Team Picture has been referred to as the last in the Benten DVD boys’ trifecta of Mumblecore releases (numbers one and two were LOL and the Aaron Katz two-for, Quiet City and Dance Party, USA). It’s a fitting way to cap the distributor’s institutional affiliation with this movie moment, which inspired more words from journalists than were probably articulated across all of the films’ running times combined. Surfacing right at the peak of the M-word hype, Team Picture may be the picture that was bot most helped and most hurt by its association with that generic name.

As the legend goes, after director Kentucker Audley (who is the same person as Team Picture star Andrew Nenninger) had his short Bright Sunny South play at Sundance in 2006, he fell in with Joe Swanberg. Soon Team Picture, a barely-feature-length feature, shot in Memphis for $1500, was booked at last summers’ mythic mumblecore double-header at the IFC Center and the Harvard Film Archives. Team Picture thus got to premiere in New York alongside some of the most covered genuinely independent films of the last decade, without having to put in time on the festival circuit first.

That was the good news. Unfortunately, that platform had its disappointments. Most of the press on the events brushed over Picture in order to concentrate on the Swanberg supergroup collaboration Hannah Takes the Stairs, and future festival play was out of the question because, for most premiere-obsessed programmers, a movie that had already premiered in New York was old news. In that sense, regardless of the film’s pedigree by association, Benten’s release of Team Picture is directly in line with their stated mission to give second life to “overlooked gems that deserve greater recognition.”

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I “eeee!”ed too soon. Yet another snag has come up in the distribution future for the film that’s become my most picked scab over the past year, Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light. Just yesterday, Anthony Kufman passed along news that Palisades Media, the company that purchased the back catalogs of both Tartan Uk and Tartan US, were planning a theatrical release for some time in the vague future. But today. Kaufman says he’s been emailed by Camille Neel of Bac Films International, who own worldwide rights on Reygadas’ film.Though Tartan did release the film in the UK, a report in Screen Daily suggesting that they had purchased US distribution rights to the film was apparently erroneous––whether they wanted to or not is unclear, but the distributor apparently never closed a deal before shutting down. Kaufman quotes Neel, italics mine: “The film is still available today for the US and of course, if we have strong interests, we are still looking for distribution [for] all rights in the US.”

Paging all distributors with notoriously strong interests!!!

• Benten Film’s latest release, the award-winning The Free Will (otherwise known as “that 3-hour German rape movie”), is available today. I’ll be posting a longish piece on the film when I get back to New York next week, but in the meantime, check out comments from Cinematical, The ScreenGrab, and Hammer to Nail.
• Fleshbot notes that the editor of Showgirls/director of last year’s Dane Cook/Jessica Alba bomb Good Luck Chuck is also a published photographer of art porn. The Approval Matrix may need to be redrawn to reflect such achievements in middlebrow sleaze.
• Speaking of dubious filmmakers: is Madonna turning into Mae West? Michael Musto is all for it, as long as we all agree to “pass a law that in 30 years she must start covering shit up.”
• New Magnet release Shrooms leads Craig Keller at Cinemasparagus to ask an immortal question: “If, in a film, a character has to have his penis bitten off within the first 35 minutes, wouldn’t it be more interesting to let him live until the story’s end?”

• At the Risky Biz blog, Steven Zeitchik accuses the Wachowskis of “insidious” product placement in Speed Racer, altering the design of Speed’s helmet and the Mach 5 to subliminally invoke corporate partner McDonalds. “It may not be brand placement. It’s something much newer and trickier: brand suggestion.”
• FILMMAKER Magazine’s website has published the essay by David Gordon Green from the liner notes of the recently-released Benten DVD of Todd Rohal’s The Guatemalan Handshake. His first impression of that film? “I had a queer anxiety in my stomach that in fact the movie was “too good,” or should I say “special,” like a retarded kid who is enchanting and liberating in his or her world view, destined for a conflict with the traditional culture.”
• Movie viral marketing or fan fic? It’s too early to tell, but two G.I. Joe characters have started Twittering. GeneralHawk’s latest update: “Having a late lunch at Bennigan’s with Snake-Eyes & Alpine. Alpine says The Roots newalbum is, quote, ‘Dope.’” [Tipped by Kevin]

A press release in this morning from Benten Films breaks news that the upstart DVD company has signed a deal to release The Free Will (Der Freie Will), the controversial Silver Bear winner from the 2006 Berlin Film Festival. Clocking in at 163 minutes, with a first act featuring a real-time rape scene, Mattias Glasner’s film was celebrated by juries and bloggers during its Festival run, but deemed by Variety to be all but unreleasable. It’s a bold move for the Benten team, a sign that their scope is much wider than the M-word associations of their first three releases (LOL, Dance Party USA/Quiet City, and the upcoming The Guatemalan Handshake). Check a clip from The Free Will above. The DVD will be available in late July June.

Benten Films‘ second superbly-packaged DVD set (they previously released Joe Swanberg’s LOL) hits stores today. The set includes two films directed by Aaron Katz: Dance Party, USA, a kind of correction to Larry Clark’s KIDS, set in Portland and starring exquisitely natural local teens; and the Independent Spirit Award-nominated Quiet City, which I previously reviewed here. Both films are about a young boy and girl who venture out into urban spaces looking for an authentic experience. What sets them apart from traditional coming-of-age stories is, in part, the patience Katz shows in allowing his characters to take the time to settle into a tentative trust together. The films are both languid and totally economical; in terms of action, virtually nothing “happens,” and yet if there’s any fat to cut on either, I can’t find it.

In Dance Party, we follow Gus, a teenage lothario whose sexual exploits seem rooted in a need to have a kernel of truth on which to base the elaborate stories with which he regales his friend/protege Bill, to a Fourth of July house party. Within minutes, Gus has talked a previously unknown girl into bed, but when that’s over––Katz cuts straight from the initiation of the flirtation to Gus rolling off the anonymous female like a cold wave––he still needs someone to talk to.

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Years from now, when the planet becomes uninhabitable for humans (Leonardo DiCaprio warned us, and still we didn’t listen!), and when alien anthropologists come to sift through the ruins of Earth to learn about late-homo sapien culture, I can only hope they come across a pristine copy of Benten Films‘ LOL DVD and have the aptitude to understand what they’re looking at.

Of all of the movies lumped into the Mumblecore bucket, LOL comes the closest to making an accurate diagnosis of a certain contemporary real-life character type (the literal gadget fetishist?) that, if seen elsewhere in culture, has nowhere else been properly condemned. The aliens may not understand why these young humanoid males spend so much time at their circa-2006 wired workstations, but if they can find an English-to-Alien translator, David Hudson’s liner-notes essay should put it all into context.

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Aaron Katz is the director of Dance Party USA and Quiet City, both of which are screening as part of The New Talkies festival at the IFC Center. The former plays Tuesday and Wednesday; Quiet City opens on Wednesday for a week-long run. Both films will be released by Benten Films as a two-disc DVD set in January 2008. I love the intersection of high and low in this interview: Aaron talks about Antonioni in the same breath as Can’t Hardly Wait, and puts Ornette Colman on the same list as Mario Kart. He also discusses the pros and cons of the Mumblecore label, and offers up some intriguing details about his next project. All that, and much more, is waiting for you on the other side of the jump.

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• Assessing the first IFC-produced chapter of Trapped in the Closet, I wrote that “From the first shot, it’s immediately apparent that Trapped’s production values have been elevated somewhat since Chapter 12 was released two years ago” and expresed concern that this and other noticeable changes “could have profound implications on Trapped’s signature, quasi-Brechtian manner of storytelling.” Then IFC TV’s general manager was like, “No you didn’t.”
• We played our part in hyping Hannah Takes the Stairs by posting Matt Dentler’s interview with one of Hannah’s many love interests, Mark Duplass.
• “Star-making is not just a hobby of the delusional rich, as it is in Sunset Boulevard; it’s not quite the cosmic structuring myth that it becomes in A Star is Born. It’s sexual fetish, and as such, it’s somehow simultaneously frivolous and primal.” With Anthology Film Archives paying tribute to Vincente Minnelli’s melodramas, I took a closer look at The Bad and the Beautiful.
• I wouldn’t die for Elvis, but I did pull together a list of links to help commemorate the 30th anniversary of his death.
• On the podcast, Kevin and Paul got their hearts broken by No End In Sight, and I wondered if celebrities should break up with their causes after watching The 11th Hour.
• “Screw the script–that voyeuristic long shot of Molly Ringwald on the stairs is how John Hughes became the voice of (highly commercial) teen alienation.” In the latest installment of The Micro Five, I take a look at dancing-in-the-library scene from The Breakfast Club, plus four other 80s musical interludes.
• I got the day’s second Xanadu reference out of Andrew Grant who, along with his Benten Films partner Aaron Hillis, dished pop cultural preferences for The Media Diet.

This week on The Media Diet, we check in with Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis. Grant is the brain behind Filmbrain; Hillis is a freelance critic and reporter whose work can be found at Premiere, The Village Voice and his personal blog, Cinephiliac. Together, they’ve just launched Benten Films, a boutique DVD distribution company aimed at drawing attention to “overlooked gems that deserve greater recognition.” Benten’s first release, Joe Swanberg’s LOL, will hit stores on August 28 (more on that closer to the date). They’re also planning to release two films by Aaron Katz, Dance Party USA and Quiet City, sometime after both screen at The New Talkies festival in New York, which begins next week.

SPOUT: We start each installment of The Media Diet with the old desert island question: you’re packing your suitcase for life-long seclusion on a tropical island that happens to have a full entertainment system. What records, books, movies, video games, websites, etc do you bring with?
AARON: I’m a media whore, so this stream of consciousness might change in an hour: I’m watching Playtime, Once Upon a Time in the West, 2001, Wings of Desire, Suspiria, Penn & Teller Get Killed, and the collected works of Herzog, Buñuel, Altman, Godard, and the Marx Brothers. I’m listening to Bob Dylan, Radiohead, Zappa, James Kochalka Superstar, and the four actresses covering Blue Hearts songs in Linda Linda Linda. Also, if my island has internet and video games, who needs books? (Kidding!)
ANDREW: I’ll try to keep this sensible, i.e., what I could reasonably carry in my backpack. The only book I’d need (the only book anybody needs for that matter) is William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, for it says everything there is to say about the human condition. I’d like to have every note recorded by John Coltrane, some Nick Drake, Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, and that Scarlett Johansson album of Tom Waits covers. (No, I haven’t heard it, but, come on…) Films, of course, are tough—give me complete box sets of Godard, Allen, Cassavetes and Imamura. Throw in The Big Lebowski, Lawrence of Arabia, and Xanadu and I’m set.

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