There is a good reason Hollywood continually makes Animal House wannabes and avoids producing films that actually focus on academia. Kids prefer their college movies to be about the fun stuff. And so a movie like Old School grossed $75 million while another Luke Wilson comedy called Tenure currently lacks a distributor. The latter film may also be hilarious, as a satire of the tenure process, but if it doesn’t concentrate more on beer bongs and naked co-eds, it won’t attract as big an audience. And according to some scholars, it may not even resonate with them, because it couldn’t possibly be what the process is really like. Film blogger and associate professor Chuck Tryon was quoted about the film last year as saying, “my ongoing pursuit of tenure typically involves me sitting in front of my laptop until 1 a.m., I don’t know how interesting that would be to watch.”
And evident by the scathing reviews from Sundance of John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, it appears another film about academia has failed to make a strong case for the subject matter. Too bad for the late David Foster Wallace, whose stories were adapted for the film, that Gus Van Sant wasn’t at the helm. A decade ago, in an interview with Van Sant, Wallace pretty much gushed that Good Will Hunting is the most accurate film about academia ever made. Do we agree with him? Let’s just say there’s not a whole lot of competition for such an honor. But in our attempt to recognize the ten best films about academia, Good Will Hunting doesn’t quite make the top spot.
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John Krasinski is best known for his role as Jim on NBC’s The Office, but he originally got into acting because he’d attended a table reading of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and he decided he wanted to stick with it when he realized how smart acting could be. He began pursuing the film rights to Brief Interviews, and at a suggestion from co-star Rainn Wilson he decided to direct it himself.
Cut to Sundance 2009, where his adaptation of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men was in competition. Spout attended a small press conference with Krasinski at Sundance where he spoke about adapting Foster Wallace’s collection of short stories, his first time directing, and why he’s not ready to leave The Office.
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My Bloody Valentine 3D isn’t worth watching in one dimension, let alone three. But it does serve to spark some good conversation. What other gimmicks have boosted the box office of sub-par films? What does good contemporary horror look like? Neil Marshall’s The Descent offers a refreshing palette cleanser. Also, what do horror and porn have in common, besides cheap nudity?
Karina checks in from Park City with some hits and misses from this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Moon, Hump Day, and The September Issue were worth writing home about, while Paper Hearts and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men will quietly fall into obscurity (we hope).
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FilmCouch 105 [47:09m]:
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(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)
0:00 - Intro
3:22 - Psychoanalyzing a listener based on his favorite films
8:15 - My Bloody Valentine 3D, gimmicks throughout movie history
16:22 - Humanizing horror vs. porn with blood
31:12 - Sundance
filmcouch-105
I’ve scoured the various Sundance schedules and picked out the 13 films that I’m most looking forward to over the course of the ten days in Park City. Note that this list does not include films that I’ve already seen, either at other festivals or through other means. It didn’t seem fair to mix up films I haven’t seen with those I have kind of an inside scoop on, and anyway, you’ll hear about those films soon enough — this is purely a catalog of my own current anticipations.
1 & 2: Moon and The Clone Returns Home
It’s the Philosophical Astronaut Double Feature! First, Sam Rockwell stars in Moon (the feature debut of Duncan Jones, AKA Zowie Bowie, David’s son) as a contract in a space pod, alone save for his trusty robot, who is nudged by the monotony (or, moonotony) of life in space towards an existential crisis. Then, there’s Clone, a Japanese feature executive produced by Wim Wenders, about a cloned astronaut who “flees the lab in search of his childhood home [and] finds his own lifeless body in a space suit. Mistaking it for his brother, he continues his journey carrying the body on his back.” Seriously, go read the Sundance catalogue description — it’s maybe the most evocative festival guide copy I’ve ever read. Clone is in the World Dramatic competition, Moon is a Premiere.
3. Humpday
A bromance directed by a broad. Lynn Shelton’s follow-up to My Effortless Brilliance (and her return to Park City after taking the Grand Prize at Slamdance in 2006 for her first feature, We Go Way Back) stars Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair) and Joshua Leonard (The Blair Witch Project) as two college buddies who reunite as thirtysomethings and end up entering an amateur porn contest. Defintiely the domestic Narrative Competition feature that’s come up most in conversation with friends and colleagues since the lineup was announced.
4. The September Issue
RJ Cutler’s portrait of editor Anna Wintour spans the nine months of work that go into the creation of fashion’s annual bible, the September issue of VOGUE. I’m bit of a sucker for fashion documentaries, but even if you’re not, one hopes Cutler (producer of The War Room, director of A Perfect Candidate) will apply lessons learned in the deep end of politics to the politics of the superficial.
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I’m wary of passing along a rumor involving the recently deceased, but I thought this would be of too much interest to too many people to pass up. Devin at CHUD says he has a source who claims that David Foster Wallace was working on adapting his epic, legendary novel Infinite Jest into a screenplay just before he died over the weekend of an apparent suicide. According to Devin, Wallace collaborated with writer Sam Jones (director of the Wilco doc I Am Trying to Break Your Heart) on an adaptation “as recently as last year.”
It’s probably worth noting that without Wallace around to refute it, any source could say anything, and even if this project did exist, there’s no guarantee that anything will come of it. Of course, as Devin points out, death sells, so I guess its possible that some exec might take it upon themselves to try to rush out a quickie version of a completely unfilmable novel in an attempt to tempt Wallace’s saddendened fans into the theater. If that does happen, we’ll be the first in line to fantasy cast Joelle Van Dyne, but as of this writing, Wallace’s sole IMDb credit is in association with John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and we imagine that’s the way it’ll stay.
Writer/novelist David Foster Wallace has reportedly been found dead of an apparent suicide. In 1996, Wallace wrote this Premiere Magazine story about David Lynch, which is widely considered (at least, by me and my friends) to be the greatest set visit story of all time. Wallace’s collection of short stories Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is the basis of the forthcoming feature directorial debut from actor John Krasinski. Wallce was 46. More details here and here.
