“I’m at the film festival. I’m at the mall multiplex. I’m at the combination film festival venue/mall multiplex.”
So I tweeted from the Toronto Film Festival this year, in a quick-wink rewrite of Das Racist’s avant-retarde one-liner critique of contemporary global capitalism and cultural homogenization, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” Twitter is rarely a venue for deep thoughts, and with that update, I was definitely being cute/glib. But the more time I spend watching allegedly non-commercial films in capitalist cathedrals round the world, the more it seems like there’s something there to this Das Racist analogy.
One of TIFF’s two mall multiplexes, the Varsity, completely reverts to festival screenings during the festival; I’m fairly sure the other, the AMC, gives many screens over to press and public screenings but holds on to a few for regular screenings of the usual Hollywood fare. As the mall multiplex becomes an increasingly ubiquitous film festival venue (how many festivals of size can you name that don’t make use of one at all?), it’s the latter tactic that’s more common. The dissemination of ostensible fine art film is only possible on any kind of grand scale thanks to these venues, virtually identical in every city that they appear in around the world, and thanks to their main business trafficking motion picture products that are as divorced from “cinema” as the fare sold at a combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell is divorced from their ostensible Italian and Mexican sources respectively. In a city like Abu Dhabi, that juxtaposition really throws into relief “festivalism,” as it has recently been derogatorily termed by A.O. Scott, as the embodiment of deviance. (See also an amusing alternate definition of Festivalism, involving the “metamorphosis of capitalism into something less predatory, that I found via an accident of Google)
When one considers what’s going on technologically and commercially, he said, there’s a real question about whether festivals “are going to be obsolete in a decade, because people won’t find them valuable anymore—they won’t be the platform from which people need to operate.”
Above, from a story in the Village Voice by John Anderson pegged to tonight’s opening of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, Geoff Gilmore sells the biggest event associated with his new employer by theorizing that it, and all festivals, may be on a long slide towards obsolescence.
Coincidentally, earlier this morning I watched the below video by JJ Lask, whose directorial debut On the Road With Judas premiered at Sundance in 2007, toured the country last year on the Range Life Roadshow, and is now available on DVD. “Don’t expect too much,” Lask says. “I’ve never had a girl come up to me after a show and say ‘I want to blow you,’ … I’ve never had a distributor come up to me and say, “Hey, I want to buy your movie … and blow you.’” Lask goes on to suggest that the real values of the film festival experience are the free wine and the cushy hotel rooms from which to work on a follow-up screenplay in peace.
CineVegas is quickly becoming one of my favorite stops on the festival circuit, and it’s not just because I have a probably unhealthy predilection towards the strange blend of optimism and despair that marks Vegas itself. The lineup for the year’s festival was released today, and once again there’s a lot to be excited about, including closing night film World’s Greatest Dad, lots of recent festival favorites (including Harmony & Me, Winnebago Man and Moon), a special screening of Attack of the 50ft Woman, and more. The full lineup is after the jump.
Woah. indieWIRE is reporting that Geoff Gilmore, a key player at the Sundance Film Festival for almost two full decades, is leaving that festival to take a job as Chief Creative Officer at Tribeca Enterprises, the New York organization that, amongst other things, is responsible for mounting the Tribeca Film Festival.
It seems too soon to assess What It All Means, but obviously, beyond each Festival’s assorted trials and tribulations, Sundance and Tribeca have had very different identities. Sundance is primarily associated with a certain type of actor-driven independent drama; Tribeca, in its brief history, has been most successful at unearthing international gems.
Of course, this is not the first sign that Tribeca has an interest in moving in more of a Sundance direction. In late 2007, Tribeca announced plans to streamline in the hopes of becoming more significant as an indie film market. At the time, Nancy Schafer lamented, “we haven’t had our Sex, Lies & Videotape yet. That’s what we want, and that’s what the industry wants.” Tribeca 2008 was my favorite installment of the festival yet, but beyond Jury Prize winner Let the Right One in, which was not a world premiere, it came and went without a breakout narrative hit. In light of this, the luring of Gilmore seems like the next logical step towards Tribeca’s long-ago stated mission.
Wells is a classic mix of online reactionary and keen insight, peppered with various “what the fuck” moments and the occasional non sequitur involving Paris Hilton and Al-Qaeda. To ring in the New Year, let’s take a quick look back at our favorite blogged remarks from the man who confused Mike D’Angelo with Ed Gonzalez, and whose random photos of restaurants and lawns oddly resemble–for lack of a better term–art. Also, any use of bold is for emphasis and my own editorial comments are in italics.
Happy New Year, Elephants
On New Year’s Eve, it sounds like Jeff was staying at a raucous party house in one of the Boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn? Who can tell these days.) Conditions were so bad that he was sadly driven to bar-hopping due to his neighbors:
I live below a family of animals — Hispanic party elephants — who stomp around and play music so loud that the building throbs and the plaster cracks. It’s a fairly safe bet they’re going to lose their minds tonight so I may as well just huddle down in the city and bounce around from bar to bar.
Follow-up in the comments from Wells:
People with a little class and breeding and a college degree don’t tend to be as noisy or boisterous or loutish as the commoners, cretins, galumphs, bad dressers, etc. The lower end of the gene pool. T’was ever thus.
During SXSW this past March, we invited filmmakers with movies at that festival to get in touch with us a few weeks before (and send screeners and any online video, if possible) so that we could highlightsome of the moreinteresting-lookingprojects before the fest, and get a jump on watching stuff so that we could ultimately post more reviews. Now we’re looking to extend the same invitation to any filmmakers who are planning to show work at Sundance or Slamdance next month. More details after the jump.
So, we’re taking the rest of the week off. Enjoy your, uh, eating and shopping? That’s what people do, right? (I’m half-English, so I’m only half willing to admit that Thanksgiving even exists.) But first, for your holiday browsing pleasure, here are a bunch of stories from this week that I meant to comment on but ran out of time. Let me know if there’s anything in particular that you’d like me to revisit in depth next week.
“Auteurism had Andrew Sarris. Abstract expressionism had Clement Greenberg. Punk rock had Lester Bangs. Where is the equivalent voice for today’s documentary scene?” So ponders Thom Powers, before offering a number of tips for those of us who might aim to fill the position.
“Is there room in that diverse [film festival] community for people of faith? For people of more conservative political beliefs? Or are film festivals only for the support and promotion of those who agree with a specific, left-of-center political philosophy? And therefore, must major film festivals — and their primary staff — have a de facto bias toward that philosphy?” AJ Schnack examines the implications of the Prop 8/Rich Raddon situation.
Eric Kohn visited the Futures of Entertainment conference, sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT. “As the conversations progressed, so too did a flurry of typing from numerous laptops throughout the audience: Microblogging and online chatter created a series of miniature conversations that converged into a unified whole.”
In the second of potentially three posts on Synechdoche, NY, Filmbrain runs Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut through the ringer of the Jungian concept of individuation. “The individuation process is about the uniting of opposites — good and evil, masculine and feminine, matter and spirit, body and psyche. There’s no question that Caden undertakes the journey, but he fails to become an individual, both literally and psychologically. Caden treats his life (both the conscious and unconscious elements) like a stage play, yet his attempt at directing from an omniscient position robs him of (in alchemical terms) the prima materia required for one to be a person.”
In the song “Range Life,” from their 1994 album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus sang about the frustrations of being a touring indie band on the summer festival circuit, settling for cred (”Hey, you’ve got to pay your dues before you pay your rent” ), while much more famous but arguably less talented artists sucked up the spotlight. Stuck on the disenfranchised end of this binary opposition, Malkmus brattily goads the behemoth bands reaping its spoils: “Stone Temple Pilots, they’re elegant bachelors…I will agree they deserve absolutely nothin’, nothin’ more than me.” In the chorus, Malkmus longs to be rid of the touring hassle: “If I could settle down, then I would settle down.”
When Todd Sklar named his indie film roadshow venture Range Life, the Pavement reference wasn’t coincidental. The same kind of imbalance cited by Malkmus in the middle of the so-called alternative music revolution has arguably gone on to infect the indie film world: the movies which least need the film festival as a platform benefit from it the most, but the little guys continue to play along (if they’re even invited to) because it’s the only game in town. You could say that Sklar’s Range Life, which is shepherding four truly independent films to 20+ cities in North America, is an attempt to shake up that model’s monopoly. But for Sklar, the Pavement reference goes deeper.
“The other thing that really struck a chord is that sarcastic chorus, talking about ’settling down,’” Sklar said this week. “That really connected with hopping in a van and taking the film on the road rather than having it showcased to the same crowd every month while we get free cheese and crackers and fruit leather in the filmmaker lounge. Don’t get me wrong, I do LOVE filmmaker lounges (and fruit leather in specific), but I truly think, and more so now than ever, filmmakers shouldn’t be settling down when they’ve finished their film. That should be when you’re most excited and most involved in the work.”
Crawford, David Modigliani’s documentary about George W. Bush’s adopted home town, becomes available today for free streaming on Hulu, with downloads to come via Amazon VOD and iTunes. Hulu is billing this as their first movie premiere, which hopefully is an indication that the site, a co-venture of super-mainstream media companies NBC and Fox, are prepared to showcase additional films straight off the festival circuit in the future.
The Texas company has become a name-brand over the past year or so for their film festival websites, which allow attendees to program their own schedules and rate the movies they’re seen, thereby allowing other attendees (and festival programmers, distributors, etc) to gauge a given film’s “buzz” in real time. B-Side has worked with festivals (Fantastic Fest, most recently) in the past to stream their films off of the festival’s own site, and has previously seen films from their Choice Indies slate premiere on IFC TV, before coming to iTunes.
But Crawford is, as far as I can tell, the first B-Side film to go directly from the festival circuit to a major onlie video portal. It looks like a smart move, not least because Crawford, unlike other Hulu features, is embeddable, and thus can easily serve as fuel for political blogs. Watch it above, or grab the code for your own blog here.
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.
Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’sParis, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which “attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture” and is also “modeled after the 1960s “it”-girl film Darling.” Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. “From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,” Powers told me in an email. “But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.”
Of course, the big question is why, and that’s something that no one seems willing to give up an answer for. As I’ve noted before, if it turns out that Hilton’s own life resembles the narrative of Darling, that might qualify as embarassing to a different kind of starlet (Orgies! Abortion! Glorified prostitution! Ennui!), but not Paris. As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, “the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.” Zeitchik didn’t name his own sources, who apparently didn’t offer details as to what, exactly, rubbed the celebutante the wrong way. Publicist Mark Pogachefsky’s statement on behalf of the filmmakers is extremely vague: “For a variety of reasons - which we are unable to discuss - the film will only be screened once. We are optimistic that the film will ultimately be released commercially, but we are not able to comment further.”
But I’ve got to wonder if there’s more to this than meets the eye. …Read more
It has come to my attention, via the Rope of Silicon post and SpoutBlog commenter Gould, that there is bad buzz in Telluride surrounding David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I’m in Telluride, and I hadn’t heard this bad buzz––the handful of people I’ve spoken to who saw the show reel either last night or this morning had generally positive things to day, aside from some general skepticism as to what the film’s reported two and a half hour final cut will look and feel and play like.
…it’s hard to tell from this reel whether or not the film is going to hold together. I don’t get the sense that he’s going for whimsy or magical realism, but it does seem like a real departure for Fincher. Hopefully the fanboys looking for another Fight Club won’t burn Fincher at the stake for branching out a bit.
Telluride is not like, say, Comic-Con; the crowd doesn’t boo or scream, and most attendees are less likely to walk out of a screening with a firmly settled opinion than they are to spend the rest of the weekend talking it out. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m right and the naysayers are wrong, but I do hope this movie doesn’t get a leg cut off before the picture’s locked thanks to the entire internet jumping to conclusions.
On Monday, I’m flying to Denver to spend a couple of days hanging around the Democratic National Convention before heading up to Telluride on Thursday. If I was reading that sentence unawares, two questions would inevitably come to mind. First: “Why, Karina, are you going to a political event when you have a movie blog to write?”
Answer: there actually are two major film events happening over the three days that I’ll be in town. The first, the Denver Film Society production Cinemocracy (previously mentioned here), will screen ten finalists in a short film competition that’s been winnowing down submissions online for months. You can watch the films and vote for your favorites here.
The second event is the Impact Film Festival. Founded this year by Jody Arlington, Jamie Shor and Kimball Stroud, IFF will screen “socially-themed documentary and dramatic films” every day at both the DNC and RNC. Films on the program include Battle in Seattle, I.O.U.S.A., and Flow. Check out the Bside page for info on the full lineup.
Earlier this week, Jonathan Marlow published a rant on GreenCine Daily, titled They didn’t build their sales model for you. Much of the piece is given over to a description of the dire state of distribution affairs for truly independent filmmakers. Marlow, who acquires films for GreenCine’s DVD-by-mail main site, essentially argues that filmmakers should put less weight on dreams of theatrical distribution and concentrate on the many new media options. I didn’t comment on this story earlier because, well, my reaction was pretty much the same as Agnes Varnum’s: “It reads to me as a good summary of where things have been for last couple of years in film sales, so my question is what’s the news? Do people really not know this information?”
Tom Hall also weighs in on the Marlow piece, from a festival programmer’s perspective: “Let me begin by taking exception to Marlow’s straw man, one that I have seen being built over and over again on panels and in discussions among filmmakers and programmers over the past few years; Film festivals are not, in fact, an ersatz distribution system for films.”
If you live in New York and/or read the blogs of people who do, chances are you’re aware of The Emily Gould Fiasco. Funnily enough, Juan and Victor Piñeiro, brothers as well as director and producer of Second Skin, have bared witness to several smaller-scale Emily Gould fiascos over the past decade and a half.
Finally, Paul Scheer explains why, although no one will admit to wanting it, Beverly Hills Cop 4 will make back twice its budget in its first weekend: “I’m like an abused sequel wife, I keep going back to theaters time and time again to get mercilessly kicked in the cinematic balls for having faith that a sequel can actually be good as it’s predecessors.”
Jeff Wells notes that Juno, which came in at the third spot at the box office over the weekend, is now besting both I Am Legend and the National Treasure sequel to sell more tickets than any other film during the week. At the rate it’s going, it looks certain to cross the $100 million mark by the end of awards season. To put it mildly, this strikes Wells as something of a surprise:
That’s a mindblower. I never would have called that in a million years. This is just a sweet and sharp little film. I wasn’t levitating after I first saw it in Toronto. I knew that I liked it because it was well-written and well-acted. I still know that. But for me, this makes two head-scratchers in a single night.
Really, Jeff? A teen sex comedy hipped up enough to attract 20-somethings, feminized just enough to attract tween girls, but not so girly that it turns off the Apatow crowd. Advertised EVERYWHERE. Plus, it’s probably the most crowd-pleasing movie to have played a festival in 2007. And you’re surprised that it’s making a lot of money? Seriously?
You would have had to have been stupid to have seen Juno with an audience at Telluride or Toronto and NOT imagined it performing at least as well as Superbad. Jeff Wells is not stupid. Is actively selling the fiction that this is a “surprise”/”crossover” hit a condition of accepting Juno skyscrapers on your site?
I swear to god, I want to stop talking about this, but they keep pulling me back in …
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.
filmcouch-114
CineVegas is quickly becoming one of my favorite stops on the festival circuit, and it’s not just because I have a probably unhealthy predilection towards the strange blend of optimism and despair that marks Vegas itself. The lineup for the year’s festival was released today, and once again there’s a lot to be excited about, including closing night film World’s Greatest Dad, lots of recent festival favorites (including Harmony & Me, Winnebago Man and Moon), a special screening of Attack of the 50ft Woman, and more. The full lineup is after the jump.
During SXSW this past March, 
It has come to my attention, via the 
On Monday, I’m flying to Denver to spend a couple of days hanging around the Democratic National Convention before heading up to Telluride on Thursday. If I was reading that sentence unawares, two questions would inevitably come to mind. First: “Why, Karina, are you going to a political event when you have a movie blog to write?”
Earlier this week, Jonathan Marlow published a rant on GreenCine Daily, titled 
