Azazel Jacobs has made a short film for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The 90 minute film, called I See, is the first in a series that MoMA plans to commission, at the rate of one per year, from filmmakers who screen work in their spring New Directors/New Films series.  I See is screening before programs in MoMA’s Titus screening rooms, and is also posted on the Museum’s YouTube channel. See it embedded below the jump.

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Azazel Jacobs‘ Momma’s Man, which premiered at Sundance in 2008 and was rescued from the ashes of ThinkFilm by Kino for a theatrical release last summer — is finally out on DVD today. The package features a pretty impressive slate of extras, including Momma’s Family, described as a 42 minute “featurette on the clash realities that takes place in Momma’s Azazel Jacobs returns to the set of the film and can’t leave”; Capitalism: Child Labor, a 2006 short by Azazel’s father (and Momma’s co-star) Ken Jacobs; plus deleted scenes and an audio conversation with the Jacobs family.

Kino’s site has buying information; you can also check out my review of Momma’s Man, our interview with Azazel from Sundance, and some further thoughts on his three features.

“What is indie cinema?” asks Richard Vine at The Guardian. He runs though a brief history of Indiewood, notes that the London Film Festival put Azazel Jacobs, Barry Jenkins and Joe Swanberg on a panel promoting a new wave of truly independent filmmaking, and then rhetorically wonders if his initial question is irrelevant:

But is indie a meaningful term anymore, or is it just shorthand for “cool”, “edgy” or “offbeat”? Does it matter if the so-called faux-indie production methods result in decent films such as Juno and Little Miss Sunshine that play at easy-to-access multiplexes alongside the CGI sequels and threequels?

To answer the three questions posed in the above paragraph: Yes, no, yes. What follows is essentially the same argument I’ve made one thousand times over the past three years, but apparently there are still some people who need to hear it.

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Voy a Explotar (I’m Gonna Explode) is the contemporary Mexican teenage Pierrot le Fou. It knows this, and it wants you to know it, and it doesn’t care if this makes you hate it on principle. The third feature by Gerardo Naranjo (director of Drama/Mex, co-writer and star of Azazel Jacobs’ The GoodTimeskid), it’s the rare love letter to influence that’s infused with enough personal style and sentiment to transform the stolen into something thrilling and moving.

15 year-old Maru (Maria Deschamps) is a prep school bad girl with a mangy mane of hair and, apparently, a drinking problem. When Roman (Juan Pablo de Santiago), the spoiled little rich boy son of a right-wing politician gets kicked out of his school and introduces himself at Maru’s suburban Mexico school via faking his own hanging at a talent show, the girl is instantly besotted. “He exists, but I also made him up,” she writes in a letter to a friend which doubles as internal monologue. “The best part is that he’s angry.” Roman is equally smitten, and soon the pair are scheming to run away together.

Or so they want their parents to think; really, they’re camped out in a tent on the roof of Roman’s father’s mansion. Maru’s hysterical mother and sister come over to the house to become part of the rescue effort––which, under the oversight of Roman’s distant dad, consists mainly of drinking tequila and waiting for clues to come to him. With a stolen cell phone, Roman calls daddy’s security detail with false leads to get the grown ups out of the house so that he and Maru can crawl downstairs and collect provisions. It’s only when the pair decide to finally really leave home that their saga starts to hew to the traditional tropes of love-on-the-run.

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This review originally appeared in slightly different form during Sundance 2008. For further thoughts on Momma’s Man and the work of Azazel Jacobs, see these notes on his recent BAM retrospective.

When a filmmaker casts his own parents as parents––in a film about an adult and his relationship to his parents upon returning to his childhood home, a film which said filmmaker shoots *in* his childhood home––you’d expect (or maybe fear) that the result would be meta-personal to the point of solipsism. But what’s really surprising about Azazel Jacob’s Momma’s Man, which stars his experimental filmmaker father Ken Jacobs and mother Flo Jacobs and was shot in the Manhattan loft in which the family has lived for decades, is that it feels completely universal. The story of a 30-something husband and father of a newborn who extends a stay at his parents’ ramshackle New York apartment indefinitely, it’s an incredible portrait of the final phase of coming of age, the transition from being parented to parenting.

First telling both his parents and his wife back home that the airline is giving him the runaround about rescheduling a canceled return flight, then tailoring his excuses for each discreet party as he needs to buy time in increments, Mikey (Matt Boren) takes advantage of his parents’ bemused hospitality to take a winter vacation. He spends his days visiting with old friends (including a recent parolee with unexpected musical passions) and trying to make new ones, his nights combing through boxes of old notebooks, love letters and comic books. In a lofted bed just feet from his sleeping parents, Mikey pulls out a guitar and plays a love song he apparently wrote in high school. Overhearing the lyrics, “Fuck fuck fuck you/I hope you die too,” his parents exchange a worried glance; maybe there’s more to this visit than they’ve been led to believe.

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With the movie opening in New York tomorrow, Kino has posted a trailer for Azazel Jacobs’ Momma’s Man on YouTube. If you haven’t seen the film, I think this clip is a pretty strong encapsulation of its overall mashup of slapstick and melancholy. Also, the reviews a starting to roll in, and J. Hoberman’s got a must-read take at the Village Voice. “Although my most vivid memories of Aza Jacobs are as the unnamed infant installed in a crib in a Johnson City apartment and called, for what seemed like a very long time, “Mr. Baby,” I’ve known his parents for nearly 40 years,” he writes. “And so, while I cannot evaluate Momma’s Man with an outsider’s clarity, can vouch for the authenticity…”

Tropic Thunder is taking heavy fire, not for Robert Downey Jr.’s blackface performance, but rather for Ben Stiller’s spoof movie-within-a-movie, Simple Jack. Is this a case of political correctness gone too far? Or does Hollywood have serious flaws in how it portrays people with disabilities? The latter may have been Stiller’s point all along…

Our friend Kevin Kelly shares the tale of his journey to the fabled Skywalker Ranch to see Clone Wars and meet the elusive George Lucas. The film, essentially a two hour trailer for the upcoming animated series, gets into some pretty wonky territory when it asks the question we’ve all wondered: What would Truman Capote be like as a Hutt?

Karina checks in with what she’s watching. An Elliott Gould retrospective sheds some light on Little Murders and Jean-Luc Godard’s refusal to direct it. Also, Azazel Jacobs, director of the upcoming Mamma’s Man, Doris Day in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and soft-core porn sci-fi web show, The Fold.

 

 FilmCouch 83 [40:19m]: Play Now | Download

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)

FilmCouch 83

4:07 - Tropic Thunder

16:50 - The Clone Wars, Skywalker Ranch

25:30 - Karina’s Media Diet

At age 35, with just three features under his belt, Azazel Jacobs seems like an unlikely candidate for a retrospective, but if such an endeavor pumps up the profile of his first two, lesser-seen films whilst effectively promoting his soon-to-be-released Momma’s Man, I’m not going to argue against it. BAM will devote five nights of programming to Jacobs this week, with all three of his features shown alongside two films selected by the director: the 1980 Clash vehicle Rude Boy, and Aki Kaurismaki’s La Vie de Boheme.

The series opens tonight with a screening of Jacobs’ second film, The GoodTimesKid. A punk rock fantasia shot on 35mm stock infamously stolen from a Hollywood feature, the film stars Jacobs as Rodolfo, a scrappy brooder who kicks his way out of domestic complacency with girlfriend Diaz (played with an irresistible mix of strength and eccentricity by Jacobs’ drop-dead real-life GF, Sara Diaz). In order to join the army, Rodolfo steals the identity of another man named Rodolfo (Gerardo Naranjo), a loner who lives on a liquor-littered little boat. When the first Rodolfo walks out of Diaz’ life on the night she’s throwing a party for his birthday, the second Rodolfo walks right in. Diaz, hungry for the attention and affection that she can’t squeeze out of her Rudolfo, is open to a replacement Rodolfos, at least for a night.

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Anthony Kaufman brings news that THINKFilm has given up distribution rights on Azazel Jacobs’ Momma’s Man to Kino International. THINK announced their acquisition of the film in early March, about six weeks after the film was unveiled at Sundance.  Just last week, THINK’s Mark Urman told Kaufmann that they planned on going through with the release of both Momma’s and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, saying that if the company “didn’t think we could get what they deserve, I wouldn’t be proceeding with them. These films are not cash-intensive films. These films will get everything they need.” No word yet on whether or not the troubled company still thinks they can give Marina Zenovich’s doc what it deserves.

Exciting times! Azazel Jacobs’ Momma’s Man has spread through the festival circuit like a deadpan, unexpectedly emotionally resonant virus (see our interview and review from Sundance) on its way to eventual theatrical release via ThinkFilm. Now, Jacobs’ previous film, The GoodTimesKid, is screening in Brooklyn for free on Monday night, as part of the Brooklyn Independent Cinema series at Barbes.

The GoodTimesKid, which stars Jacobs himself opposite girlfriend Sara Diaz, was famously shot on 35mm stolen from the truck of a big Hollywood production; the film’s tagline works the procurement of the tools of production into the narrative by branding it “a story about stolen love and stolen identities, shot on stolen film.” The fact that this is a DIY production even becomes the subject of the trailer, which consists of a montage of shots of the actors, slating each scene with a hand clap.

I’ve embedded that trailer above; theoretically, there are a number of clips from the film on MySpace, but due to the, um, ideosyncrasies of MySpace video, I haven’t been able to get any of them to load.

• ThinkFilm has announced their acquisition of Azazel Jacobs’ Momma’s Man, for theatrical release after its New York premiere at New Directors/New Films next month. We reviewed the film (which I love) when it premiered at Sundance, and also interviewed Azazel.
• Joan Cusack is playing Isla Fisher’s mom in a romantic comedy about a New York magazine journalist with a lot of credit card debt (ah, romance). Before you ask, “Wait, does that even make mathematical sense?”––yes, it does. If Joan gave birth when she was 14. Eight years before playing a teenager in Sixteen Candles.
• Speaking of fuzzy math, I don’t understand these figures at all.  Turner Broadcasting (TBS, TNT, etc) has picked up broadcast rights to a number of films that will theoretically be released by New Line and Picturehouse later this year. Variety says, “The coin involved in Turner’s purchase…[comes] in at a high end of about 11% of the eventual domestic box office gross of the four New Line pictures.” How do you calculate eventual gross on films that have not only not opened, but which lie in limbo because their ostensible distributor no longer really exists? According to this story, Warners execs have just started screening films on New Line’s leftovers, and questions like “What pictures will ultimately make it to the slate, and when will they be released?” have yet to be answered. Isn’t the eventual gross of, say, The Women remake heavily dependent on whether or not Warner Brothers gives it the full push as if it were one of its own, or, conversely, dumps it in September when all their “real” fall films are opening at Toronto?

photo: WireImage

Azazel Jacobs wrote and directed Momma’s Man, the tale of a grown man who decides to move back in with his parents. Not only did he decide to film the movie in his parents’ apartment, he chose to cast his actual parents in the role, his mother Flo and his father, the famous experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs. In this interview Azazel and star Matt Boren reflect on living with their parents during production, and a chance encounter with the films of John Casavettes that turned a budding experimental filmmaker on to the power of narrative.

 

 Momma's Man Interview [4:50m]: Play Now | Download

Also on SpoutBlog:

Sundance 2008: Momma’s Man -Karina’s review of Momma’s Man.

Momma’s Man Interview

When a filmmaker casts his own parents as parents in a film, which he shoots in his childhood home, about an adult and his relationship to his parents upon returning to his childhood home, you’d expect (or maybe fear) that the result would be meta-personal to the point of solipsism. But what’s really surprising about Azazel Jacob’s Momma’s Man, which stars his experimental filmmaker father Ken Jacobs and mother Flo Jacobs and was shot in the Manhattan loft in which the family has lived for decades, is that it feels completely universal. The story of a 30-something husband and father of a newborn who extends a stay at his parents’ ramshackle New York apartment indefinitely, it’s an incredible portrait of the final phase of coming of age, transitioning from being parented to parenting.

First telling both his parents and his wife back home that the airline is giving him the runaround about rescheduling a canceled return flight, then tailoring his excuses for each discreet party as he needs to buy time in increments, Mikey (Matt Boren) takes advantage of his parents’ bemused hospitality to carve out a winter vacation. He spends his days visiting with old friends (including a recent parolee with unexpected musical passions) and trying to make new ones, his nights combing through boxes of old notebooks, love letters and comic books. In a lofted bed just feet from his sleeping parents, Mikey pulls out a guitar and plays a love song he apparently wrote in high school. Overhearing the lyrics, “Fuck fuck fuck you/I hope you die too,” his parents exchange a worried glance; maybe there’s more to this visit than they’ve been led to believe.

…Read more

Yesterday, I made a list of five films amongst Sundance’s four competition slates that I’m particularly excited to see. Today, here’s a look at another film films that I’m looking forward to, culled from the Spectrum, New Frontier, and Park City at Midnight sidebars. This list was MUCH harder to weed down to five, and as you’ll see, I had to cheat a bit. Here we go…

Momma’s Man (Directed by Azazel Jacobs, Spectrum)

Excerpt From the Official Synopsis: “Humorous and poignant, Momma’s Man wrestles with universal themes, but its strength lies in its deeply personal details. Writer/director Azazel Jacobs cast his own parents and shot the film in their apartment, where he grew up.”

Why I’m Interested: Jacobs “own parents” are Flo Jacobs and experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs; in the film’s press notes, he says he cast his own family because he “couldn’t picture anyone else in their bed, in their kitchen, or in their place (although Peter Falk and Shelly Duval would be in my movie-movie version of it).” If the notion of the guy who made Star Spangled to Death channeling Columbo isn’t enough for you, I don’t know what would be.

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