Maybe it’s not fair for me to begin the review of a festival film with a lengthy digression on nostalgia and the death of Michael Jackson, but somehow all of these things seem to point in the same direction (and not geographically speaking, despite the connection to Westwood). So please, bear with me:
The Associated Press published an editorial this morning by Ted Anthony, titled “2 lost icons: For Generation X, a really bad day.” In it, he assesses the impact of the near-simultaneous deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson on the segment of the population who were at their most demographically desirably in the late 80s-early 90s. He attributes the following portentous quote to a 38-year-old HBO employee:
“This,” he said, “is the moment when Generation X realizes they’re grown up.”
Thanks to this article and others, “Generation X” has been bopping around Google’s Top 100 search terms all day. Which is funny, because I can’t remember the last time I even thought about the concept of Generation X … before earlier this week, when I watched Passenger Side, Matt Bissonnette’s third feature and an entry in the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Narrative Competition. Starring the director’s brother Joel Bissonnette and Adam Scott as two brothers (one a struggling novelist with an aversion to modern technology, the other a personable recovering junkie) who spend a day driving around Southern California looking for the ex-girlfriend who one of them wants to marry, Passenger Side also seems to have that age group’s reconciliation of age and nostalgia for a simpler time on its mind.
October Country, Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s debut documentary feature describing a year in the lives of four generations of Moshers living in a depressed upstate New York suburb, is a rare work of impressionistic nonfiction. Its patchwork of visual detail often reminded me of the photographs of Gregory Crewdson (whose work you might have seen on the cover of this Yo La Tengo album, or this Six Feet Under campaign). Crewdson’s work usually imbues suburban and domestic scenes with the aura of the supernatural; nothing actually horrific is visible in the frame, but the presence of something is always implied, out of frame, in the air. With their arresting images of smoked-clogged rooms and American flags convulsing in the wind, Mosher and Palmieri demonstrate a similar knack for lighting and framing the mundane to spin it towards the surreal, suggesting an invisible but not imperceptible force altering the proceedings. The style fits because the Moshers are essentially living a ghost story, with each member so haunted by past decisions that’ve lost control of the future.
I’ve seen five films in three days at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and every single one is, at least partially, about the break-up of a romantic relationship. Three of these films are in the Narrative Competition: Harmony & Me, Hollywood, je t’aime, and Wah Do Dem. It would be an interesting exercise to try to make the argument that this trend is a sign of the times, that (of course!) filmmakers are using the universal touchstone of romantic trauma as a key to understanding a wider world torn asunder. But break-up movies tend to resist obvious real-world relevance. These three films all exist in vague fantasy worlds where the defining difficulties of life in our contemporary world don’t exist, where our heroes — all of them men, two out of three pining over lost women and one haunted by an ex-boyfriend — are essentially unaware that anything exists but their own heartbreak, until that outside world barges in and demands their attention. This is as it should be — this is how break-up films work — but it does seem notable that a film festival would devote nearly half of their narrative competition to movies about white men moping. Hey, maybe this *is* realism! Let’s investigate.
Film Independent has released the core line-up for the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. There are a LOT of world and US premieres in the Narrative and Documentary competitions, both of which offer the winner a $50,000 prize courtesy of Target. I’m particularly excited about the latter, which includes Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s October Country and the final cut of Convention, which AJ Schnackpreviewed at True/False. Though the opening and closing night titles have yet to be announced, the Centerpiece selection of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies adds a bit of starpower to a lineup also including some familiar 2009 circuit titles, including Humpday, Harmony & Me, In the Loop and We Live in Public. Also: The Muppet Movie! The full list of titles is after the jump.
So, we’re taking the rest of the week off. Enjoy your, uh, eating and shopping? That’s what people do, right? (I’m half-English, so I’m only half willing to admit that Thanksgiving even exists.) But first, for your holiday browsing pleasure, here are a bunch of stories from this week that I meant to comment on but ran out of time. Let me know if there’s anything in particular that you’d like me to revisit in depth next week.
“Auteurism had Andrew Sarris. Abstract expressionism had Clement Greenberg. Punk rock had Lester Bangs. Where is the equivalent voice for today’s documentary scene?” So ponders Thom Powers, before offering a number of tips for those of us who might aim to fill the position.
“Is there room in that diverse [film festival] community for people of faith? For people of more conservative political beliefs? Or are film festivals only for the support and promotion of those who agree with a specific, left-of-center political philosophy? And therefore, must major film festivals — and their primary staff — have a de facto bias toward that philosphy?” AJ Schnack examines the implications of the Prop 8/Rich Raddon situation.
Eric Kohn visited the Futures of Entertainment conference, sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT. “As the conversations progressed, so too did a flurry of typing from numerous laptops throughout the audience: Microblogging and online chatter created a series of miniature conversations that converged into a unified whole.”
In the second of potentially three posts on Synechdoche, NY, Filmbrain runs Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut through the ringer of the Jungian concept of individuation. “The individuation process is about the uniting of opposites — good and evil, masculine and feminine, matter and spirit, body and psyche. There’s no question that Caden undertakes the journey, but he fails to become an individual, both literally and psychologically. Caden treats his life (both the conscious and unconscious elements) like a stage play, yet his attempt at directing from an omniscient position robs him of (in alchemical terms) the prima materia required for one to be a person.”
I had heard a rumor about this earlier this morning, but Mike Jones at The Circuit is the first to confirm it: Rich Raddon has resigned from his post as the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival. Raddon, who is a practicing Mormon, first submitted his resignation last week, when it was revealed that he had made sizable donationto the campaign in support of California’s anti-gay-marriage Propositon 8. The FIND Independent board who govern LAFF chose not to accept the resignation, but instead met, talked it out and took no action. The conversations calling out Raddon for putting his money where his beliefs are did not stop, and when Raddon submitted his resignation again last night, LAFF accepted it.
UPDATE: As I commented below, I didn’t mean above to take a stance one way or another on any of these issues, and I think if anybody had read what I wrote carefully rather than jumping to conclusions, they would see that. But because nobody seems interested in actually reading anything carefully and I don’t have time to defend an innocuous statements from the instant emotional responses of everyone on the internet, I’ve deleted a paragraph in which I essentially said that this is a bad situation for all involved.
“If this is confusing, let’s make the comparison to the airlines — the cost of travel is up and the cost of providing travel is way up. So the business is down. Only the best routes work. And only the best films work. Economics explains it all.” In a post on the IndiePix blog, Bob Alexander re-frames Mark Gil’s by-now-legendary LAFF “the indie film sky is falling” speech––not to mention the vigorous head-nodding that followed––as, essentially, don’t look-behind-the-curtain propaganda designed to buy time for a failing business model whilst attracting attention away from viable alternatives.
When Netflix announced it was going to take away the ability for subscribers to keep profiles on their website, writes Lia LoBello at Radar, “Calamity followed. Petitioners petitioned. Conspiracy theories took hold. Blogs were set ablaze with the fire of DVD rental righteousness. Today, the company announced that the plans to keep, yes, keep, the feature. You did it, people!”
Finally, a way to celebrate Bastille Day that doesn’t involve tempting the food poisoning gods with discount moules frites: Vinyl is Heavy is hosting a blogathon. Quoth Ryland Walker Knight: “if any of our beloved, if mostly silent, readers want to offer any Francophilic thoughts on July 14th, let me know, either via links in the comments or via emails. Until then, go see Wall-E on a big screen when you aren’t out and about, eating cheese or throwing cake or dancing in the woods or driving into the Mediterranean.”
I had to leave Westwood on Saturday before the much-anticipated (well, at least, by me) screening of Heaven Wants Out, the long-gestating film at the center of Mark Mann’s documentary Finishing Heaven. I’ve been eagerly awaiting published reports that would clue me in on what I missed, but saw nothing for days. Finally, Craig Kennedy has weighed in at Living in Cinema. “I’d love to report that Heaven Wants Out is a belated triumph that will change how we perceive cinema,” Craig writes. “But…
Two quotes just popped out of my feed reader and clubbed me over the head; when I came to, I recalled a couple of other soundbites from my week in LAFF that sort of seem related. First, from David Poland’s eye-roll at “Tom & Jerry On Crack cartoon” Wanted:
Wanted is more like the last of big budget porn, throwing around endless style along with massive fake boobs and enough smoke to choke a Scott. Guys still get off on it - guys can get off on anything that tells them it wants to get them off - but one simply has to wonder, “Doesn’t anyone just f*** anymore?”
Friday at LAFF brought back-to-back screenings of two very different documentaries about how sexual politics and policies within two individual communities come to define these worlds-apart spaces. Sarah Friedman and Esy Casey’s Thing With No Namefollows two women in sub-Saharan African villages as they controversially begin a program of anti-retroviral drugs after having been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. Undeniably beautiful to look at and powerfully poetic in its depiction of a community of women stricken with poverty and sick with a virus that they don’t fully understand, the film ironically and sadly fails at its propagandist mission when tragedies of timing and fate intervene. Meanwhile, Trinidad offers a portrait of the titular “sex change capitol of the world,” a frontier town in Colorado where a male-to-female post-op transsexual rockstar surgeon named Marci is pioneering the art and science of genital reassignment surgery. In tone and content these films couldn’t be more different, but they still constitute a sort of double feature of films about real people living lives impacted by scientific attempts to customize fate.
I’ve had a bit of bad luck with the screenings over the past few days, so when it comes to movies I have very little new to report. But the film festival karaoke trainrolls along, as evidenced by these pics. This time around, it went down in a private room in a place in a strip mall on Sawtelle. That same strip mall also housed an establishment called Mousse Fantasy; I assume this place either serves dessert or has something to do with hair, but I couldn’t figure it out one way or another. If you’re familiar with the place and have the answer, do leave a comment. Above, that’s Your Blogger, Michael Lerman and Medicine for Melancholy producer Cherie Saulter. More after the jump.
Finishing Heaven begins in a bodega. A tall, thin, older woman with fire engine red dyed hair and a drawn face saunters to a table in the back of the deli section to greet a shifty-looking mustachioed character with whom she is clearly very well acquainted. They kiss hello, and almost immediately fall into an argument about matters that date back nearly four decades. it’s a bizarre scene, for a lot of reasons, but initially, I couldn’t get beyond the setting: why are these two in a bodega? They didn’t come for the food––she walked in with a half-empty venti Frappucino, and a wide shot reveals that the deli’s heat lamp trays are empty, thus signifying that it’s either very early or very late. If you were to meet an old lover to argue about old Warhol superstars and reminisce about Max’s Kansas City, would you really do it in front of the soft drink case at your circumspect corner grocery?
Director Mark Mann presents us this scene with judiciously inserted explanatory on-screen titles, through which we learn that the man’s name is Robert Feinberg, and the woman’s is Ruby Lynn Reyner, and the two were a couple in the 70s and are now reuniting for the first time in over 30 years to talk about finally making some progress on Heaven, a film which he directed and she starred in but he never finished editing. In spite of this exposition, overall it feels like we’re being thrown into a fire, and it’s exciting––sometimes you see things happening in Manhattan that you can’t quite explain and simply must accept, and you come to understand that it’s just one of the ways that the city humbles you into acknowledging that you do not control the universe. But then we cut to an exterior shot of the deli’s incongruously sunny exterior, and a title slowly fades up at the bottom of the screen: “Formerly Max’s Kansas City.”
It’s a laugh line, but it’s also an object lesson in how the director will proceed to tell this story. He asks us to jump straight in to one aspect of his subjects’ lives, and just as we think we have a handle on what’s going on, he pulls out and unpacks another box, unveiling a further facet of who these people are and what their relationship is all about. It’s a film that, on the top level, is about two extreme personalities trying to finish a film, but on a deeper level, it’s about the way lives slip out of control, dreams slip out of reach, and the incredible way that massive egos can take repeated beatings and continually bounce back, worse for wear but still resillient.
Oh good, fake controversy! Everyone’s pointing to Jeffrey Ressner’s Politico piece on Boogie Man, the Lee Atwater doc screening here at LAFF. “Atwater doc makes conservatives groan,” cries the headline. But, as AJ Schnack points out, those groaning conservatives were actually Ressner’s invited guests, conservative plants who would likely be hostile towards the subject matter regardless of its actual treatment.
On to controversy-baiting classics: “The 7-minute film has a hero called Eveready Harton (sometimes spelled “Hardon”), a fellow with a very large penis who, throughout the course of the film, lets his manhood lead him into contact (mostly sexual) with a naked woman, an unfortunate man, a farmer, a donkey, a cactus and ultimately a cow.” A brief history of dirty animation from Nick Dawson at Film in Focus; behold the adventures of Mr. Harton above.
Finally, WTF? Sequel Controversy: Corey Feldman strenuously attempted to defend the existence of a sequel to The Lost Boyslast night at LAFF, but even the sequel’s director seemed unconvinced: “I still think no matter what, it’s not like Citizen Fucking Lost Boys Kane.” More from Stu at Defamer.
I grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of Flight of the Navigator. I’m sure people go to film festivals in their hometowns all the time and don’t think it’s weird at all, but I get painfully nostalgic. I, like, went to school and stuff, but hanging out in these theaters for entire summers is how I fell in love with movies.
Funny, then, that I’ve been here for almost two full days and I haven’t yet been able to see a single film. Part of this is a scheduling issue––I got in too late on Monday to make it to a screening, and I had already seen many of the films that played yesterday, including Medicine for Melancholy and The Pleasure of Being Robbed. I did actually try to make a screening of Largo, the documentary about the famed Fairfax club, but I, um, went to the wrong theater by mistake and missed it. And then, there were parties to go to. More on that, with photo evidence, after the jump.
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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Film Independent has released the core line-up for the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. There are a LOT of world and US premieres in the Narrative and Documentary competitions, both of which offer the winner a $50,000 prize courtesy of Target. I’m particularly excited about the latter, which includes Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s October Country and the final cut of Convention, which AJ Schnack 
I had heard a rumor about this earlier this morning, but 
I grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of 
