“Why is it so hard to make a film about yourself?” asks Richard Rogers in Alexander Olch’s The Windmill Movie. He shortly thereafter unwittingly answers his own question via another question: “Is there anything to say?” Opening today at Film Forum in New York, Windmill is a kind of personal documentary by proxy. After his teacher/mentor/collaborator Rogers died of cancer, Olch was invited by Rogers’ widow, world-renowned photographer Susan Meiselas, to comb through the Harvard professor/documentarian’s vast archives of film and video, shot towards a hypothetical autobiographical movie that Rogers was never able to put together.
For Rogers, self-examination lead to a kind of tunnel-vision, embodied by an oft-seen image in Windmill of Rogers looking into the mirror from behind the camera. One of Windmill’s key ideas seems to be that the camera actually got in the way of Rogers’ ability to clearly see his own reflection. that, because of constant self-doubt as to whether he, as a white man born into money, had anything worthwhile to say, the apparatus through which he made his living filming other people couldn’t double as a tool through which to see himself. The service that Rogers provided to his subjects — of finding the truth in the raw material they offered up — Olch attempts to perform by any means necessary for his lost friend.
Matt Tynauer’s doc Valentino: The Last Emperor (see our Toronto coverage here) has been scheduled for a NY premiere at Film Forum since December, but now indieWIRE is reporting that the film will have a further theatrical rollout via Magnolia’s Truly Indie asissted self-distribution model.
This is interesting timing, because in the context of a conversation about self-distribution the other day, somebody asked me if Truly Indie was still running, and I couldn’t remember the last film I knew for sure that they helped to release. When the Valentino news broke, I went on Truly Indie’s website, and saw that they have been involved recently with the release of films I’ve either covered (Boogie Man) or at least heard of (Lake City, starring Sissy Spacek). It’s interesting that some of these releases would make news and others wouldn’t — I don’t know what it means, exactly, but it’s interesting.
As economic woes turn to economic nightmares, comparisons to the Great Depression are a time a dozen. But what about movies? How did the movies of the ’30s respond to the crisis of the day? A series of pre-code Depression era films is being shown now at Film Forum, under the title Breadlines and Champagne. We take a look at American Madness, A Man’s Castle, and Our Daily Bread.
But what of the current crisis? Are there a slew of modern day Depression movies in the works? Maybe. Tom Hanks is rumored to be starring as a pensive barista in an adaptation of the riches-to-rags bestselling book, How Starbucks Saved My Life.
If you live in New York and you pay attention to the movies (or if you don’t live here but you read about film across the blogosphere, say), then it’s probably safe to assume you are aware of Film Forum’s Breadlines & Champagne series, running now through March 5th. All the films are shown in 35mm, plenty are not available on DVD and every day there’s a new 2-for-1 double bill of 1930s Depression-era cinema. This Saturday, the ever-dreaded (around here, at least) and always-plastic Valentine’s Day offers a delicious dream pairing sure to propel its audience back outside with all the right Hallmark-approved sentiment appropriate to gaudy reds and garish pinks and overpriced (and often terrible) chocolate: Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) followed by Mitchel Leisen’s Easy Living (1937). Indeed, Film Forum’s program has a David Thomson endorsement that says, “If you paired [Easy Living] with My Man Godfrey, you’d have a beautiful portrait of money in New York—and a happy audience.”
I think the phrase I used was “petit-point-on-Kleenex,” and a lot of it seemed to have that situation. But no, I think people know more about film now than they knew then. And I think critics really have a more accurate sense of how pictures are put together, and why certain things work the way they do. People know a little more about the business. There were so many great pictures in the ’70s; I think, gradually, people were looking at them in a serious way.
Didion was responding to a question from Hillis inregards to her circa 1973 essay “In Hollywood,” in which she also declared that there are only three “non-Industry people in New York whose version of Hollywood corresponds at any point with the reality of the place” –– all daughters of former moguls –– and includes “reviewers being courted by Industry people” amongst those “who do not understand the mise of the local scene” and are thus likely to try to flirt at a Hollywood dinner party.
In the IFC interview, Didion also praises The Reader, talks about the future of the Tuesday Weld-starring adaptation of Play it as it Lays, and refuses to lament the loss of old, seedy New York.
The Sundance Film Festival had it’s first major deal go down Saturday night as young distributor Senator Entertainment (in a co-venture with Sony Pictures Worldwide) picked up North American rights to Antoine Fuqua’s admittedly unfinished Brooklyn’s Finest for a price tag of less than $5 million (with a marketing commitment of $10 million).
Other acquisitions made just before and since the festival began include the following:
Another doc, Brothers at War, was bought by Samuel Goldwyn Films for a U.S. theatrical release.
Danish documentary Burma VJwent to HBO for a theatrical run at NYC’s Film Forum and cable broadcast.
E1 Films Canada picked up Canadian rights to Sophie Barthes’ Cold Souls.
Sony Classics finally confirmed that it had indeed bought North American rights to Carlos Cuaron’s Rudo y Cursi.
All these pickups have been added to SpoutBlog’s Sundance Deals chart, which will continue to be updated throughout the festival. So remember to keep checking back and bookmark the post if you haven’t yet.
“Tell me why I should go see a fucking movie that’s in Mennonite!” — Joshua Rothkopf.
Consider the gauntlet thrown down. The above quote comes from a “pubcast” posted last week by Aaron Hillis on his first day as editor of GreenCine Daily. In this conversation between Hillis, Rothkopf, David Fear and Matt Zoller-Seitz, about where film criticism currently is and where they’d like to see it go, the verdict seemed to be that everyone would like to see more clear-headed advocacy, free of snark and academic flourish. The film implicitly referenced is that pullquote Silent Light– which, though made by Carlos Reygadas in an Mexican Mennonite community and featuring a number of real-life Mennonites in lieu of professional actors, is not “in Mennonite,” but the obscure German dialect Plautdietsch. That kind of quibble, of course, doesn’t really matter. What does matter, is a) that Silent Light is finally having its official for-profit US premiere tomorrow at Film Forum in New York City, and b) Rothkopf’s point is valid. The thing most expressed by most Stateside writers (including myself) to audiences about this near-masterpiece has nothing to do with what’s actually on screen. It’s that, since the film’s debut at Cannes in 2007, Silent Light been rather difficult to see.
That wasn’t intended as a pun, but maybe it should be taken as one: though Light’s path to US distribution has been both thorny and worth noting, it’s also a relatively painless thing to put into plain language. The experience of actually watching Silent Light is not summarized so easily. At its basest level, Silent Light is a film about the gulf between what we can explain (based on evidence and experience and a common language for things that happen to all people) and things we can’t, things which push our understanding of the way the universe works and what it means to be a part of it. Like any number of visually extraordinary epics about big ideas which open up new avenues of interpretation on each viewing (2001 is the example that, perhaps oddly, comes quickest to my mind), words are not always its best advertisements.
This is what I can say, in the plainest language in which I can say it. …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.
This review originally appeared during the Sundance Film Festival. Ballast opens in New York today.
Ballast is the kind of movie that I’m predisposed to enjoy––a slow, score-free and sometimes actually silent character study, offering the chance to spend some time watching real-ish people floating in and out of a crisis point, demanding that we engage by refusing to pander for that engagement––and yet its wonders still crept up on me. But falling for a movie is like falling for anything, I guess; you don’t really know it’s happening until the undeniable gut punch.
For me, that moment came about two thirds of the way through Ballast, with a shot of a young boy lying on the floor, listening to adults speak off camera while absentmindedly stroking the belly of a giant dog. Like every shot in Lance Hammer’s feature directorial debut, it’s dead simple but beautifully composed, and it gets you by playing hard to get.
Oscilloscope, the fledgling distribution label spearheaded by the Beastie Boy formerly known as MCA, has picked up Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, which premiered at Cannes to raves from some but measured praise from me. It’ll open at Film Forum on December 10. If his boys don’t try to push Michelle Williams for an Oscar nod the same year her baby daddy has a posthumous nomination all but locked down, Adam Yauch needs to check his head.
Ted Johnson has details on the many film oriented events happening at the Democratic National Convention next month––or, as he calls it, “the Sundance of politics.” I think I might go and cover them. Would you like that?
Sophia from Golden Girls, ie Estelle Getty, has died.
While I was in Park City, Film Forum hosted a two-week run of Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s high-design, dream-like classic about the reunion of a man and woman who may or may not have had an affair the previous summer. The Playlist hit one of the last screenings before the print hit the road for rep houses around the country (check your local listings blah blah blah), and was reminded of the music video for the 1994 Blur song, “To The End”. I was a huge Blur fan in the mid-90s, but didn’t see Marienbad until 1999 or so, so that’s my excuse for never having made the connection. But The Playlist is right––”To The End” is “a direct pastiche homage” to Marienbad, except in many ways, a music video is a much more ideal format than a feature film for the elliptical tyle and nebulous substance that’s being borrowed.
See the video above; there’s a clip from Marienbad at The Playlist for comparison.
I’ve never seen Richard Fleischer’s CinemaScope Noir Violent Saturday, but with a name like that, how can it not be great? Film Forum here in New York will be screening it for a week starting February 29; their press release describes it as star-studded day-in-the-life of a small town, where a trio of bank robbers (including Lee Marvin) collide with a larcenous librarian (Sylvia Sidney), Tommy Noonan as voyeuristic bank manager, and “the usually menacing Ernest Borgnine as a gentle Amish farmer.” WOW.
I’ve embedded the film’s title sequence above. It’s not much, but it’s enough to start to get a feel for the amazing look of the picture–it’s like a 1950s noir dressed up as a 1970s Western. Again: WOW. I’ll be at True/False and then SXSW for most of the film’s run at Film Forum, but I’ll definitely try to catch a press screening and report back.
Chicago: Nothing cuts through a mid-summer haze like the sound of Isabella Rossellini warbling a Bobby Vinton song. My alma mater the Art Institute of Chicago is sponsoring a month-long festival of David Lynch films. This week offers three chances to see Blue Velvet in the gorgeous Gene Siskel Theater. And what luck! If you prefer your Italian women to keep mouths shut, there’s an Antonioni retrospective in the very same theater complex. Via ScreenGrab.
Seattle: Quick, go home and change–you’ve finally got an audience for that Ruby Keeler impression you’ve been practicing. Cineoke starts tonight at the Jewelbox Theater at 8pm. Sponsored by the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Cineoke is basically karaoke set to your favorite scene from your favorite movie musical. The organizers say they have hundreds of songs to choose from, but you’re also welcome to bring your own DVD or cued-up VHS. More info here [via Wes Kim].
New York: You have just four more nights to catch what is essentially the New York cinephile sequel event of the summer. Though not a literal sequel to Army of Shadows by any means, Le Doulos is another re-release of another Jean-Pierre Melville masterpiece, and it’s again packing a single screen at the Film Forum screen. Jean-Paul Belmondo (all dressed up like Bogart two years before Godard went there again in Pierrot le Fou) sneaks his way around a world where every criminal dreams of gathering some money and a girl and retreating to “a place with no cops and no hoods.” In a film flooded with casual violence, Belmondo’s character uses his charisma as his most efficient weapon. I’d see it ten times between now and Thursday … if I didn’t have anything else to do. See more at FilmForum.org.
To have your event included in a future Cinephile Calendar, please send info to Karina AT Spout DOT com.
Posting will be light here this afternoon–it’s a slooooooow post-holiday news day, and I’m planning to spend the better part of the afternoon at Film Forum swooning over Jean-Paul Belmondo in a new print of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos. To get into the mood, I went to YouTube and searched for “Belmondo.” I found this trailer for A Woman is A Woman, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 “musical” starring Belmondo, Anna Karina, and Jean-Claude Brialy. In it, Godard explains (via wall-to-wall voice over) his Renoir-inspired approach to on-the-set improvisation. It’s semi-NSFW, but considering it’s a beautiful summer Friday afternoon, you’re probably not at work, anyway.
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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The Sundance Film Festival had it’s first major deal go down Saturday night as young distributor Senator Entertainment (in a co-venture with Sony Pictures Worldwide) picked up North American rights to Antoine Fuqua’s admittedly unfinished 
Oscilloscope, the fledgling distribution label spearheaded by the Beastie Boy formerly known as MCA, 
