I saw and reviewed James Toback’s Tyson at its world premiere at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and the docu-confessional certainly left a lasting impression … for the wrong reasons. Mike Tyson himself walked down the long aisle of the Lumiere theater after the screening to both a rapturous standing ovation from the home crowd, and a dimly heard protest cry of “rapist!” drifting down from the balcony (a female film critic later took credit for the latter). Suffice it to say, that contradiction made that Cannes premiere … uh … memorable, regardless of the content of the film.
Almost a year later, there seem to be as few contrasting voices in regards to Tyson as there are in regards to Tyson within the film itself. The way this non-conventional nonfiction film, and what a cynic might see as the nefarious project behind it, has been accepted by the media virtually unquestioningly, even appreciatively (see the 85% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, higher than the current rating for the latest film from the critically beloved Dardennes brothers), cements that Cannes premiere as a crucial moment in documentary evolution. That night in May, the freak show aesthetic that marks salacious, nonfiction-in-name (if questionably in content) VH1 product like Flava of Love, Celebrity Rehab and Confessions of a Teen Idol, slipped seamlessly into Cannes, en route to a US arthouse release from the same company that brought you very classy recent Oscar nominees Frozen River, Waltz with Bashir and The Class. That night, any remaining distinction between the lowbrow non-fiction of reality TV and the rarefied space of the world’s most revered film festival ceased to exist.
…Read more
Each day this week, Christopher Campbell will take a look back at a “classic” film that played the Sundance Film Festival. Today’s installment: Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991).
Richard Linklater’s breakthrough film, Slacker, almost never played Sundance. According to John Pierson’s book Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes, Competition Director Alberto Garcia “did not particularly like the film.” In fact, Linklater was initially rejected when he submitted Slacker for the 1990 festival, at the time still called the US Film Festival. So, that summer, he self-released the film in his hometown of Austin, Texas, with much success. But the biggest success was yet to come.
…Read more
It didn’t work out so well for Michael Moore, but who is to say other documentarians can’t succeed in fiction filmmaking? Recent notables to make the switch have included Nick Broomfield (whose unscripted yet dramatized Battle for Haditha opens at New York’s Film Forum next month), Barbara Kopple, Andrew Jarecki and Seth Gordon, who originally seemed to be crossing the line to remake his own The King of Kong as a narrative feature but has instead become attached to other fiction projects.
The latest, though, is a bit of a shocker, even if he is famous for making a dramatization-heavy doc. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Errol Morris’ next project is a comedy, which he’s currently writing. Titled The End of Everything, the script is at least based on a true story and Morris says the film will be, “a new idea of how to blend drama with reality.”
…Read more
