6. I predict the death of mumblecore movies by 2011. Independent films will once again boast strong scripts and, as such, will reach a broader audience. This is probably as good a time as any to reiterate to critics who invoke the name of John Cassavetes in their reviews of so-called mumblecore fare: John’s only improvised film was Shadows. Suck it.

Indie film distribution stalwart-turned-director Jeff Lipsky has written a two-part, ten item list of reasons he’s “bullish on the state of indie” film for Ted Hope’s blog Truly Free Film. There’s no denying that Lipsky has seniority in this realm, even if the introduction to the piece, presumably written by Hope, strains credibility by refering toLipsky’s recent Sundance premiere Once More With Feeling as a “hit” (John Anderson’s declaration that the film “would be a natural for cable, if the execution weren’t so distractingly strange” was one of the kinder notices). But much of Lipsky’s numbered so-called optimism comes off as cranky old man-ism.

Whether he’s celebrating setbacks in digital projection via questionable cause-and-effect logic (”Fewer digital screens…will mean fewer bad digital movies”), dismissing “download, PPV, and VOD numbers” as “paltry” without offering examples or comparisons, or making broad generalizations about the production methods of emerging filmmakers, as in the quote above (we’ll presume critics of Andrew Bujalski, Barry Jenkins, and any other “mumblecore”-associated writer/director who works off a screenplay are excused from “sucking it”), the whole post is anti new-technology, anti-experimentation, pro-traditionalism. It’s as if Lipsky’s ultimate reason to be bullish is something along the lines of, “all this shit you crazy kids keep throwing at the wall ain’t sticking, and that makes me feel good personally.”

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.

…Read more

One of the most underrated and overlooked titles at Sundance last year was Dennis Dortch’s A Good Day to be Black and Sexy. Over six vignettes, Dortch takes a daring, authentic and frequently hysterical look at the sexual mores of a young black Los Angelenos. The film, which garnered Dortch a nomination at Tuesday’s Gotham Awards for Best Breakthrough Director, opens in Los Angeles today via Magnolia Pictures. We caught up with Dortch to discuss seeing The Story of a Three Day Pass at MoMA, Marvin Gaye as an auteur and his desire to work with George Clinton. …Read more

The nominations for the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards are out, and there are a lot of causes for excitement. IndieWIRE has the full list; here are a few of the many reasons to celebrate:

• Silent Light, which still hasn’t officially been released in the US (although a run at NY’s Film Forum is pending), was nominated for best Foreign Film, alongside Cannes winners Hunger, Gomorrah and The Class, and the upcoming IFC release The Secret of the Grain.
• Three big nominations for Medicine for Melancholy: director Barry Jenkins and producer Justin Barber were nominated for Best First Feature, Jenkins was named alongside Nina Paley and Lynn Shelton as contenders for the Acura Someone to Watch Award, and James Laxton earned a nomination for Melancholy’s distinctive cinematography.
• Sean Baker competes against himself for the John Cassavetes Award for the best feature made for under $500,000; Prince of Broadway and Take Out were nominated alongside The Signal, Turn the River, and In Search of a Midnight Kiss.
• SpoutBlog favorites The Order of Myths, Encounters at the End of the World, The Betrayal and Man on WireUp the Yangtze join in the Best Documentary category; Myths director Margaret Brown was also nominated for the Lacost Truer Than Fiction prize, which goes to an upcoming nonfiction filmmaker.
• On the bigger film front, Rachel Getting Married, The Wrestler and Vicky Cristina Barcelona were amongst the most nominated films; Woody Allen will compete in the Screenplay category against fellow Oscar winner Charlie Kaufman.

The full list of nominees can be found here. The Spirits will be handed out, as per tradition, the night before the Oscars in Santa Monica.

“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.

…Read more

Not to be all Barry Jenkins all the time around here (although, with Medicine For Melancholy having its New York premiere tonight at Independent Film Week, it’s a little hard not to be), but with Claire Denis‘ 35 Rhums coming out of TIFF with a lot of goodwill (see my review here), I just remembered Jenkins’ interview from last summer with Dickon Hinchliffe for ShortEnd Magazine. Hinchliffe, from the Brit band Tindersticks, is Denis’ scorer of choice, having worked on Rhums, Friday Night, and Trouble Every Day (with Tindersticks); he’s also composed music for non-Denis films like 40 Shades of Blue and Married Life. The interview is here, and an example of Hinchcliffe’s work is embedded above.

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Barry Jenkins’ film Medicine for Melancholy, and we’re lucky enough to have Barry be big fans of Spout as well. His little film has had a long journey since it premiered in Austin at SXSW earlier this year, and it’s continuing to take him around the world.

We spoke with Barry in Toronto about the genesis of the movie, what has happened since that first screening in Austin, how he found the actors, and if this film represents a love letter from him to the city of San Francisco. Read on for the full interview.

…Read more

• Erin at Steady Diet of Film alerts us to the news (which we might have figured out for ourselves, except that we have a bad habit of being in bars at 11pm on weeknights––we swear, we’re working on cutting back on that) that Medicine for Melancholy star Wyatt Cenac is now a correspondent for The Daily Show. His first segment, in which he attempts to understand primary season through the rubrick of plot developments on Lost, is embedded above. We’ll give you a preview: “A polar bear on a tropical island? There are so many reasons why that’s AMAZING!”
• Stacy Peralta’s was reproached for his lackadaisical sense of style by the gang member subjects of his doc Made in America. He tells Vulture: “These guys don’t step out the house unless they’re dressed really well. In fact, a couple of our subjects took me to task for how I looked. I’d be wearing a pair of Levis and a T-shirt, and they’d ask me, ‘Do you dress like that every day? You oughta think about how you dress more often.’”
• The MPAA be damned, Ridley Scott might make an uncensored film based on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and the very prospect has filmdrunk oversharing. Concludes a post headlined “BONER ALERT”: “Like all really violent things, it makes me slightly sexually excited.  That’s healthy, right?”

• While I gather my final thoughts on the Moving Image Institute, check out the most recent dispatches from my fellow attendees, Doug Cummings and Kevin Lee.
• I had to leave the Sarasota Film Festival long before the awards were announced, but I was happy to learn that both Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed and Barry Jenkins’ Medicine For Melancholy went home with prizes. Alison has further details at Indie Eye.
• In his round-up of the various stories on Matt Dentler leaving SXSW for Cinetic, David Hudson pays tribute to Dentler’s years at the festival. “As I’ve said here in the past, any history of American independent cinema in the 00s is going to have to include a passage on the impact of Matt’s smarts, instincts and sheer guts as a programmer.” David also links to Scott Kirsner, who has some reservations about the digital division of Cinetic that will becomes Dentler’s new home, at least in terms of its potential attractiveness to filmmakers.

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, 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.

Formally and thematically, Melancholy is, in fact, driven by fractions. African-Americans currently make up less than 7 percent of the city of San Francisco. Several decades of gentrification have all but whitewashed the city’s historically non-white communities south of Market Street; the few non-gentrified pockets still standing are under constant threat of being steamrolled by the luxury housing boom. To make that point visually, Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton literally drain the color almost completely from their digital video image (on first viewing, I guessed that the entirety of the film had been desaturated 93 percent to match the racial breakdown, but in a recent interview, Jenkins said the level of desaturation actually fluctuates). The resulting image is soft and smoggy, mostly gray with pastel hints. Melancholy may be more committed to certain of the city’s un-pretty social truths than any other recent fiction film set in San Francisco, but ironically, as a sheer portrait of the city, it’s also maybe the most beautiful.

…Read more

We’re not going to start posting reviews of SXSW films until the week of the festival, but having already seen several via screeners, I can promise you that when the time comes I’ll have much, much more to say about Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy. A beautifully shot examination of 24 hours in the lives of a boy and girl who hook up at a party in San Francisco, Jenkins’ film has already been compared to certain other handmade movies about the personal dramas of lost urban youth. But Melancholy is politically engaged and formally ambitious in ways that films of this budget level often are not. More than a relationship drama, it’s a portrait of the city in which its set, a grafting of tentative romance onto the city’s very real, very rocky terrain of race, class and cultural conflict.

Above, you’ll find the Medicine for Melancholy trailer; below, Barry Jenkins answers the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody. The film premieres at 2:30pm on Sunday, March 9, at the SXSW Film Festival.

Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.

“It’s like Before Sunset meets Do The Right Thing…with a dash of the French New Wave to sweeten the pot.” And yes…I know that makes no sense.

I’ve never considered doing the “It’s like this meets that” game with this film, but looking at the descriptor above I must admit, that pretty much sums it up. Two strangers meet and spend the day together following a random romantic liaison (Before Sunset) while pondering the shifting dynamics of place and identity as it directly relates to their locale (Do The Right Thing). The New Wave references are a bit more obtuse, but…they’re there

It had been quite some time since I’d made my last film—my undergraduate thesis short for film school—and I’d just been through a crushing breakup when I sat down to write the film. I needed direction and an outlet, and making a film seemed the best way to satisfy both. You go four years without doing something and you begin to doubt your abilities. For me, this film is as much a gut check as an artistic endeavor.

The entire crew, all seven of us including the editor and save the sound guy, are graduates of the film school at Florida State. We made this fast and I mean FAST: production ended November 15th and we were sending screeners to festivals by December 27th. Making a movie that quickly is like dancing to a kick ass song: sound coalesces to a hum, vision blurs, the slipping of time, and then…it’s done.

…Read more