If there’s a single crippling irony to the explosion of web video over the last half decade, it’s this: no single piece of media created specifically for online distribution has so far engaged the masses as deeply as the bits of cultural detritus, from cat videos to classic films, that end up online unofficially, accidentally and/or illegally. Taking into account his own viewing habits and those of the post-internet generation, with Stingray SamCory McAbee set out to make a film that could be watched in discreet ten-minutes segments while still maintaining the narrative and image quality of the widescreen experience.
And so several months after premiering at Sundance, Stingray Sam became available for purchase in a variety of different formats from McAbee’s website, while the filmmaker continued to tour the world accompanying the film to festival screenings and other theatrical events. When the six-part musical space western screened last month at Fantastic Fest, McAbee and I met up at the new Alamo Drafthouse-adjacent clubhouse The Highball to talk about science fiction as political allegory, the peaks and valleys within the landscape of web video, and the further adventures of Stingray and the Quasar Kid.
At the screening last night, you said that Stingray Sam is political, whereas your earlier film, The American Astronaut, was personal. What are the politics, as you see them, in Stingray Sam?
Right after the US bombed Iraq, a woman from Copenhagen came and interviewed me for an art magazine. She was talking about American Astronaut, and she said, “Right now, Europeans are very angry at America because of what your government is doing, and they’re starting to feel like they don’t like Americans.” But, she said, Europeans always enjoyed loving American culture, and The American Astronaut had all the things they enjoyed loving about America.
If you can imagine Mike Leigh directing an In the Loop-esque deadpan comedy embedded within a British version of The Sopranos, in which Tony is an embittered ex-hippie in passive-aggressive conflict with his pot-dulled but surprisingly ruthless adult son, then you might be able to wrap your head around Down Terrace, which won the juried Best Picture and Best Screenplay prizes in the Next Wave competition at Fantastic Fest on Monday.
At the start of the film, 30-something Karl (Robin Hill, who also co-wrote with director Ben Weatley) and his father Bill (Robert Hill) get out of jail and set to work finding out who ratted them out to the police so they can seek revenge. That logline implies that Down Terrace is a lot more action-packed than it is; in fact, most of the film features father and son sitting around the house, drinking and smoking, idly bickering, jamming on their guitars, and waiting for the two or three associates who they suspect may have had something to do with it to drop in for a drink. If these guys were ever truly on-the-ball criminals (Bill makes it hard to give them the benefit of the doubt when he starts name dropping Timothy Leary), lethargy has set in. Karl seems particularly resentful of his role in the family business. A typical lament: “I was thinking I should avenge his death but — is this bad? — I just don’t want to.”
The formula for a productive, engaging debate on the state of indie film? Take a festival founder and a controversial filmmaker, throw them in a boxing ring, and add a hundred or so hecklers and a lot of cheap booze. Also, a stars and stripes unitard wouldn’t hurt. And, voila — the circular indie film apocalypse conversation finally gets interesting.
On Monday evening, Fantastic Fest commandeered the South Austin Gym (conveniently located in the same mini-mall as the festival’s two key venues, the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar and the new Highball, a former Salvation Army store converted into a bar/bowling alley/event venue by Alamo mastermind Tim League) to throw a throwdown featuring battles of both “body and spirit” between various friends of the festival. The basic format seemed to change with every bout, but the basic concept was simple: the opponents would first take the stage to debate a given topic ostensibly of interest to the Fantastic masses, and a winner for the brains portion of the battle would be declared via audience applause. Then, each debater would step out from behind their podium, install a mouth guard, and box two rounds so that a champion could be declared based on brawn (or, more likely, luck). The first three rounds, featuring an assortment of online critics and Austin favorites were well received, but the main event was worth waiting for: League, the co-founder and guiding spirit of Fantastic Fest, vs much-maligned filmmaker and experienced boxer Uwe Boll. The debate topic: Independent film is dying and/or dead.
The imbalance of the physical match between slight-of-stature League and trained killing machine Boll was its key selling point. The hypeman/ref ran down Boll’s list of qualifications: “He’s rumored to have a PhD in everything! It’s rumored that he’s the reason Germany reunited! He’s rumored to be making Miss Pacman this fall! He’s also trained as a fighter, which is more than I can say for his opponent!” The fight, it was said, “will later be known as The Timothy League Memorial Debate.”
Let it not be said that today’s nerds are indifferent to history. For the second year in a row, Fantastic Fest has set aside a portion of its program to pay tribute to classic pink films. Think of these unclassifiable softcore B movies as Japan’s answer to Roger Corman: some are schlocky fun, some are unwatchable, others are subversive works of art. And as Corman’s assembly line gave way to the 1970s American new wave, pinku has given many of Japan’s major mainstream filmmakers their start. The most notorious graduate of the pink school, at least in the States circa now, is Yojiro Takita, whose schmaltzy Departures won the Oscar earlier this year for Best Foreign Language film. The Oscar winning filmmaker is responsible for at least a dozen of the hundreds of pink films in the loose Groper Train franchise. What’s the distinguishing characteristic of a Groper Train film? According to Nadav Streett of the pink film distributor Pink Eiga, who along with Ayumu Oda and was on hand for a Fantastic Fest screening on Sunday of Takita’s 1984 Groper Train: Wedding Capriccio, “You have to have a train. And a preferably there is a pervert, who is hanging out groping women.”
The initial lineup was announced yesterday for the 2009 edition of Fantastic Fest, the genre festival that takes place in late September at Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse. Programmed by the inimitable Tim League and friends, this year’s festival will kick off witht he premiere of Jared Hess‘ third feature, Gentleman Broncos, starring Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords. Other highlights from the selections thus far announced:
Cory McAbee’s incredible episodic “musical space western” Stingray Sam (trailer above)
Morphia, Alexei Balabanov’s follow-up to the delightfully grotesque indictment of Soviet decay Cargo 200 (to which I gave a special prize as a member of a jury at last year’s Fantastic Fest)
Buratino: Son of Pinocchio, described as a musical in which “the Estonian son of Pinocchio who quickly forms a rock band, commits terrorist acts, falls in love and gets embroiled in a maniac’s plot to conquer the world”
Two relatively recent Magnolia acquisitions: the highly-anticipated (at least, if our search logs are any indication) District 13 Ultimatum; and Ti West’s excellent homage to 80s horror, The House of the Devil
The Legend is Alive, a Vietnamese martial arts film which would seem to join the Late Bloomer sub-genre of weird-ass Asian pictures about violent disabled adults
Love Exposure, the 4-hour upskirt epic which recently won the grand prize at the New York Asian Film Festival
The Revenant, which would seem to join Joe Dante’s Homecoming in the sub-genre of films about Iraq veterans returning from the dead, and which recently won the audience award for best narrative at CineVegas
Truffle, a Canadian film about a truffle miner whose “incredibly sensitive nose … makes him valuable, especially to the sinister pair of furriers plotting to seize control of the local truffle industry with the help of their furry, mind-controlling creatures.” Attendees of one screening will be treated to a five-coure truffle dinner, akin to the event that accompanied last year’s FF screening of the Brazilian prison drama/food porn hybrid Estomago.
There’s the SXSW of indie premieres, and then there’s the stuff the fanboys come for; the home of Ain’t It Cool News and the Alamo Drafthouse has an understandably enthusiastic place in its slate for midnight gorefests. So relax fanboys: Sam Raimi’s “work-in-progress” screening of May 29’s Drag Me To Hell (missing ambient sound and end credits, but generally looking ready to judge) showed the final product will give you what you want. There will be cartoonish gore and gleeful bad taste; yes, there will be Evil Dead shout-outs. Alison Lohman shall suffer the punishment of beautiful blonde women everywhere: she will atone for her selfishness, and she will do it in a wet t-shirt.
They’re calling it the “Geek Telluride.” In addition to their previously announced late-night lineup, SXSW has announced they’re partnering with Fantastic Fest to show six films at this year’s festival, “which will serve as a kind of sampler of the midnight genre programming Fantastic Fest has made its signature.” Unlike Telluride, which traditionally keeps the lineup under wraps until the day before the projectors roll, SXSW promises to unveil their Fantastic half dozen “later this month.” We’ll keep you posted.
In other SX news, the full panel lineup is out. In addition to actual notables like Ricky Van Veen, the Daily Kos guy, John Pierson, Bob Berney and Elvis Mitchell, I’ll be there, chirping in on a panel about film criticism. The panel will be moderated by Gerald Peary, director of the documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, which premieres at the festival, and which I am (very briefly) in.
Another reminder: if you have a film at SXSW this year and want to be part of our preview coverage (which will start appearing on SpoutBlog next week), do get in touch. karina AT spout DOT com, please.
A version of this review previously appeared during Fantastic Fest. There is a new addendum at the bottom of the post. Let the Right One In opens in select cities today, as the first release in Magnet’s Six Shooter Series.
After months and months of anticipation, encompassing countless breathlessreviews, surprise festival accolades, and angry warnings from supporters of the Swedish vampire film that I’d better stop dismissing it as “The Swedish Vampire Film”, there was probably no way in frozen-over Scandinavian hell that Let the Right One In could have lived up to the hype. So — sorry — but I don’t think it’s a masterpiece, nor do I see it breaking significant new ground. In transmuting universal real-world fears of the other and of mortality into the tropes of the supernatural, it’s simply doing what good horror movies have always done, and always should do. That said, it’s hard not to find its widespread popularity to be extremely encouraging. Aside from its lovely cinematography and sensitive child-actor performances, Right One’s real selling point is the humanist gild it lays on its genre lily. Maybe this is why I’m less than blown away — it’s hardly the first film I’ve seen recently which uses basic genre elements to delve deeper into everyday human horrors — but if there seems to be more of an appetite for this kind of horror than the Saw V kind of horror, that has to be a good thing.
This might be the least safe-for-work thing I’ve ever blogged. Cargo 200, Alexei Balabanov’s gruesome indictment of Russian devolution circa 1984 which was one of my favorite films from this year’s Fantastic Fest (it also played Telluride and Toronto in 2007), is available for viewing in nine parts on YouTube.
This is either the best way to watch this film or the worst. As I noted in my review, one of the best things about Cargo is its slow build –– it takes forever for anything actually disturbing to happen, but then once shit goes bad, it just gets worse and worse and worse –– and the power of the mounting revulsion might get lost if you’re watching it in chunks. That said, you also have the option to either skip, or skip directly towards, the really, really sick stuff. For the record, that gets started in part four. It gets much, much worse in part seven. Enjoy!
Most 12 year old kids are busy updating their MySpace pages or planning on what they’ll wear to school the next day, but not Emily Hagins. She decided to direct her own feature film about zombies entitled Pathogen after watching a screening of Undead, and Zombie Girl: The Movie is documentary that chronicles her effort from concept to the first screening. Emily’s a local gal, so this movie was a shoe-in for this year’s Fantastic Fest.
Filmmakers Aaron Marshall, Eric Mauck and Justin Johnson stumbled across Emily and her movie when they saw a local ad looking for people who wanted to be zombies in a movie, and when they found out how old Emily was, they decided to do a documentary about the film, which turned into 146 hours of footage that had to be broken down into a digestible size.
Although a really good short film can catapult a director into feature filmmaking, much like Gil Kenan’s short film The Lark led to the chance to direct the CGI film Monster House for Robert Zemeckis and the just-completed live action The City of Ember , film festivals often show short films that most audiences won’t have a chance to see anywhere else. Fantastic Fest had a shorts playing in front of many of the features, and they also had two separate shorts screenings: Short Fuse for live action shorts, and Animated Shorts for, well… animated shorts. On first glance, the long-titled The Facts In The Case Of Mister Hollow doesn’t appear to be animation, but slowly you come to realize that it’s a series of still photographs that tell a very chilling story. It was my favorite amongst the animated shorts, and hopefully it’ll be seen by more audiences soon.
Fantastic Fest ended last night with a party in a cave to celebrate the closing night film, City of Ember, directed by Gil Kenan and starring Bill Murray. But I took the above photo the night before, and given the ubiquity of both karaoke and Nacho Vigalondos throughout the week, it seems like a pretty fitting final image of Fantastic Fest 2008. We’ll have a few most FF2008 posts trickling out across the weekend, before we shift bears to focus on the New York Film Festival on Monday (I’m ransacking my closet for something to wear to the opening night party as we speak. Wish me luck.) In the meantime, you can find much, much more photo documentation on our Flickr page.
The one face that has been prevalent all over Fantastic Fest for the past week, even more so than Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League, has been Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo. His movie Timecrimes premiered to U.S. audiences here last year, and was snapped up by Magnolia; there’s now an Americanized version in the works. He’s been at pretty much every single screening, every event, and in every condition: tired, wired, drunk, sober, sleepy, awake.
He doesn’t have a feature film at the festival this year, but he did come with about 90 minutes worth of his short films, and those played as a single screening full of Nacho’s wacky blend of British and Spanish humor. Check out the full interview with him below, where you can also watch several of his shorts.
As the shit hits the fan on Wall St., a more gradual, but equally serious shake-up is happening in the world of independent film. Paul shares stories from Independent Film Week, a tumultuous clash of ideas about what the future of cinema sans Hollywood will look like.
Karina checks in to tell us about Fantastic Fest. Along with alcohol, karaoke, and BBQ, she’s enjoyed the films Cargo 200 and Ex Drummer.
Choke, the new film based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), comes out tonight. Is this Sundance alum truly provocative cinema, or just the same old thing with some extra sex thrown in?
After months and months of anticipation, encompassing countless breathlessreviews, surprise festival accolades, and angry warnings from supporters of the Swedish vampire film that I’d better stop dismissing it as “The Swedish Vampire Film”, there was probably no way in frozen-over Scandinavian hell that Let the Right One In could have lived up to the hype. So––sorry––but I don’t think it’s a masterpiece. That said, I find its widespread popularity to be extremely encouraging. Aside from its lovely cinematography and sensitive child-actor performances, Right One’s real selling point is the humanist gild it lays on its genre lilly. Maybe this is why I’m less than blown-away by it––it’s hardly the first film I’ve seen this week which uses basic genre tropes to delve deeper into everyday human horrors––but if this a new trend, I’ll have more, please.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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They’re calling it the “Geek Telluride.” In addition to their 
