Funny how, in the indie film world, falls from grace tend to begin before you’ve even hit the top. Yesterday, Lance Hammer’s Ballast was nominated for four Gotham Independent Film Awards — the most of any single film — including Breakthrough Director and Best Picture. Meanwhile, the critical darling is, for maybe the first time since its Sundance premiere, provoking sour responses. Armond White wrote a scathing review of the film attacking it as evidence that “African-American life is imprisoned by the art fallacies of Indie filmmaking, controlled by white liberal condescension” — but he’s Armond White, so that was somewhat expected. Somewhat less expected was this Hollywood Elsewhere post, where Jeff Wells pounces on White’s review like it’s the smoking yellow cake that makes the case that Ballast is overrated.
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Kyle Buchanan has a post at Defamer taking Jeff Wells and Anthony Lane to task for questioning the plausibility of race relations in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. His basic point is that critics who are old and white can’t hold back their “thinly veiled discomfort with the shocking idea that white people can marry black people in 2008 without someone giving a speech about it.” But this is actually a common complaint about the film, and it’s definitely not limited to those afflicted with either oldness or whiteness. I saw and sort of fell in love with the film at Toronto where a lot (a LOT) of critics were dismissing Rachel for its allegedly laughable multiculturalism. Not only does the white Rachel take a black husband without comment or incident, but the members of the wedding party wear saris, even though no one involved is visibly of sari-wearing ethnicity. Scandal!
At Toronto, I was still a little bit too in love with the film from first viewing to be able to come up with a finely calibrated, bullshit-free rationalization, but I knew that to make the argument that the film’s melting pot was somehow inauthentic, and/or tacked on by Demme to reflect his own sensibilities rather than those of his characters, was to fundamentally misunderstand the film. I think I thus may have said something stupid in defense of the film whilst under the influence of whiskey and petulant certitude. Whoops.
But a month later, I’ve calmed down and sobered up, and I’ve figured out exactly why Demme’s “cultural appropriation” is not just “obnoxious exoticism“, but is absolutely integral to the film’s story.
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“Why did everyone have Che wrong?” reads the headline at Variety’s festival blog The Circuit. “The headline all over last week’s Cannes prognostications were about how Soderbergh’s Che epic wasn’t going to make the Croisette,” Mike Jones writes. “Today, all the Cannes headlines lead with Soderbergh. Surprise, surprise: Che will storm the south of France - all 4 hours of it.”
Jones says that after sales agency The Wild Bunch failed to find a distributor for the film in Berlin, “the Cannes rumors started, becoming a near-fact in the blogosphere that there would be no revolution on the Croisette.” The implication is that Wild Bunch spread rumors that the movie wouldn’t make it to Cannes, in order to make it instant news when it did.
But the thing is, I just did a pretty exhaustive Google BlogSearch, and though I found several post-Berlin posts indicating that Che would make its debut in the south of France, I couldn’t find a single blog post trying to pass off Che’s absence from Cannes as fact dated before this Variety story from April 17. …Read more
In continuing to use his movie blog as a platform for Hillary Clinton hate wrapped in the thinest of pop cultural guises, is Jeffrey Wells doing some kind of brilliant, absurdist theater, or has the presidential election simply driven him insane? First, when Baby Mama was announced as the opening night film for the Tribeca Film Festival, Wells admitted “a certain part of me would like to see Baby Mama go down as a kind of karma payback for [Tina] Fey’s Hillary shilling.” I went to SXSW and ignored Wells’ blog for a week; when I came back, I discovered a post titled “Funny Games = Hillary Campaign.” Note the lack of prevaricating question mark in the headline: this is an unequivocal statement.
So what’s Wells’ evidence that Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own 1997 thriller has anything materially or spiritually in common with the troubled campaign of the first serious female presidential candidate? It’s specious, of course––amongst other things, he notes that the antagonists played by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett “are clearly monsters, a term that has recently been used to describe Senator Clinton by former Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power”; they and Hillary also have “similar” haircuts!––but Wells’ balls-out committment to his own craziness is, as always, engaging.
Don’t criticize Chris Matthews when 
