“Narrative Jackass.” That’s the genre shorthand Micheal Tully has invented to describe Benny and Josh Safdie’s latest short film, There is Nothing You Can Do, and it’s pretty fitting.
The film was shot by Josh on a tiny prosumer video camera on a real-life, New York City bus crowded with both actors and unknowing actual riders. It stars Eleonore Hendricks from The Pleasure of Being Robbed as a young mother, and Benny Safdie as an irate businessman who complains that the noise coming Eleonore’s baby is distracting him from reading his newspaper. Various regular Safdie associates, including Ronald Bronstein, are planted around the bus, and when Benny starts harassing Eleonore, some of them rise to her defense.
The Safdies and crew pull off the street theater element so flawlessly that I’d love to see them turn this into a regular series––but not so regular that average New Yorkers start to recognize their troupe.
It looks like John Waters has a new muse. In an interview with Pop Candy’s Whitney Matheson, the filmmaker discusses his upcoming Christmas movie Fruitcake––“imagine The Little Rascals if John Waters had directed it”––and has nothing but effusive praise for the film’s star, Johnny Knoxville:
Yeah, I love Johnny. He really personifies every male character that’s a good guy that I could write that would live in Baltimore. I think Jackass is very much in the spirit of what my early films were. He’s an anarchist, and I’m always happy to hang around anarchists. He’s a cultural anarchist.
Knoxville, of course, starred in Waters’ most recent feature, A Dirty Shame. And Waters has been vocal about his admiration of the prank punk turned actor before; he memorably stuck Jackass Number 2 in the (wait for it) number 2 slot of his Top Ten Films of 2006 list for Artforum, declaring it a triumph that Knoxville and his boys had the “number-one-grossing movie in America on its opening weekend—and the male stars eat shit and drink horse semen for real. They’re nude a lot, too. If this isn’t cultural terrorism, I don’t know what is.”
By now, we’re used to Waters cheerfully celebrating mainstream culture for co-opting his once-shocking provocations. I’ve never been entirely sure how I feel about it––complimenting a product of a Viacom subsidiary as an act of “cultural terrorism” is a little much, don’t you think?––but I don’t know…there’s something vaguely interesting about the idea of him taking this superfamous guy who he’s convinced is an “anarchist”, and putting him in a children’s film. Maybe Waters is finally co-opting his aesthetic back.
The Underwire spots the strike-assisted irony in that story from last week about the online release of the next installment of the Jackass franchise:
The studios are locked in a death grip with the Writers Guild of America over the future of digital entertainment. When negotiations began, the studios claimed there wasn’t yet enough money being made online for them to keep track of such new-fangled bangs and whistles. So, to prove their point that they’re not making any money online, Viacom is releasing a major feature film through the internet. Doh!
I don’t know if we can really classify a glorified blooper reel that would have gone direct to DVD anyway as “a major feature film,” but the argument’s still pretty solid. And Jackass is a particularly interesting example of the contested territory that the writers are striking over––although, I’m afraid that if I were to think too hard about someone “writing” something like the above, my brain might explode. In any case, can’t wait for the YouTube dramatization of this little twist in the saga to pop up on United Hollywood.
Two Paramount subdivisions are collaborating to produce Jackass 2.5, an almost-feature length, direct-to-internet sequel to last year’s massively successful Jackass: Number 2. The film will premiere at blockbuster.jackassworld.com, where it will be viewable for free (The Hollywood Reporter story doesn’t specify if it’ll be downloadable or streaming) for two weeks, at which point it will hop to other online and DVD venues, totally skipping theatrical release in favor of “light-speed reinvention of the customary distribution-window chain.”
Today’s dirty secret: I’m writing this post 16 hours before it will be published, and as of this second, the trades haven’t picked up this story yet. So I’ll just link to Matt Dentler: Luke Wilson, Richard Linklater and Zadi Diaz will judge web series for the Greenlight Awards, to be handed out in March at SXSW.
Steven Spielberg has issued a statement saying he’s not leaving Dreamworks. What if I issued a statement every time I decided not to leave my house? Actually, that’s basically what blogging is, right?
Dana Carvey has started doing a web show for Netflix. Down in Front With Dana Carvey streams live at Netflix.com/NetflixNowPlaying on Friday and Saturday nights only, but one episode has made it to YouTube (embedded above). It’s kind of a marketing thing (each episode is built around a film available via Netflix’s Now Playing streaming program, another Windows-only app inviting us Mac users to suck it), it’s kind of a movie review thing (judging by the Jackass episode above, it doesn’t seem like Carvey’s under any mandate to be effusively positive), and it’s kind of sketch comedy thing (although, judging by the episode above, it’s not really funny). But, um, it’s a living…?
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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It looks like John Waters has a new muse. In an interview with Pop Candy’s Whitney Matheson, the filmmaker discusses his upcoming Christmas movie Fruitcake––“imagine The Little Rascals if John Waters had directed it”––and has nothing but effusive praise for the film’s star, Johnny Knoxville:
Two Paramount subdivisions are collaborating to produce Jackass 2.5, an almost-feature length, direct-to-internet sequel to last year’s massively successful 
