spring at Tribeca, I noted that Girl, which stars Zoe Kazan as Ivy, an epileptic college student navigating tricky interpersonal territory on a school break, “not ‘just’ a naturalistic character study; in fact The Exploding Girl is a work of rigorous formalism. Shooting in real locations on the streets and rooftops of New York, Gray keeps his camera far away from Ivy when she’s in public, allowing his star to pop and weave in and out of layers of cars and strangers, the crush of city life both overwhelming her and protecting her. The film’s sound design amplifies this layering effect; the core of this film is the frustrated sadness that surrounds a long-awaited phone call finally coming in, only to have the voice at the other end of the cell virtually swallowed by the noise around you, the conversational flow choked by distance and uncertainty.”
If there’s a single crippling irony to the explosion of web video over the last half decade, it’s this: no single piece of media created specifically for online distribution has so far engaged the masses as deeply as the bits of cultural detritus, from cat videos to classic films, that end up online unofficially, accidentally and/or illegally. Taking into account his own viewing habits and those of the post-internet generation, with Stingray SamCory McAbee set out to make a film that could be watched in discreet ten-minutes segments while still maintaining the narrative and image quality of the widescreen experience.
And so several months after premiering at Sundance, Stingray Sam became available for purchase in a variety of different formats from McAbee’s website, while the filmmaker continued to tour the world accompanying the film to festival screenings and other theatrical events. When the six-part musical space western screened last month at Fantastic Fest, McAbee and I met up at the new Alamo Drafthouse-adjacent clubhouse The Highball to talk about science fiction as political allegory, the peaks and valleys within the landscape of web video, and the further adventures of Stingray and the Quasar Kid.
At the screening last night, you said that Stingray Sam is political, whereas your earlier film, The American Astronaut, was personal. What are the politics, as you see them, in Stingray Sam?
Right after the US bombed Iraq, a woman from Copenhagen came and interviewed me for an art magazine. She was talking about American Astronaut, and she said, “Right now, Europeans are very angry at America because of what your government is doing, and they’re starting to feel like they don’t like Americans.” But, she said, Europeans always enjoyed loving American culture, and The American Astronaut had all the things they enjoyed loving about America.
You know how a movie can get so hyped up that by the time you see it your only possible reaction is, “that’s it?” Well, it definitely works for short films, though it’s not often enough that shorts gain so much attention. I mean “real” shorts, the kind that play at film festivals, not funny skits and user-generated YouTube videos (feel free to argue that many of these count as shorts; I won’t necessarily disagree). And yes, Spike Jonze’s We Were Once a Fairytale, which stars Kanye West, did play at a film festival (Los Angeles), so I guess that makes it a “real” short. And now it’s been leaked online (temporarily by Kanye, himself) just in time to make a (presumably) good companion piece to Jonze’s box office winner, Where the Wild Things Are.
After all the Tweeting and bloggery I noticed centered on the film last night and today, I’m pretty underwhelmed. I appreciate the stop-motion animation at the end, but otherwise I guess I just can’t really stand Kanye’s persona here — fictionalized or not — and would have stopped it short had I not heard there would be some trippy shit eventually. Also, I’ve now learned that I need to stop watching TV shows and short films online while I eat my lunch. Between this and The Office wedding episode, I hope to never see someone vomiting (even if its rose petals) while I’m chewing food again. Besides, I’m far more interested in another upcoming Kanye collaboration, with animator Bill Plympton.
Check out other film bloggers’ reactions to the short after the jump:
The nominees for IFP’s 2009 Gotham Awards were announced just a few minutes ago, via a live webstream starring A.O. Scott, critic of film for the New York Times and At the Movies, who recently coined the term “festivalism” as a pejorative to describe the audience-limiting nature of contemporary art house film and the institutions that present it. Before launching into the list of names and titles, Scott disclaimed any personal connection to the nominees. “I had nothing to do with this, I am only reading the nominations, he adlibbed. “Chances are I probably hate most of the movies that are nominated.” Debate over the sincerity of that statement is sure to consume all 238 people who watched the live Ustream broadcast for days.
Anyway, I quite like several of the movies nominated, including The Hurt Locker (Best Feature, Best Ensemble Performance, Jeremy Renner for Breakthrough Actor), The Maid (Best Feature, Catalina Saavedra for Breakthrough Actor), October Country and You Won’t Miss Me (both nominated for Best Feature Not Coming to a Theater Near You). indieWIRE has the full list of nominees.
Oftentimes a big star will be humbled by a few flops and he/she will take a step back to work on a smaller project or two before making another attempt at something as unnecessarily expensive as Land of the Lost. Is this what’s going on with Will Ferrell, though? According to Variety, he’s signed on to a little comedy called Everything Must Go, a title which could be attributed to his recent bombs, including The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, which he produced and tried to help sell via a much-publicized cameo.
But this is no Winter Passing or Melinda and Melinda. Yes, Everything Must Go is an “indie,” but it still has a budget of $10 million and it’s still a high-profile sitcom sort of movie. I’m sure it will be less goofy than his major studio vehicles, but we’re not looking at one of those cases where a Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler starts doing dramatic roles and acquiring (ultimately unsubstantiated) Oscar buzz. Not that Ferrell doesn’t have it in him.
Still, the only thing Ferrell needs to learn after this past summer is that he should stay away from huge budgets and silly sci-fi concepts and stick with Adam McKay-directed comedies (and the like). No bigger, no smaller. Fortunately, next summer’s The Other Guyswill come along at just the right time to remind us what we like our Will Ferrell movies to be like.
Check out what other film bloggers have to say about Will Ferrell’s seemingly retreating career move after the jump: …Read more
Because last year’s list of dress-up ideas for cinephiles was a hit, we’re doing it again. From movies released in the past 12 months, there are few obvious costume ideas. We’re sure to see a lot of guys dress up as the main trio from The Hangover, while girls inspired by Whip It will be sexy Girl Scouts (with or without roller skates).
This time around, though, we’re presenting ten costume ideas that shouldn’t be too popular. And that makes them somewhat appealing, because nobody wants to show up at a Halloween party where someone else is dressed in the same outfit (especially if the other person’s costume is better). Of course, keep in mind that some of the following unpopular ideas could in turn make you unpopular, too. …Read more
In all likelihood, a new documentary about Robert Pattinsontitled Robsessed is a total cash grab and a waste of time. But let’s not completely toss aside the potential of this film, which UK-based distributor Revolver Entertainment has acquired and will release to DVD in the U.S. around the time that The Twilight Saga: New Moonopens in theaters.
I’m reminded of all the late night commercials I used to see for Biggie & Tupac years ago. The way the film was being sold sure made it seem at the time to be as cheap and disregardable as any of those compilation CD sets advertised in the same late hours. I never would have guessed the film was made by such an interesting filmmaker as Nick Broomfield, who I now place within my top five favorite documentarians. If only I’d been a bigger hip hop enthusiast I might have discovered Broomfield earlier than I did.
Likewise, if I’d been a greater Nirvana fan I might have been turned onto the filmmaker through his prior doc Kurt and Courtney (it wasn’t until years later when I wrote a paper on first-person documentaries that I acquainted myself with Broomfield’s films). And speaking of Kurt Cobain, I’m sure some of his young fans rented Kurt Cobain About a Sononly to wind up interested in non-traditional documentary and the further work of director A.J. Schnack.
Could Robsessed really have been directed by a true talent like Broomfield and Schnack? It’s hard to imagine, especially since neither the news release nor Revolver’s website reveals the filmmaker behind this documentary. But since the film may concentrate primarily on Pattinson’s obsessed fanbase, it could at least be as interesting as docs like Trekkiesand We Are Wizards, which deal with devout followers of the Star Trek and Harry Potter franchises, respectively.
I wouldn’t write Robsessed off so much as I’d say to ignore the film’s DVD-set companion, a pre-TwilightRPattz movie titled The Haunted Airmen.
Check out what other film bloggers are saying about the documentary after the jump:
If you know nothing else about Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, which screened at the New York Festival on Thursday night just four months after the VHS cameras started to roll, you’ve probably heard it described, either positively or negatively, as “not really a movie.” As Korine himself put it before the screening, “I don’t know what it is. It was made to be more like something that was unearthed, or buried — something that was in a ditch, maybe. Like a VHS tape that was in a ditch. Or an attic. Or a drawer.”
It’s fitting that as Korine rambled, the words that came out of his mouth to define what he made became increasingly intimate in their connotation. In the span of a handful of sentence fragments, Trash Humpers went from something dumped like corpse, to something stored in a home, first hidden away in an attic, and then kept close at hand in a drawer. And this is exactly what Trash Humpers does in practice: in a series of vignettes, videotaped from an insider’s perspective, Korine introduces us to a world of inexplicable horror, and then slowly domesticates it. There may not be an traditional narrative intended, but if you make any effort at all to tie together the threads that Korine has laid out, it would be impossible to not see a beginning, middle and end to this 78 minute artbomb, a progression from dangerous grotesquerie to something more personal and almost — almost — sweet and nice.
If you can imagine Mike Leigh directing an In the Loop-esque deadpan comedy embedded within a British version of The Sopranos, in which Tony is an embittered ex-hippie in passive-aggressive conflict with his pot-dulled but surprisingly ruthless adult son, then you might be able to wrap your head around Down Terrace, which won the juried Best Picture and Best Screenplay prizes in the Next Wave competition at Fantastic Fest on Monday.
At the start of the film, 30-something Karl (Robin Hill, who also co-wrote with director Ben Weatley) and his father Bill (Robert Hill) get out of jail and set to work finding out who ratted them out to the police so they can seek revenge. That logline implies that Down Terrace is a lot more action-packed than it is; in fact, most of the film features father and son sitting around the house, drinking and smoking, idly bickering, jamming on their guitars, and waiting for the two or three associates who they suspect may have had something to do with it to drop in for a drink. If these guys were ever truly on-the-ball criminals (Bill makes it hard to give them the benefit of the doubt when he starts name dropping Timothy Leary), lethargy has set in. Karl seems particularly resentful of his role in the family business. A typical lament: “I was thinking I should avenge his death but — is this bad? — I just don’t want to.”
The formula for a productive, engaging debate on the state of indie film? Take a festival founder and a controversial filmmaker, throw them in a boxing ring, and add a hundred or so hecklers and a lot of cheap booze. Also, a stars and stripes unitard wouldn’t hurt. And, voila — the circular indie film apocalypse conversation finally gets interesting.
On Monday evening, Fantastic Fest commandeered the South Austin Gym (conveniently located in the same mini-mall as the festival’s two key venues, the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar and the new Highball, a former Salvation Army store converted into a bar/bowling alley/event venue by Alamo mastermind Tim League) to throw a throwdown featuring battles of both “body and spirit” between various friends of the festival. The basic format seemed to change with every bout, but the basic concept was simple: the opponents would first take the stage to debate a given topic ostensibly of interest to the Fantastic masses, and a winner for the brains portion of the battle would be declared via audience applause. Then, each debater would step out from behind their podium, install a mouth guard, and box two rounds so that a champion could be declared based on brawn (or, more likely, luck). The first three rounds, featuring an assortment of online critics and Austin favorites were well received, but the main event was worth waiting for: League, the co-founder and guiding spirit of Fantastic Fest, vs much-maligned filmmaker and experienced boxer Uwe Boll. The debate topic: Independent film is dying and/or dead.
The imbalance of the physical match between slight-of-stature League and trained killing machine Boll was its key selling point. The hypeman/ref ran down Boll’s list of qualifications: “He’s rumored to have a PhD in everything! It’s rumored that he’s the reason Germany reunited! He’s rumored to be making Miss Pacman this fall! He’s also trained as a fighter, which is more than I can say for his opponent!” The fight, it was said, “will later be known as The Timothy League Memorial Debate.”
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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Did you see Paranormal Activity? Did you like it? If you answered yes to the second question, you mostly have writer-director Oren Peli to thank. But if you didn’t like it, you can thank Paramount for at least getting you in the movie theater. And the studio’s shareholders have Paramount’s marketing department to thank for the humongous profits the movie has been making — from people buying tickets, not from people liking what they paid for.
