Steven Soderbergh was on hand at the Eccles Theater in Park City tonight to screen a “work-in-progress” cut of his latest low-budget digital picture for HDNet Films, The Girlfriend Experience. Starring porn star Sasha Grey as a high-end escort who alternately goes by the names Chelsea and Christine, the film is not the salacious, graphically sexual verite that fans of Grey’s previous filmography might have expected/hoped for. Instead, it’s a cold (although understandably, necessarily so), hands-off portrait of a certain New York City life about a month before the 2008 presidential election.

With panic over the economic crisis inescapable even in the extremely moneyed circles in which she does business, our heroine sees clients, argues with her live-in personal trainer boyfriend, brunches with a call girl friend, lunches with a journalist (played by real-life prostitution expose writer Mark Jacobson) and meets with a variety of men who can stand to help her “expand [her] business.” Through it all, she maintains an impenetrable (no pun intended) facade, until a “connection” with a new client and the manipulations of an online hooker review writer (played by none other than film critic/blogger Glenn Kenny, apparently typecast for his talent at cracking even the toughest girl’s shell via his written word) combine to damage her armor.

It’s probably not fair to offer a full review of a work-in-progress, but Experience fascinated me enough that I do want to throw out a few comments.

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So yesterday, the Los Angeles Film Critics made the stunning move of voting Wall-E as the Best Film of 2008. Stunning, because this is the first time the body has ever given their top honor to an animated film; stunning because last year, they gave it to the decidedly less commercial There Will Be Blood, thereby giving that film one of the boosts it needed to be nominated for Best Picture. The rest of the LAFCA awards were split amongst a wide range of films: Danny Boyle for director, Sean Penn for Actor, Happy-Go-Lucky’s Sally Hawkins as Actor, and, in the biggest wealth-spreading move of all, Waltz With Bashir as Best Animated Film.

Now, today, the New York Film Critics Circle are voting on thier awards as we speak, and the results are leaking in dribs and drabs via member Mike D’Angelo’s Twitter stream. Like their LA counterparts, the New York critics have so far shared the love amongst a number of pictures––Rachel Getting Married for its screenplay, Slumdog Millionaire for its cinematography, Hawkins for Actress, Mike Leigh for Best Director––and so unless Happy-Go-Lucky takes Best Picture, we can either call this magnanimity, or we can call it what it likely is: there is not a single film this year that stands head and shoulders above the rest.

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I might as well get this out of the way first: I loved Baz Luhrmann’s epic Australia. I was on the fence about seeing this, especially once I heard about the 165 minute running time, but I gave in and boy was I glad. It’s a sprawling epic with nods to classic films of the 30s and 40s, and besides featuring the eye candy combo of Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, it also introduces Brandon Walters, who is possibly the cutest child actor alive. If there was some sort of scientific cuteness scale, he’d break it.

Despite the beautiful vistas and the sweeping storyline, not everyone is loving it. After the press screening I attended, a bunch of us gathered on the street outside the theater to debate reactions. It was oddly dividing: people either hated it or loathed it. I’d spent part of the week with a friend from Australia, and he’d denounced it as cheesy, because they have two Aussies in the lead roles: Jackman doing a faux “crikey!” Australian accent, while Kidman actually has a faux British accent. He said most of his friends in Sydney felt the same way.

Here in the States, Australia’s detractors are saying a lot of the same things. So, I’m taking the top five critiques of Australia and refuting them. I might not be able to change the critics’ minds, but I’m hoping you’ll at least give the movie a chance in theaters. Spoilers ahead!

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Conservative film blogger Dirty Harry is often best ignored when he’s aggressively railing against the liberal Hollywood elite, but when he offers a faux-populist view of filmgoing that’s so obstinately limited in scope that it’s actually potentially dangerous, I have to say something.

The gist: the cursed Hollywood elite is once again pushing movies with purely elite appeal for awards, and audiences are not responding to these films because after years of reading reviews written by partisan elitists who are out of touch with What The People Want, they no longer trust film critics. Also, elitism! An excerpt:

From early predictors, it looks as though the ever-widening disconnect between Hollywood and their audience will reach into 2008. The Visitor, The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Rachel Getting Married… Any of these on your radar? Any of these captured your imagination?…what a sad statement that the films the industry are most proud of are met with almost complete indifference at the box office.

Dirty Harry’s commenters take it from there; the basic consensus is that if any of the above named films get the Best Picture nomination that should rightfully go to The Dark Knight, why they’ll … become really indignant about the tyranny of the liberal media? Not watch the Oscars? Boycott movie theaters? So, pretty much status quo, right?

Anyway. First things first: that Variety story he bases the post on is three weeks old, which is a lifetime in the prognostication game. And let’s leave aside the fact that neither Slumdog nor the Wrestler have opened anywhere yet, and that only a very small percentage of the population would admit to having their “imagination captured” by a Woody Allen film, even though Vicky is still on almost 100 screens almost three months after its release and is currently about a million dollars away from being Allen’s highest-grossing film in 22 years.

Regardless: Dirty Harry chooses to extrapolate two films named in that story as evidence that “the films the industry are most proud of are met with almost complete indifference at the box office”: Rachel Getting Married and The Visitor. I’m far more of a fan of one of these films than the other, but Harry’s assessment of audience “indifference” is misleading for both. As is common for him, he willfully refuses to acknowledge that expectations and accounting are different for films that open on 3 screens and then expand, than they are for films that roll right out into 3,000.

So, some numbers: …Read more

Every year some over-hyped award-laden independent film faces a critical backlash, dissenting writers who cry it ain’t all that. This year it’s Ballast. To quote Armond White, from the NY Press:

“Director-writer Lance Hammer shows a black Mississippi family torn apart by a double suicide attempt, drugs and alienation. But you have to see through these ludicrous black phantoms to the actual white middle-class fantasies at the film’s core.”

Maybe “backlash” is a strong term for a handful of disgruntled critics, but I detect a similar sense of unrest in the audience.

The second time I saw Ballast, I dragged a friend along to Manhattan’s Film Forum (where it recently closed after a brief run). I told her that this film was everything I had been arguing for in American cinema (mostly on internet message boards, in my drawers—sad, really): Its angelic patience, its reverence for faces, silences and subjective experience (with more watchful over-the-shoulder shots than a ‘Nam combat doc) could teach American audiences how to look and listen again. Second time around, I was able to appreciate these qualities even more, as the story became fairly transparent, cleverly delineated though it was. Second time around, it was all about the beauty.

I suspect it was the story that had some of the folks in the Film Forum audience sighing, whispering and even snickering uncontrollably. Story-wise, Ballast can be easily mistaken for an entry in the Why We Be Black genre—films which depict underclass African-Americans scratching and surviving and tearing each other apart. Such films are said to exist mainly for the delectation of white liberals who like to think of poor blacks as lovable to the degree that they are irrational, impulsive and self-destructive. Mighty Joe Young in a do-rag. The fallacy of placing Ballast in this genre is as tragic as the critical backlash against Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple adaptation, which reduced that film’s towering humanism to Song of the South T-N-T.

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• Mike Everleth passes on a philosophical Jonas Mekas quote on the purpose of critics/criticism: “If the critic has any function at all, it is to look for something good and beautiful around him, something that can help man to grow from inside; to try to bring it to the attention of others, explain it, interpret it — and not to clutch at some little pieces of dirt, or mistakes, or imperfections.”
• David Edelstein jumps into the Remembering Manny Farber fray, with a personal anecdote. “Once I made the mistake of saying I thought a film was ‘about’ something. ‘About…’ he said, softly, and glanced at Patricia. ‘How can we say what a film is ‘about’? There are so many things…’”
• Critic Robin Wood does the impossible: he narrows the entire Criterion Collection down to ten favorites.

Two weeks ago, David Edelstein attracted ridiculously outsized ire from the fanboy community for daring to do his job––ie, give his considered opinion on the cinematic value of The Dark Knight. Still, even the most vocal critics of Edelstein’s criticism didn’t really do anything more hostile than declare his review to be “bullshit.”

But other critics who reviewed the latest Batman film less than positively aren’t getting off so easily.

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When word got out that Angelina Jolie would be playing the French/Afro-Cuban Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart, a small but very vocal segment of the population jumped to decry the casting as racist. Labeling Jolie’s work in the film sight unseen a”blackface performance”, the blog Racialicious declared that Jolie (who is, you know, trying to save the world by adopting a bunch of kids of different races) should have known better than to accept the part. “Given that Jolie has two children of color, I would have thought that she might have been more sensitive to issues of race and the place of women of color instead of following in the footsteps of Al Jolson.” Even actress Thandie Newton (who was last seen in a paragon of cultural responsibility called Norbit) jumped into the debate, telling a UK tabloid that she was “shocked” Jolie had “been blacked up to play a black woman.”

Anyone who really knows the history of Hollywood blackface understands that it’s ridiculous to compare Jolie (who appears in Heart wearing a wig and a healthy dose of bronzer) to Jolson, who smeared shoe polish on his face in caricature of Black performers (a caricature that, it must be noted, was not generally considered racist at the time). Still, it’s been interesting to see how mainstream critics deal with the issue in their Mighty Heart write-ups. Newsweek devoted an entire paragraph to the issue:

The studio releasing Heart, Paramount Vantage, insists that Jolie’s makeup was not darkened for the role, and that any complexion variation is caused by the film’s lighting. If they are lying–which is probable–it’s only by a little. In costume and under natural light, Jolie looks, at most, a shade or two duskier than her natural complexion. Regardless, both Jolie and Pearl say they were blindsided by the charges. “I know that people are frustrated at the lack of great roles [for people of color], but I think they’ve picked the wrong example here,” Jolie says. Pearl is more pointed: “This is not about skin color. I wanted her to play me because I trust her.” She sighs. “Aren’t we past this?”

I haven’t found a review yet that professes Jolie’s makeup to be a problem. On the contrary: most high-profile film critics are male, and for them, a new Angelina Jolie movie is, like, the event of the year. Jolie dressed up as Mariane Pearl is not so much an opportunity to contemplate racial and cultural dynamics as it is an opportunity to fantasy role play. Anthony Lane, whose New Yorker review is devoted primarily to the “problem” of Jolie’s schizophrenic sexpot/saint split, contemplates Jolie’s “corkscrewed hair [and] tinted skin,” but is far more interested in her lips, which he dubs “the world\’s most recognizable mouth.” (He also makes the laughable suggestion that Jolie would have been somehow better suited to the career of blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield.) Certainly, no one seems to be getting more pleasure out of this than New York’s David Edelstein, who comes close to crossing the line of common decency by suggesting that Jolie has been “dipped in caramel.”

On the whole, A Mighty Heart is very much a film about reflection, perception, and projection. As a star, Jolie often functions as a blank screen for the projection of the audience’s desires. As usual, despite Jolie’s efforts to generate interest in the issues that she deems important, it seems to be much more interesting to talk about what’s it’s like to look at her.

We’ll have more Mighty Heart chatter on Friday’s edition of FilmCouch.

I should say upfront that I’m strangely ambivalent when it comes to Hostel mastermind Eli Roth. There’s a kind of sick humor baked into his baroque, balls-out extended death sequences, that, as a Dario Argento fan, I appreciate, but like most modern horror movies, sitting through the bad dialogue and endless setup that threads together the torture scenes is, actually, torture. On the other hand, I kind of get a kick out of Roth’s pretentions about the socio-political allegorical value of his movies. There’s something about the petulance of a horror movie director favorably comparing himself to Dick Cheney that I can’t resist.

That said, is it just me, or does this whiny, panicky, super-dramatic blog post on Roth’s MySpace page kind of read like those coked-up interviews Dirk Diggler gave Amber Waves for her documentary in Boogie Nights? It’s like the beleaguered filmmaker’s equivalent of the ill-advised drunk dial.

“All over the map” would be an appropriate phrase to use here, if there were a map in the world big enough to encompass all of Eli Roth’s paranoia. The ostensible purpose of the post is for Roth to announce that he’s taking some time off from filmmaking, but in attempting to explain that decision, he manages to cast blame on every conceivable outside force for therelative failure of Hostel 2. Piracy, he says, “is really hurting us, especially internationally.” He then jumps to blame film critics (who aren’t usually allowed to see allegedly “critic proof” films like this before they’re released) for allegedly reviewing the pirated workprint of the film instead of the completed version. Which critics did that? Roth “wouldn’t dignify them by mentioning them by name,” but he’s going to make damn sure they’ll lose all legal access to his films (which doesn’t seem like much of a threat, since these critics would apparently rather watch a pirated workprint than go to a press screening anyway). My favorite part is when Roth tells his fans they can help fight piracy with … piracy? “Flood file sharing services with fake Hostel II downloads just so no one can ever actually get the movie,” he declares.

A rant like this is obviously candy for for haters. Nikki Finke, one of the most vocal opponents of the so-called “torture porn” genre, ate it up. “Notice how it doesn’t even enter his mind that moviegoers rejected his twisted content of torture porn,” Finke sniped. “Maybe this year off will help Eli get a clue.” Roth is obviously playing passive-aggressive, putting himself out there as a victim so that his fans will rally around and beg him to make another movie. It’s hard to imagine a successful film director actual being so immature that they would not see how such a tactic would be doomed to backfire.

What’s the real problem with Hostel 2? Did everyone who really wanted to see it really watch it online before it opened? Could it just be that the movie industry is cyclical, and the torture porn cycle is simply dying its natural, inevitable death? For what it’s worth, the Horror Movies 101 group here at Spout hasn’t really shown much interest in the Hostel films. Whether or not you’re a Roth fan, does such an, um, impassioned message from a filmmaker make you any more or less likely to support their work?

Another interesting perspective from our film studies friend Dodd, known as “moviedodd” on Spout.

Friday means different things for different people, from getting out of town to hitting the bars for a long stretch of “unwinding.” For movie-lovers, it’s the ripe time to hit Rotten Tomatoes and check for reviews on the latest weekend releases. Usually everything seems in order, as most of the major releases have been branded positive or negative. However, there is sometimes one major release with nothing next to it. Despite the heavy promotion for weeks–sometimes months–on end, not one major critic has given his or her two cents. Have you ever noticed this?

I’m sure that by now most moviegoers are familiar with the films that are not screened for critics. Sometimes these are flicks that have been shelved for years. Other times they are fresh off the studio lot. It was recently announced that the long-delayed Ghost Rider will not be screened for critics. The action film features Nicholas Cage as a rough-around-the-edges biker with a CGI flaming skull for a head. Not screened for critics? Imagine that.

It seems quite clear why critics are forbidden to see these films. If a release has “disaster” written all over it, then it would be poor publicity to release it upon the masses with stamps of disapproval from the nation’s trusted film experts. However, people are beginning to get what’s behind non-exhibition for the critics. Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper even bestowed The Wagging Finger of Shame upon these films to indicate the foul smell they emanate.

While some may immediately recognize a dud, the tactic is certainly not flawed. Epic Movie recently debuted in the number one spot despite not being screened for critics and blatantly presenting itself in previews as one of the most awful things to hit screens this year. However, the unscreened comedy Let\’s Go to Prison was a monster flop in 2006 (this goes without mentioning possible box office competition).

As a self-proclaimed movie aficionado, I see this restriction as a kiss of death. On rare occasions, some titles are worth the blind venture into the multiplex. You better believe that a critical ban did not stop me from checking out Internet phenomenon Snakes on a Plane. However, it is easy to recognize when a movie studio is so ashamed of a picture that they keep it hidden from the press.

What is your take on the black sheep of the box office? Do you decide to go see if there’s potential in a film not screened for critics, or do you see a toe tag that might as well be marked “Dead on Arrival?”