If you listen to this week’s episode of FilmCouch, you’ll hear me tell a sad story about why I no longer have my most beloved cable channels like Turner Classic Movies and IFC, and what happens to a girl when she’s hungover from her birthday party and is forced to lie on the couch all day without her premium channels (hint: it involves both Michael Ian Black and Kathy Bates. Be afraid.) But thankfully, I *do* still have the ability to pay Time Warner extra money for movies, so the next time I’m curled up in a fetal position on a Saturday afternoon, I’ll be able to watch David Zellner’s Goliath, which just debuted on IFC’s VOD-only Festival Direct service. Back at Sundance, Kevin Buist interviewed David and brother Nathan, and Joe Swanberg went shopping with them.
Here’s an excerpt from a comment by Variety writer Peter Debruge, left on a SXSW dispatch by Aaron Hillis on Glenn Kenny’s blog:
Pretty soon, it all reduces to semantics, but the label benefits those it describes in that it connects films that, on an individual basis, would be too small to register on most people’s radar. Would Hannah Takes the Stairs or Quiet City or Mutual Appreciation have warranted a NY Times piece on their own? (Then again, is the NYT even the right forum to discuss such films, which seem to do just fine with the more selective audience of the blogosphere?)
Debruge is here giving us an object lesson in why most applications of The M Word are really, really frustrating: the genre label becomes a polite form of thinly masking the condescending assumption that none of these films can stand on their own without it. Mutual Appreciation is not a film that needs a movement as a prerequisite, especially one which mostly coalesced after its premiere. As resolutely analog as it is, it also hardly fits in with Debruge’s wider argument that “important thing is that digital cameras, home editing software and the internet have enabled a new wave of filmmakers, many of whom have become very close friends, sharing equipment, ideas, cast and crew.”
This statement is not totally false, but at the risk of sounding like a cranky Marxist, it seems like he’s really talking about the means/tools of production. Goliath and Hannah Takes The Stairs might share an actor and certain technical commonalities, but I can’t imagine two films being more different in their sensibilities. By Debruge’s rationale,The Ten Commandments and The Tingler were part of the same “movement,” because both were shot on film cameras, both were released in movie theaters, both were produced by gimmicky showmen, and both productions employed Vincent Price.
Actually, now that I think about it, The Ten Commandments and The Tingler are basically the same movie. Never mind!
In another installment of his series of Sundance interviews, Joe Swanberg goes shopping for, um, “fine art” with David and Nathan Zellner, stars and co-directors of Goliath. The Zellners talk about working together as brothers, navigating the insanity of Sundance, and why they qualify as “total sluts.”
I did not expect to wake up this morning to a feed reader and email inbox full of stories about the full lineup for the 2008 SXSW Film Festival––the press release was not supposed to arrive until sometime this afternoon. But The Hollywood Reporter apparently broke the embargo on the information yesterday evening, so now it’s here. And it’s a LOT to process before coffee.
In a nutshell: we’re looking at new films from Michael Almereyda, Ashley Sabin and David Redmon, Joe Swanberg, Mary Bronstein, Lynn Shelton, and Frank V. Ross; Sundance hits American Teen, Gonzo, The Order of Myths, Baghead, and Goliath; and a number of buzzy films culled from recent international fests, including Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones doc Shine a Light, Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, Christophe Honore’s Love Songs, and Heavy Metal in Baghdad. All of that should be enough to make anyone happy, but of course, there’s also much, much more.
The full lineup is after the jump. We’ll have sickeningly exhaustive coverage of SXSW starting soon. The Festival itself begins March 7.
The festival is over, but we’ve still got a back-log of content to deliver. In this installment, I talk to Nathan and David Zellner. At last year’s festival their short about the mysteries of circumcision, Aftermath on Meadowlark Lane, got a lot of people talking. This year they return with Goliath, a feature about divorce, demotion, and a missing cat. For my money it has the best trailer of any film in the festival, check it out along with Chris’ thoughts here.
From what I hear, everyone is talking about Goliath, a film by the Zellner Brothers that premieres at Sundance this evening. But after watching the trailer, I have to wonder what has people so excited. Sure, I think it looks cheap and funny in a Me and You and Everyone We Knowsort of way — which isn’t a gripe, as Miranda July’s film was my favorite at the festival back in 2005 — but it also looks like something homemade and bound for YouTube, and I’m not the only person on the internet to say so. Fortunately, the film has support from the right people. On the Goliath Facebook page, SXSW producer Matt Dentler commented that it’s “an awesome, awesome movie. Truly.”
But Sundance is very different from Austin, and just because the Zellner Brothers have a loyal following back home doesn’t mean they’ll succeed in Park City. Then again, after excitedly watching Me and You three years ago, I never thought it was going to catch on with other people at Sundance let alone be a huge hit in the real world. Of course, the Zellners have already been to Sundance — every year since 2005, in fact. It could all change this year, though, with their first feature, the simple synopsis of which is as follows: “In the wake of a divorce, a man desperately searches for the one relic of the broken marriage- his pet cat ‘Goliath’, who has gone missing.”
So, I can’t wait to hear what festivalgoers think of the film after tonight’s premiere (or even from readers who view the trailer and wish they could be there). For those of you not in Park City, you’ll have to settle for this sorta funny clip. And maybe eventually the film’s website (Goliathismissing.com) won’t be down — damn that Sundance buzz for causing the bandwith to be exceeded — and we can investigate further what is so attractive about this little movie. Is it just the association with filmmaker Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation), who appears in the film? Is it just the popularity of the Zellner’s three shorts that have shown at Sundance in the past? I guess I could just go and find those films on the interweb and see …
Goliath premieres at the Prospector Square Theater tonight at 8:30 PM. It also screens at the Library tomorrow morning and Saturday morning and then in Salt Lake City on Saturday night.
As you may well know, the Spout team is knee-deep in Sundance, that juggernaut of American film festivals. For this episode of FilmCouch we present a conversation between the regulars (Paul, Kevin, Karina) and Filmspotting’s Adam Kempenaar about what we’re up to at the festival this year. Adam is looking forward to a pair of docs about legendary artists, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson. Among the many film’s on Karina’s to-see list are two movies by pairs of brothers: the Zellner brothers’ Goliath and the Duplass brothers’ Baghead. Kevin is hoping the Mexican near-future dystopian sci-fi film Sleep Dealer can live up to the expectations set by Cuarón’s Children of Men.
Yesterday, I made a list of five films amongst Sundance’s four competition slates that I’m particularly excited to see. Today, here’s a look at another film films that I’m looking forward to, culled from the Spectrum, New Frontier, and Park City at Midnight sidebars. This list was MUCH harder to weed down to five, and as you’ll see, I had to cheat a bit. Here we go…
Excerpt From the Official Synopsis: “Humorous and poignant, Momma’s Man wrestles with universal themes, but its strength lies in its deeply personal details. Writer/director Azazel Jacobs cast his own parents and shot the film in their apartment, where he grew up.”
Why I’m Interested: Jacobs “own parents” are Flo Jacobs and experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs; in the film’s press notes, he says he cast his own family because he “couldn’t picture anyone else in their bed, in their kitchen, or in their place (although Peter Falk and Shelly Duval would be in my movie-movie version of it).” If the notion of the guy who made Star Spangled to Death channeling Columbo isn’t enough for you, I don’t know what would be.
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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Here’s an excerpt from a comment by Variety writer Peter Debruge, left on a SXSW dispatch by Aaron Hillis on Glenn Kenny’s blog:
I did not expect to wake up this morning to a feed reader and email inbox full of stories about the full lineup for the 2008 SXSW Film Festival––the press release was not supposed to arrive until sometime this afternoon. But The Hollywood Reporter apparently 
