As what used to be called The Entertainment Media melts down into one big, incestuous, pageview-mad morass, occasionally something happens that reminds us of why The Good Old Days — when the people who gossiped about startlets and their cocaine habits were not the same people assigned to even half-seriously analyze trends in cinema — were So Much Better. Today the movie nerd contingent on Twitter is piling on The Pool Movies That Ruined a Generation’s Greatest Directors, a Gawker listicle in which author NatashaVC cites where and when a number of “90s directors” (such as Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher and, um, Jonathan Demme) sold out by making movies obviously intended to pay for their luxurious lifestyles, embodied by new swimming pools. Even if we’re to take this post as being tongue-in-cheek, the author’s lack of long-term perspective and number of casual errors are fairly stunning. A refutation of points follows after the jump.
…Read more
When I saw Michelange Quay’s Eat, For This is My Body at Sundance in 2008, I called it “the rare Sundance title that unquestionably bears the mark of an obstinately independent vision. It’s by turns exhilarating and totally confounding, and it’s certainly not always successful, but it is always a challenge.” The film, which went on to screen at New Directors, New Films and all over the world, comes back to New York tonight as part of a program at the French Institute hosted by none other than Jonathan Demme. How did that come about?
…Read more
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.
…Read more
The Internet seems eerily quiet today, which is probably due to all the blog writers being miles above wifi signals, flying towards Austin for SXSW. Of course, there are some posts here and there discussing rumors about Jon Favreau directing The Avengers and continued commentary on Watchmen’s box office future and Joaquin Phoenix’s “brawl” in Miami, but there’s not much new news to get excited about.
So, I’ve decided to highlight some recent SXSW-related posts from other blogs in anticipation of the festival. I won’t be there this year, and the Bloggery posts will be taking a week off in order to let SpoutBlog focus on film reviews, interviews and other SXSW goodies, so this is my one chance to be a part of the SXSW fun, albeit from a very cold, very jealous perspective up here in NYC.
I wish everyone down in Austin a good time and, more importantly, a lot of good movies.
…Read more
The Golden Globes have been handed out, and the last of Oscar ballots are to be postmarked by today. So, that’s it, the nominations for the 81st Academy Awards are being figured out as we speak, and campaigning is over until the official contenders are announced on January 22. Hopefully a few Academy members took notice of our unlikely last-minute suggestions, but it’s more probable that we’ll be looking at an unsurprising crop of films represented in the major eight categories. As you’ll see after the jump, we predict that two heavily-buzzed supporting performances will be snubbed. Of course you’re likely to disagree with these foreseen omissions. In fact, we welcome all you readers to make your own predictions in the comments section — what you think will be nominated, not what you want nominated. And on Monday, January 19, SpoutBlog will feature a post highlighting the best of these comments and predictions.
…Read more
We’re less than two weeks away from receiving this year’s Oscar nominations, and though none of the major categories are completely predictable just yet, each has at least three or four certain favorites. Meanwhile, the final slots for Best Picture, Best Director and the acting and screenwriting categories may be simply a random grab from small handfuls of rotating contenders. As of now, it doesn’t appear we’ll be seeing any huge surprises come the morning of January 22nd, when the Academy announces the nominees. The Dark Knight is sure to become the first comic book film up for Best Picture, and it won’t even be a shocker if animated feature Wall-E is listed alongside it in the same category.
But the ballots don’t need to be mailed out until Monday, so I’m taking one last chance to reach out to the procrastinators within the Academy membership. If you still don’t know who and what to write in, and you’re unwilling to go the safe route and nominate the expected bunch of films and talent, then consider some of these underdogs, under-appreciated and pretty much unlikely possibilities:
…Read more
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.
…Read more
In a crowded year for Best Actress contention, Anne Hathaway could be the only first-timer to receive an Oscar nomination in the lead category, possibly going up against mainstays such as her Devil Wears Prada costar Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet, as well as the less-nominated vets Nicole Kidman and Kristen Scott Thomas. Her main competition for the outsider, dark horse position is Frozen River’s Melissa Leo (who may benefit from her film’s initiatory screener campaign even though River’s theatrical release was early and hardly noticed), and Happy-Go-Lucky’s Sally Hawkins, whose film just debuted to favorable reviews citing her brilliant (as in talented and bright) performance. But Hathaway is sure to be the victor –– even though her performance in Rachel Getting Married is hardly deserving of such an honor.
The Oscar buzz for Hathaway has been high for weeks now, enough that the actress apparently joked about it in her Saturday Night Live monologue earlier this month (I thought of it as less a current-year expectation than a general career goal, but it’s made Risky Biz Blog’s Steven Zeitchik compare Hathaway to Catherine O’Hara’s buzz-afflicted character in For Your Consideration). The fact that she’s a well-known movie star should make Hathaway’s buzz continually more reportable by the press and more noticeable by both the public and the voters, which gives her some advantage over Leo and Hawkins in terms of cultural consciousness.
…Read more
This review originally appeared during the Toronto Film Festival. Rachel Getting Married opens in select cities today.
Jonathan Demme’s first fiction film since his 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidatee (and only his second non-documentary in ten years), Rachel Getting Married is orchestrated like an extraordinarily intimate work of direct cinema. Working from a script by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney), Demme shot the dysfunctional family drama on a combination of grainy, handheld 35mm and consumer video––without rehearsal, with a huge ensemble cast made up of actors and musicians, with a soundtrack consisting entirely of diegetic music performed either on or just off camera by the likes of Robyn Hitchcock, New Orleans jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr, TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe (who also plays the key role of the man Rachel is getting married to) and sometime American Idol Tamyra Grey. For a film featuring not only said reality competition castoff but a tour de force performance from a two-time Teen Choice Award nominee, it’s almost unfathomably dark and emotionally tough. It’s essentially a Dogme 95 film directed by Robert Altman, which will be a frightening proposition for some, and something akin to cinematic ecstasy for others. It’s the latter for me.
…Read more
Rosemarie DeWitt is best known for her role as Don Draper’s beatnik-artist-in-residence Midge on AMC’s hit show Mad Men, but her turn as Rachel in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married is already getting rave reviews. She’s been acting since 2001 and has done a lot of television work, but after this performance she may be ready to turn the corner and move into film.
Read the full interview after the break to find out how she got the role, and what it was like working with Anne Hathaway and Jonathan Demme.
…Read more
Anna Hathaway has come a long way since The Princess Diaries, although speaking to her in person you sort of forget everything she’s done, from Brokeback Mountain to The Devil Wears Prada and now Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, because she still looks like that young girl thrust into the role of suddenly becoming a princess. Although she might look the same, she’s definitely matured in both her acting and how she handles a press room.
Read on to find out about her role as Kym in the movie, why she isn’t entirely satisfied with her previous acting roles, and what she’s doing next.
…Read more
Jonathan Demme has had an extremely successful career ever since directing Caged Heat in 1974. He won the Oscar for Best Director in 1992 with Silence of the Lambs, and helped Tom Hanks act his way to a Best Actor Oscar for Philadelphia. He’s also directed things as varied as a Saturday Night Live episode in 1980, the Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense, and Neil Young: Heart of Gold, with a new Young movie on the way in next year’s Trunk Show.
Rachel Getting Married represents another big change for him, as the film was shot completely handheld, features a lot of improvised dialogue, and uses ambient music from musicians actually on the set. It’s about as close to a Dogma film as you can get these days. We sat down with Jonathan in Toronto, and read on to find out what inspirations he drew on for this film, why he wanted to cast director Paul Thomas Anderson as the male lead, and how he came to work with Anne Hathaway.
…Read more
Jonathan Demme’s first fiction film since his 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidatee (and only his second non-documentary in ten years), Rachel Getting Married is orchestrated like an extraordinarily intimate work of direct cinema. Working from a script by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney), Demme shot the dysfunctional family drama on a combination of grainy, handheld 35mm and consumer video––without rehearsal, with a huge ensemble cast made up of actors and musicians, with a soundtrack consisting entirely of diegetic music performed either on or just off camera by the likes of Robyn Hitchcock, New Orleans jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr, TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe (who also plays the key role of the man Rachel is getting married to) and sometime American Idol Tamyra Grey. For a film featuring not only said reality competition castoff but a tour de force performance from a two-time Teen Choice Award nominee, it’s almost unfathomably dark and emotionally tough. It’s essentially a Dogme 95 film directed by Robert Altman, which will be a frightening proposition for some, and something akin to cinematic ecstasy for others. It’s the latter for me.
…Read more
Former New Line heads Bob Shaye and MIchael Lynne have announced 
