I’m not sure what it means that one weekend, I sit on a film festival panel about criticism and barely get a word in edgewise, and the next weekend become the center of a scandal on another film festival panel while actually physically attending yet another film festival on the opposite side of the globe. I guess I am more interesting in absentia. More remarkable is that, thanks to the magic of Twitter, I was able to comment on an argument about myself from 7,000 miles away, in virtual real time.
To recap for the Twitilliterate: there was a panel on film criticism at the Hamptons International Film Festival this weekend. I was not there; I was, and still am, in Abu Dhabi at the Middle East International Film Festival (see my coverage here). According to Michael Tully, on that panel Karen Durbin (film critic for Elle, with whom I shared space on another panel the week before at Woodstock) mentioned my writing on this blog as an example of high quality “in-depth criticism” happening on the web. When the conversation shifted to the “internet’s democratization of authoritative/professional voices,” Durbin again brought up my name as an example of something worthwhile online. Then things got weird.
According to Tully’s report at /Hammer to Nail, NY Press critic Armond White then “dismissively reminded Durbin that he was proud to be a member of a professional organization. When she asked him if he’d read Longworth’s writing at Spout, he replied that he had and stressed that she/they were not a member of their own organization [the New York Film Critics Circle] for a reason, adding, ‘The reason is they don’t rate.’” After that, there was apparently some heated cross talk, and “it felt like all hell was about to break loose, but instead of turning into a full-blown war, everyone regrouped and took the discussion in another direction.”
It’s hard for me to know how to respond to the criticisms leveled against me without having been there to hear them for myself, but I can try to speak to the concept of professionalism in general as I think it applies to me. This entire panel has been reduced to “Armond White Disses Karina Longworth,” but I find it hard to believe that this is all really about Armond White thinking that I am a bad writer. If there are several ways to interpret this incident, I chose to believe, as Tully put it, that White “didn’t actually know who Durbin was referring to but he knew that she was talking about internet writing and that was enough to warrant a curt dismissal (hence, his use of the word ‘they’ instead of ‘she’).” I think this is about death.
Luke and Brie Are On a First Date, which world premiered in the Hamptons last weekend, is the debut feature by Chad Hartigan, a frequent collaborator of Aaron Katz, and there are definitely some superficial similarities between the two filmmakers’ work. Like Katz’sQuiet City, Luke and Brie follows two attractive young people (George Ducker and Meghan Webster) around a city as they break through awkward uncertainty to forge a tentative romantic connection, and with their dreamy, super-intimate videography, both films have a way of enveloping a viewer in the action (or what passes for action), ultimately serving as delivery vehicles for the kind of heightened realism that marks an unexpectedly life-changing night out. But Luke and Brie plays its drama much closer to the surface, and through a little bit of self-reflexivity, a film that’s virtually wall-to-wall conversation manages to avoid feeling too talky.
Hartigan, who is a Los Angeles-based box office analyst by day, said after the Hamptons screening that Luke and Brie, based structurally on his own first date with his current girlfriend, was shot in 5 days on a budget of $3000. The small scale of the project opens it up to an obvious criticism: surely, all of us could come up with a single night in our romantic lives that seems worthy of dramatization, and many of us could round up some friends and scrape together a few dollars and take a week off work to tell it. So what makes Luke and Brie special? Maybe nothing, and maybe that’s it — maybe it’s not interesting because it’s entering into unchartered territory, but because it takes us through universal, well-worn feelings and makes them feel new. With his camera often seeming to float over faces in extreme close-up, Hartigan’s micro-focus on the nerves, uncertainties, and ambiguities, the posturing and reflex self-medication and unexpected moments of honesty that fuel the night so nails the harrowing aspect of navigating modern romance — in which it’s always easier to do nothing than to do what one really wants — that he’s able to turn the film’s ultimate surrender to traditional romantic closure into something of a surprise.
I had a bit more to say about Luke and Brie on this week’s episode of FilmCouch. The trailer is above, and future screening information is here. The film is still on the festival circuit and does not have distribution.
Those who have spent the last three or four years following the parallel production nightmares of Fanboys and 5-25-77would be excused for assuming that all films involving teenagers and early cuts of Star Wars films are cursed. The former, which Kevin reviewed at Comic-Con, should have been the nerd toast of summer 2007, but reshoots, reedits and a scuffle with the Weinsteins over the film’s pesky downer undercurrent mandated a number of shuffles down the calendar; it’s now tentatively scheduled to hit theaters at the end of next month. Geek excitement for 5-25-77 hit fever pitch when the film’s first trailer hit the web way back in January 2006 (and subsequently the won Golden Trailer for the best promo for a film that wasn’t actually released — yes, such an award exists). A rough cut screening (apparently, very rough) followed a year and a half later, and a year and a half after that, Patrick Read Johnson’s long MIA autobiographical epic, now simply called ‘77, had its official World Premiere this weekend at the Hamptons Film Festival, where it won a Heineken-sponsored indie auteur award. But don’t get too excited yet — it’s still not finished.
As you can see above, Floridian turned Brooklynite Holly Herrick knows a thing or two about flowers, but this is just where her expertise begins. The programmer of Sarasota’s quickly emerging film festival has taken up programming duties at the Hamptons Film Festival, which kicks off on Wednesday. We spoke recently about why Agnes Varda’s new film shook her up, the new record from The Walkmen and why she’s looking forward to Examined Life so much. …Read more
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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I’m not sure what it means that one weekend, I sit on a film festival panel about criticism and barely get a word in edgewise, and the next weekend become the center of a scandal on another film festival panel while actually physically attending yet another film festival on the opposite side of the globe. I guess I am more interesting in absentia. More remarkable is that, thanks to the 
