“I don’t know what this is,” said Jem Cohen, in his introduction to last night’s screening of his new work Empires of Tin at the IFC Center. He went on to call it “a documentary musical hallucination,” which really only chips the surface of this astounding, frustrating, one-of-a-kind piece.
This review was originally published during the 2009 SXSW Film Festival. Died Young, Stayed Pretty opens in New York today at the IFC Center. There is also an opening party tonight at the 92Y Tribeca.
I’ve hung out with enough graphic design nerds to know how tedious their fetish can be to the unconverted, and the options for a documentary about rock posters seemed to be either that kind of geekery or hipster hagiography. “Culture is that thing you shovel out of your window in the evening,” interviewee Mike King wisely announces in Died Young, Stayed Pretty; “otherwise, it will drown you.” The danger in such a project is obviously that kind of self-valorizing mythology, when your clique’s self-evident importance is inaccessible (or just stupid-looking) to outsiders. But Eileen Yaghoobian’s documentary is unexpectedly excellent, a bracingly free-form group portrait of people who only recently discovered each other’s existence when the founding of GigPosters.com showed isolated artists they weren’t just working alone in the dark. I’ll have to take Yaghoobian’s word for it that eminently quotable interviewees like Art Charney and Tom Hazelmyer are actually luminaries of the poster world, but this is one entertaining film regardless of how its profiled community receives it .
Last night, Stranger Than Fiction and the Woodstock Film Festival co-presented a screening of Swimming to Cambodia, Jonathan Demme’s 1987 performance document of Spalding Gray’s monologue ruminating on sex, drugs, genocide, “perfect moments” and “invisible clouds of evil.” Inspired by Gray’s real-life experience playing a small role in Roland Jaffe’s The Killing Fields (”I’m not making up any of these stories I’m telling you tonight,” he swears. “Except for the fact that the banana sticks to wall when it hits. Everything else is true.”), Swimming, the first of three films based on Gray’s monologues, easily eclipses Jaffe’s film in contemporary freshness and replayability. Gray’s stream-of-consciousness style of deeply personal social documentary has never been equalled on as mainstream a scale. Gray may have been great at self-documentation, but it’s the subtle sinematic shaping employed by Demme, cinematographer John Bailey, editor Carole Littleton and composer Laurie Anderson that takes the raw material of a guy sitting in front of a map at a desk with a glass of water and a MacDonalds notebook, and turns it into great documentary.
In her second feature length documentary Examined Life, which opens today at IFC Center, Canadian born, Georgia bred documentarian Astra Taylor whips around the Tri-State area and beyond with eight of the planet’s most renown contemporary philosophers and probes their ever active brains for answers to questions large and small, elemental and abstract. Engaging a diverse and eclectic group of lauded philosophers and/or public intellectuals to step away from the Ivory Tower and into airports and lakesides, Tompkins Square Park and quaint row boats, Taylor’s subjects include Martha Nussbaum, Avital Rennel, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Mr. Prophesy Deliverance!himself, Cornel West, who at one point happily summarizes himself as a “blues man in the life of the mind, I’m a jazz man in the world of ideas”.
Heady but built for maximum glide, Examined Life expands upon the director’s previous outing, a 2005 portrait of Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek (who appears here, discussing the fascism of ecology next to a trash dump) which was also distributed, to wide acclaim, by Zeitgeist Films. This time she incorporates a broad spectrum of contemporary philosophical viewpoints within a series of lengthy, wide ranging chats that are often held while in motion through spaces that illustrate the topics at hand. The film ultimately creates a dynamic new template for a primarily verbal cinema that remains both visually satisfying and endearingly self-reflexive.
It seems somewhat appropriate then that I caught up with Astra via cell phone, while she strolled around Austin, TX.
Matteo Garrone’s Italian mob film Gomorrah found the highest per-theatre-average debut of 2009 this President’s Day weekend, according to four-day estimates provided this afternoon by Rentrak. On 5 screens, the IFC release grossed $102,702 for a $20,540 average. That even topped overall box office leader Friday The 13th’s $14,56- PTA. It also set a record for the biggest opening weekend ever at the IFC Center in New York City, grossing an estimated $32,000. Gomorrah played to sold-out houses all weekend-long, with hundreds of would-be movie patrons turned away. The strong numbers for Gomorrah helped lead the IFC Center complex to its highest grossing weekend of all-time with an estimated take of $53,870, beating the previous record weekend by nearly $10,000. The previous highest grossing weekend for the IFC Center was $43,337 from January 25-27, 2008 in conjunction with the opening of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” On Sunday, February 15th, the IFC Center broke the record for its biggest one-day gross, taking in more than $20,167 in a single day.
The indie box office boom in the face of otherwise total economi despair continues.. Via indieWIRE.
What do you do with Josh Fox’s Memorial Day, a sporadically engaging (but far too simple-minded to be as troubling as it wants to be) hypothetical slice-of-life which exists to use spring break to explain away Abu Ghraib? When I saw the film at CineVegas last summer, Memorial Day certainly seemed to have fewer defenders than detractors, and I found it to be alternately mesmerizing, infuriating, boring and eye-rollingly facile. I think it fails as a narrative film, even as it occasionally stuns as a work of pure cinema. And yet, I don’t think it’s dismissable outright.
In the middle of Tom Hall’s interview with Arnaud Desplechin, director of my current favorite film of the year A Christmas Tale, indieWIRE has embedded a clip from the film, which I’ve in turn stolen and embedded above. This scene, in which Catherine Deneuve’s ailing (but still gorgeous) matriarch Junon goes shopping with her son’s new girlfriend (played by Emmanuelle Devos), incorporates the film’s running joke about Angela Bassett.
A Christmas Tale opens in New York and L.A. on November 14, but in the intervening 11 days the IFC Center is hosting a mini-retrospective of Desplechin’s films. I’m hoping to make it out to see L’Aimee, Desplechin’s personal documentary about his own family, andMy Sex Life (…Or How I Got Into An Argument), which stars Christmas‘ Mathieu Almaric, and which I’ve somehow never seen. Check out the full details on the program here.
Standing in front of a packed crowd at the IFC Center last night before the SXSW-presented New York City premiere of his doc Of All The Things, Jody Lambert contemplated his good fortune. “To have Janet Pierson introduce the movie, to be part of Stranger Than Fiction, to have John Pierson send you an email…it’s kind of like Bonertown, USA.”
To say that there were boners all around might be an exaggeration, but Lambert’s goofy, feel-good film definitely pleased the crowd. Jody’s father Dennis Lambert is the songwriter and/or producer of dozens of mainstream pop-rock hits, from “Baby Come Back” (after the screening, Lambert noted that its use in Swiffer commercials has been “very lucrative”) to “Ain’t No Woman” to (my personal favorite) “Do The Freddie.” After spending twenty-plus years writing hits for other artists, eventually Lambert moved down to Boca Raton to start a new life with a new wife and daughter, and a new career as a real estate agent. But “Bags and Things”, the solo album that Lambert released in the early 70s which flopped in the States, is a huge hit in the Phillippines, and Things follows Lambert as he embarks on a tour of that country performing the songs from that album which have apparently become the standard soundtrack for Filipinos in love.
Ever since word broke at Toronto that IFC had picked up Steven Soderbergh’s Che for US distribution, there have been conflicting rumors as to how the company, known for its day-and-date theatrical and VOD releases, would handle a film of this length, scope, and potential Oscar cachet. At yesterday’s NYFF press conference, Soderbergh talked a bit about the “roadshow” concept, through which the entire two-part film will first hit theaters.
He confirmed that in each market the film enters, it’ll screen for just one week, on one screen, with ticket buyers paying a premium (probably $25 each, including full-color printed program) for the experience. “I think that’s the ideal way to see it,” the director said, although he acknowledged that “it’s a lot to ask of an audience, to throw away an entire day.”
A source told me last night that IFC is banking that a lot of people are going to want to throw away their days on Che.
Last week, when I interviewed Whit Stillman on the occasion of Metropolitan’s premiere on Hulu, I asked him what movies he’d recently seen and enjoyed, and though he said that “seeing the trailers puts me off many more films than makes me want to see,” he noted that he did enjoy Sex and the City, which was lensed by his own frequent cinematographer John Thomas. Then, this weekend, Stillman sent me an email:
I spaced badly when you asked about films I’d liked recently. I loved Godfrey Cheshire’s Moving Midway which I saw at New Directors and which is coming out Sept. 12th. I’m going back to my film sales agent days in helping Godfrey trying to find it releases abroad.
Midway, film critic Cheshire’s personal documentary about his cousin’s plan to physically move the family plantation, will be at the IFC Center for two weeks. More info here.
“Sexuality is one of the great mysteries of humanity.” Or so declares famous, 50-something novelist Charles Saint-Denis, near the beginning of Claude Chabrol’s latest film, A Girl Cut in Two. A bit too much of an on-the-nose of a thesis statement for a film about various crimes of passion? It might have been, if not for the portentousness with which actor Francois Berleand delivers the line, and the distance at which Chabrol places the camera in order to shoot it. Even if Charles’ young, vivacious but sexually naive weather girl mistress Gabrielle (a just-barely grown-up Ludivine Sagnier) accepts each of her lovers words of supposed wisdom at face value, Chabrol doesn’t exactly give the impression that we should.
Gabrielle’s last name translates to “snow”, and the obvious joke seems to be that Charles seems to believe she’s pure as an un-mussed embankment until he starts driving her. But as Charles vacillates between the poles holding up his romantically mopey middle-age––Gabrielle, his work, and a long-standing wife who choses to deny rather than suffer over her “perfect man”’s indiscretions––his young love interest is also being courted by Paul Gaudens, a spoiled scion who won’t take her coy nos for an answer. Gabrielle bounces between the two, always with a wider eye for Charles who, paradoxically but inevitably, only wants her after he’s pushed her away.
The script is transposed from the story of Evelyn Nesbit, the early-20th century it girl whose teenage relationship with an older sexual mentor led to tragedy once she settled with someone more age-appropriate but far crazier. A cursory familiarity with how that real-life story turned out will spoil a few of Girl’s beats, but the constellation of plot points isn’t what’s important here. Though Girl does eventually build up to a murder, there’s no mystery concerning how or why––that crime happens out in the open, while the events that animate it are largely kept discreet. At 78, the living master of the French thriller is less interested in forensics than in the perplexities of violent acts a bit outside the jurisdiction of the French police––those that happen behind closed doors, inspired by the insanity of desire. The joke’s on Charles if he thinks that he, as one who strip-mines human behavior for a living, is closer to cracking the case than anyone else.
A click on the image above will take you to an exclusive clip from A Girl Cut in Two. The movie opens this Friday, August 15 in New York at the IFC Center & Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and will also be available On Demand via IFC in Theaters. It’ll roll out to further cities in the coming weeks.
Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths opens at the IFC Center in New York on Friday. This review is adapted from our coverage of the film at the SXSW Film Festival, where we also interviewed the director. Above: Brown shops and talks at Sundance.
Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths offers an immersion into the archaic miasma that is Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama. It’s the world’s oldest celebration of its kind, and tradition mandates that the two weeks worth of parties and parades are mostly racially segregated. Using Mardi Gras season as a microcosm for a portrait of contemporary race relations in the city, Brown gets a filmmaker’s dream gift in the black and white Mardi Gras associations’ selection of their queens.
Queen Stephanie, a black schoolteacher, is a descendant of a group of slaves who were transported on the Clothilde, the last slave ship to enter the US. When the Clothilde came ashore, there was a fire and the passengers escaped into the woods, ultimately settling in an area that came to be known as Africatown. Queen Helen Meaher, whose family now owns most of the land in Africatown, is a descendant of the company that brought the Clothilde over. “My people was on her people’s ship,” Stephanie says, with a slow, matter-of-fact nod. That nod confirms the film’s thesis: racism isn’t an outrage or even a spoken issue Mobile––it’s casual, habitual, and historically excused.
It’s Internet Week in New York City! That means all my Twitter friends are going to three parties a night and texting from each about about how bored/drunk/drowning in nerdy masculinity they are. Because they keep going back night after night, I have to assume that either the NY tech community is full of self-destructive masochists (probable) or these events are actually kind of fun (naaaahhhh).
I’m going to see what all the fuss is about tonight, as IndieGoGo, FILMMAKER Magazine and the IFC Center co-host an Internet Week event called Where Internet and Film Collide. The evening will begin with screenings of Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno shorts; one of Jamie Stuart’s short films produced during the annual New York Film Festival press screening grind; Beyond the Rave, an online series for which Lance Weiler created an interactive game; and web neo-Western The West Side, about which we’ve gushed previously. After the screenings, Stuart, Weiler, and West Side creators Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Leiberman will join Ari Kuschnir and Scott Thrift of web video studio M ss ng P eces and Christopher Barry, a digital media exec from the Sundance Channel for a panel discussion. I’ll Twitter it, I promise!
Shotgun Stories, the impressively accomplished feature debut of writer/director Jeff Nichols, has a few obvious affinities with the directorial work of its producer, David Gordon Green. Beyond the fact that both filmmakers have a demonstrated interest in the personal tragedies of working class families in the small-town South, much of the commonality lies in the aesthetic sense that Green has been fairly accused of adopting from Terrence Malick. But if Shotgun’s courting of visual pleasure via deliberate pacing and a certain transluscent golden glow fail to reinvent the wheel, at least credit Nichols with picking the seconds that suit the material. A lyrical story of feuding familial factions in Southern Arkansas, Shotgun gets off to a slow, quirk-leavened start, but as a seemingly minor character morphs from grating comic relief to major catalyst for action, the film gains weight and eventually snowballs into an undeniably affecting moral tragedy.
The worm turns and squirms in Frownland, an aptly named film made on the cheap in and around New York. An up-close, painfully intimate portrait of a hapless, manipulative schlub, a Loser with a capital L, the film offers for our horror and our empathy a creature whose very existence is a rebuke to the stultifying uniformity (the niceness, the neatness) of what now often passes for American independent cinema. Written and directed by Ronald Bronstein, making his feature-film debut, this is personal cinema at its most uncompromising and fierce.
The first paragraph of Manohla Dargis’ rave review of in the New York Times. Read the full thing here.
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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Matteo Garrone’s Italian mob film 
Standing in front of a packed crowd at the IFC Center last night before the SXSW-presented New York City premiere of his doc 
Ever since word broke at Toronto that 
