Criterion, who had already shown the Wes Anderson love with their Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic discs, announced back in 2007 that they were going to be putting out an edition of Bottle Rocket. This was met with much joy, especially because the previously released version, which came out back in 1996, was about as bare bones as you could get. The only real special feature it could claim was widescreen on one side of the disc, and full screen on the other. Big whoop.

The new version, which just came out in late 2008 has a ton of features, and is available in both standard and Blu-ray editions. But it also contains one of the single most sour notes ever hit in an Anderson DVD. It’s so extremely painful that it makes the package almost worth avoiding.

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Writer / director Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes opens in various locations over the next few weeks, starting with Austin, Texas this weekend. If you’ve heard about this film, then you’ve probably been waiting on it at least since it played Sundance earlier this year (it premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2007). If you haven’t heard about it, then you need to.

Nacho is one of those filmmakers who could make an amazing film with five million dollars, or with five bucks, because he’s all about the writing. Some of his short films feature only one camera setup, but they are incredibly funny because of the writing. One even features the same shot, over and over, and somehow it gets funnier each time.

Below is our primer to the best of Nacho on YouTube, which you can watch and explore as Timecrimes gets closer. It won’t exactly prepare you for the movie, but it’ll give you some insight into his sense of humor. We explored a few of these during our interview with Nacho at Fantastic Fest (where they showed many of these on a big screen in a theater), but here’s a guide chock full of shortage.

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“What is indie cinema?” asks Richard Vine at The Guardian. He runs though a brief history of Indiewood, notes that the London Film Festival put Azazel Jacobs, Barry Jenkins and Joe Swanberg on a panel promoting a new wave of truly independent filmmaking, and then rhetorically wonders if his initial question is irrelevant:

But is indie a meaningful term anymore, or is it just shorthand for “cool”, “edgy” or “offbeat”? Does it matter if the so-called faux-indie production methods result in decent films such as Juno and Little Miss Sunshine that play at easy-to-access multiplexes alongside the CGI sequels and threequels?

To answer the three questions posed in the above paragraph: Yes, no, yes. What follows is essentially the same argument I’ve made one thousand times over the past three years, but apparently there are still some people who need to hear it.

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Above is a screencap of a ScreenDaily headline as seen in my Google Reader yesterday. I don’t actually subscribe to ScreenDaily, so I couldn’t read the story, but it appears to indicate that troubled distributor ThinkFilm’s international sales division has taken on the job of repping the troubling Down and Dirty Pictures, as well as the latest film from the guy who made Il Postino, for sale in Cannes.

This *could* be part of the answer to the question posed at the top of AJ Schnack’s second post today on THINK’s troubles: “What is Mark Urman doing in Cannes when the company has no money to pay anyone?” But it seems like the situation has become a little too dire for THINKFilm to bail themselves out on a couple of commissions.
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At his new Salon blog, Andrew O’Hehir asks:

Are the Indiewood movies gradually sucking money and life out of the genuine independents, meaning smaller distributors without a big studio’s marketing muscle behind them?

Answer: Yes.

Glad we could sort that out.

• Anthony Kaufman investigates the “little mini-studio” of producer Paul Mezey, the man behind a host of notable recent indies, including Sugar and Momma’s Man. What’s Mezey’s secret? Location. Says the Pennsylvania-based producer, “I would have sunk long ago if I had to raise a family in New York.”
• Future of Classic points to Classic Cinema Online, a site which offers almost full-screen streams of public domain classics and foreign films. Like the 1936 version of Sweeney Todd, for starters.
• Lady Wakasa informs us that the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be screening a new print of one of Louise Brooks’ early films, Beggars of Life.
• This is where we start getting smutty: Tilda Swinton took her 29-year-old boyfriend to the BAFTAs whilst “68-year-old John Byrne, her partner of 18 years, stayed at home in the north of Scotland, looking after the couple’s ten-year-old twins Xavier and Honor.” Why can’t she have a reality show?
• Finally, “in honor of Valentine’s Day,” i09 has “started asking random people to tell us about their science fiction sex experiences.” I guess I’ve never had a “science fiction sex experience”, because I have no idea what that means.

Benten Films‘ second superbly-packaged DVD set (they previously released Joe Swanberg’s LOL) hits stores today. The set includes two films directed by Aaron Katz: Dance Party, USA, a kind of correction to Larry Clark’s KIDS, set in Portland and starring exquisitely natural local teens; and the Independent Spirit Award-nominated Quiet City, which I previously reviewed here. Both films are about a young boy and girl who venture out into urban spaces looking for an authentic experience. What sets them apart from traditional coming-of-age stories is, in part, the patience Katz shows in allowing his characters to take the time to settle into a tentative trust together. The films are both languid and totally economical; in terms of action, virtually nothing “happens,” and yet if there’s any fat to cut on either, I can’t find it.

In Dance Party, we follow Gus, a teenage lothario whose sexual exploits seem rooted in a need to have a kernel of truth on which to base the elaborate stories with which he regales his friend/protege Bill, to a Fourth of July house party. Within minutes, Gus has talked a previously unknown girl into bed, but when that’s over––Katz cuts straight from the initiation of the flirtation to Gus rolling off the anonymous female like a cold wave––he still needs someone to talk to.

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So. Tired. Of. Talking. About. Juno.

Look, let’s get one thing straight: in that post that I wrote earlier this week,  I wasn’t making a statement about Juno’s quality. I’ve done that elsewhere, but at this point it seems like my energy would be best directed elsewhere–it’s not THAT offensive, and it’s certainly better than Little Miss Sunshine. All I was saying, is that the idea that this film has “crossed over” from an “indie” sphere to mainstream success is a fiction created and promoted by Fox Searchlight in order to align Juno with past “crossover” successes. This is working for them, so that’s great. But the idea that Juno is “small”, that it’s some kind of an underdog––either at the box office or within the clusterfuck of award’s season––is categorically insane.

It’s also somewhat troubling to think that if this kind of marketing coup works so well once, it’ll almost certainly work again, and at some point, there won’t be room in the marketplace for actual “small” films that have actually “crossed over”, because they’ll be pushed out of the conversation by studio films (I don’t care how much Juno cost to produce–it was paid for by a studio and it has the full benefit of a studio’s marketing apparatus) masquerading as “small” “crossovers.”

I don’t think I have anything left to say about this, but feel free to have at it/me in the comments.

I’ve read two stories in two hours that refer to Juno as “crossover hit.” I’m not denying that it is, so far, a hit, both with audiences and with critics. But tell me again how this film––made by a not-exactly-maverick director for a studio specialty division, starring three known actors and one tabloid staple, targeted at teens and young adults, both thematically and stylistically indebted (or, at the very least, related) to previous hits like Superbad, Ghost World and Napoleon Dynamite––qualifies as a “crossover”?

Yes, Searchlight bought “indie” credibility by taking Juno to a bunch of festivals and rolling it out slowly. But we’re also talking about a film that’s been advertising on NYTimes.com for over three months. This is so clearly a studio film that, in a bit of smart awards season strategy, has been sold by its distributor as an indie. Why are journalists who should know better playing along?

Preston Miller’s Jones offers an outsider’s perspective on contemporary New York rarely seen on film, and almost never acknowledged by natives. As the camera tracks star Trey Albright strolling the streets in real time, through neon-overlit Times Square and streetlamp-orange midtown side streets, Miller transforms some of the most personality-devoid sections of the city into a kind of paradise of anonymity. Times Square may be a sanitized tourist trap to you and me, but in Jones, it’s a blank screen for an actual tourist’s fantasies of liberation.

Opening tomorrow night for a one-week run at the Pioneer Theater in New York, Jones is the kind of lo-fi, no budget, non-traditional narrative that, without the support of a festival like SXSW, has an extremely difficult time making waves. But Miller finds a few ingenious ways around his limitations, and the unprofessional look of the video is actually one of my favorite things about it. It’s shifty and unstable and, particularly in the eerie brightness it captures on real NYC streets, never film-like but often very pretty.

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• Sunday night strike stories: According to Carl DiOrio at The Hollywood Reporter, “The WGA will respond to studio reps’ latest contract proposal on new-media pay by advancing its own new proposals.” Though DiOrio admits that “the simple fact is that nobody knows where this roller-coaster ride of collective bargaining will end,” his is still the glass half-full take compared to Variety’s take. Dave McNary says that while the WGA has been surprisingly lenient in the past few days about allowing writers to work on benefits and awards shows, “Optimism for a quick resolution as negotiations resume Tuesday has faded to nearly nonexistent.”
• With Enchanted expectedly taking the number one spot at the overall box office for the second week in a row, the real story this weekend is in the specialty market. The Savages opened to the best per-screen average of the week, with $38,280 in each of its five locations; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly opened to $85,300 across three screens, making it Julian Schnabel’s most impressive opening to date; and I’m Not There dropped a respectable 33% whilst expanding to 138 screens. To their credit, this time Variety managed to report it without being totally condescending.
• Deals: Ridley Scott will direct a Gucci family biopic for Fox 2000; Variety confirms fanboy whispers that Christian Bale is “closing in on the role of John Connor in Warner Bros.’ reboot of the Terminator franchise.”

This week on The Media Diet, we check in with Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis. Grant is the brain behind Filmbrain; Hillis is a freelance critic and reporter whose work can be found at Premiere, The Village Voice and his personal blog, Cinephiliac. Together, they’ve just launched Benten Films, a boutique DVD distribution company aimed at drawing attention to “overlooked gems that deserve greater recognition.” Benten’s first release, Joe Swanberg’s LOL, will hit stores on August 28 (more on that closer to the date). They’re also planning to release two films by Aaron Katz, Dance Party USA and Quiet City, sometime after both screen at The New Talkies festival in New York, which begins next week.

SPOUT: We start each installment of The Media Diet with the old desert island question: you’re packing your suitcase for life-long seclusion on a tropical island that happens to have a full entertainment system. What records, books, movies, video games, websites, etc do you bring with?
AARON: I’m a media whore, so this stream of consciousness might change in an hour: I’m watching Playtime, Once Upon a Time in the West, 2001, Wings of Desire, Suspiria, Penn & Teller Get Killed, and the collected works of Herzog, Buñuel, Altman, Godard, and the Marx Brothers. I’m listening to Bob Dylan, Radiohead, Zappa, James Kochalka Superstar, and the four actresses covering Blue Hearts songs in Linda Linda Linda. Also, if my island has internet and video games, who needs books? (Kidding!)
ANDREW: I’ll try to keep this sensible, i.e., what I could reasonably carry in my backpack. The only book I’d need (the only book anybody needs for that matter) is William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, for it says everything there is to say about the human condition. I’d like to have every note recorded by John Coltrane, some Nick Drake, Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, and that Scarlett Johansson album of Tom Waits covers. (No, I haven’t heard it, but, come on…) Films, of course, are tough—give me complete box sets of Godard, Allen, Cassavetes and Imamura. Throw in The Big Lebowski, Lawrence of Arabia, and Xanadu and I’m set.

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The debate over the New York Mayor’s Office proposal to more strictly regulate public photography has hit a kind of a fever pitch over the last week. A week ago today,  a group called Picture NY (which includes filmmaker Jem Cohen) organized a rally in downtown Manhattan that got quite a bit of local news attention. Around the same time, web comedy troupe Olde English released a protest video, done in the style of early-90s soft-rap. The clip seems to be on its way to viral classic status; since I wrote about it here at the beginning of the week, it’s been viewed about 13,000 times on SuperDeluxe, seemingly without any kind of formal promotion from the site. It’s super-broad and hyperbolic, but sadly, I think a case could be made that political media needs to be both in order to disseminate messages to web video audiences.

I think the protest itself is valid, and if you feel the same, you may want to sign this petition before it is submitted to meet the deadline for public comment, which is EOD today. However, like Stu VanAirsdale at The Reeler, I’m a little wary of how all the hoopla surrounding the protest has led to a distortion of what the debate is all about.

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We love it when two previously-blogged topics collide. According to Anthony Kaufman, filmmaker Jem Cohen (whose collaboration with Patti Smith I posted about here) sent out an email today asking friends and colleagues to join him in protesting proposed changes to New York City permit regulations for amateur photographers (which I wrote about previously here). As Cohen explains, the proposed changes (which would make permits necessary for any shoot involving more than two people and a hand-held camera that lasted over thirty minutes) would severely limit DIY photography and film/video making in the city:

The fact is that we simply CANNOT predict where, when, and how long we are going to film or photograph; we CANNOT afford expensive liability insurance policies; we occasionally NEED to work with other people or to use tripods to support our gear. (The regulations would, for example, effectively rule out a great deal of time-lapse photography which depends on tripods and cannot possibly be done with time limitations of 10 to 30 minutes, as well as the use of large format still cameras and long lenses).

One of Michael Bloomberg’s greatest successes as mayor has been his promotion of local film and television production. By offering some amazing tax incentives, the Bloomberg administration has re-established NYC as a feasible shooting location for indies. Kaufman says the proposed regulations would tarnish the city’s reputation as a haven for filmmakers pretty significantly. “If the New York Mayor’s Office of Film and TV really cares about New York as a vital indie filmmaking center,” he writes, “They need to stop putting in effect procedures that help Hollywood productions and cripple the low-budget mavens that once made this city the artistic capital of the world.”

If you want to join the protest, click through for the contact info on Anthony’s blog. The Mayor’s office is allegedly accepting feedback on this issue until August 3.