Visually more sophisticated than the bulk of features to yet come out of the new wave of DIY independent American cinema, narratively smoother and yet still boundless in mold-breaking ambition, triple-Independent Spirit Award nominee Medicine for Melancholy offers a self-contained rebuttal to claims that precious, naturalistic dramas about the existential dilemmas of hipster singles are exclusively a white man’s game. But the most exciting thing about the film is that director Barry Jenkins doesn’t seem interested in rebutting anything, or in playing any sort of game but his own. His mission: to talk about what it feels like to be young, black and artsy in a city in which people who fit that description make up a minuscule fraction of the population.

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2008 was not the banner year that ‘07 turned out to be, but there were still plenty of movies worth watching. Sometimes end-of-year lists look like straight Oscar predictions, with little deviance from critic to critic, not so this year. Some of our favorite stuff was not playing in a theatre near you, some of it was. For the record, our complete lists are after the jump.

But first! Wholphin 7 is out now! The geniuses over at McSweeny’s have once again curated a delightful collection of rare and unseen short films. We share our thoughts about a few favorites. One film we both loved, Glory at Sea, is available for free here.

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)

0:00 - Intro, listener e-mail

2:59 - Wholphin 7

16:18 - Kevin’s list, Paul’s “soup”

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One of the most underrated and overlooked titles at Sundance last year was Dennis Dortch’s A Good Day to be Black and Sexy. Over six vignettes, Dortch takes a daring, authentic and frequently hysterical look at the sexual mores of a young black Los Angelenos. The film, which garnered Dortch a nomination at Tuesday’s Gotham Awards for Best Breakthrough Director, opens in Los Angeles today via Magnolia Pictures. We caught up with Dortch to discuss seeing The Story of a Three Day Pass at MoMA, Marvin Gaye as an auteur and his desire to work with George Clinton. …Read more

The nominations for the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards are out, and there are a lot of causes for excitement. IndieWIRE has the full list; here are a few of the many reasons to celebrate:

• Silent Light, which still hasn’t officially been released in the US (although a run at NY’s Film Forum is pending), was nominated for best Foreign Film, alongside Cannes winners Hunger, Gomorrah and The Class, and the upcoming IFC release The Secret of the Grain.
• Three big nominations for Medicine for Melancholy: director Barry Jenkins and producer Justin Barber were nominated for Best First Feature, Jenkins was named alongside Nina Paley and Lynn Shelton as contenders for the Acura Someone to Watch Award, and James Laxton earned a nomination for Melancholy’s distinctive cinematography.
• Sean Baker competes against himself for the John Cassavetes Award for the best feature made for under $500,000; Prince of Broadway and Take Out were nominated alongside The Signal, Turn the River, and In Search of a Midnight Kiss.
• SpoutBlog favorites The Order of Myths, Encounters at the End of the World, The Betrayal and Man on WireUp the Yangtze join in the Best Documentary category; Myths director Margaret Brown was also nominated for the Lacost Truer Than Fiction prize, which goes to an upcoming nonfiction filmmaker.
• On the bigger film front, Rachel Getting Married, The Wrestler and Vicky Cristina Barcelona were amongst the most nominated films; Woody Allen will compete in the Screenplay category against fellow Oscar winner Charlie Kaufman.

The full list of nominees can be found here. The Spirits will be handed out, as per tradition, the night before the Oscars in Santa Monica.

IFP has announced the nominees for the 2008 Gotham Independent Film Awards (formerly known as just the Gotham Awards), and just by virtue of nod count, Ballast is the big winner with nominations in four categories:Best Feature, Breakthrough Director (Lance Hammer), Breakthrough Performance (Michael J. Smith) and Ensemble Performance.

Also very exciting: Barry Jenkins will compete against Hammer in the Director category for Medicine for Melancholy; Sita Sings the Blues, one of my Tribeca 2008 favorites, will compete against Tom Quinn’s The New Year Parade and SXSW winner Wellness for the Not Coming to a Theater Near You award; and The Wrestler, Rachel Getting Married and Synecdoche NY, some of my favorite American films of the year, all received attention. The full release is after the jump.

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Not to be all Barry Jenkins all the time around here (although, with Medicine For Melancholy having its New York premiere tonight at Independent Film Week, it’s a little hard not to be), but with Claire Denis‘ 35 Rhums coming out of TIFF with a lot of goodwill (see my review here), I just remembered Jenkins’ interview from last summer with Dickon Hinchliffe for ShortEnd Magazine. Hinchliffe, from the Brit band Tindersticks, is Denis’ scorer of choice, having worked on Rhums, Friday Night, and Trouble Every Day (with Tindersticks); he’s also composed music for non-Denis films like 40 Shades of Blue and Married Life. The interview is here, and an example of Hinchcliffe’s work is embedded above.

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Barry Jenkins’ film Medicine for Melancholy, and we’re lucky enough to have Barry be big fans of Spout as well. His little film has had a long journey since it premiered in Austin at SXSW earlier this year, and it’s continuing to take him around the world.

We spoke with Barry in Toronto about the genesis of the movie, what has happened since that first screening in Austin, how he found the actors, and if this film represents a love letter from him to the city of San Francisco. Read on for the full interview.

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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 train rolls 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.

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• IFC has picked up Medicine for Melancholy for day-and-date distribution. It’ll be released sometime next year; in the meantime, it’ll play in competition at the impending Los Angeles Film Festival.
• Paramount is getting sued by Mario Puzo’s son, based on allegations that he wasn’t paid proper royalties on a video game based on The Godfather. He’s trying to make the studio stick to contract they made with his father seven years before his death, which was in turn intended to provide reparations for Paramount having gyped him when first buying the Godfather rights.
• Sienna Miller will play Maid Marion opposite Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood Sheriff in Nottingham. Sure, it’s an unnecessary retread of a beloved brand, but it should be a nice break for her after filming G.I. Joe, don’t you think?

• Erin at Steady Diet of Film alerts us to the news (which we might have figured out for ourselves, except that we have a bad habit of being in bars at 11pm on weeknights––we swear, we’re working on cutting back on that) that Medicine for Melancholy star Wyatt Cenac is now a correspondent for The Daily Show. His first segment, in which he attempts to understand primary season through the rubrick of plot developments on Lost, is embedded above. We’ll give you a preview: “A polar bear on a tropical island? There are so many reasons why that’s AMAZING!”
• Stacy Peralta’s was reproached for his lackadaisical sense of style by the gang member subjects of his doc Made in America. He tells Vulture: “These guys don’t step out the house unless they’re dressed really well. In fact, a couple of our subjects took me to task for how I looked. I’d be wearing a pair of Levis and a T-shirt, and they’d ask me, ‘Do you dress like that every day? You oughta think about how you dress more often.’”
• The MPAA be damned, Ridley Scott might make an uncensored film based on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and the very prospect has filmdrunk oversharing. Concludes a post headlined “BONER ALERT”: “Like all really violent things, it makes me slightly sexually excited.  That’s healthy, right?”

• While I gather my final thoughts on the Moving Image Institute, check out the most recent dispatches from my fellow attendees, Doug Cummings and Kevin Lee.
• I had to leave the Sarasota Film Festival long before the awards were announced, but I was happy to learn that both Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed and Barry Jenkins’ Medicine For Melancholy went home with prizes. Alison has further details at Indie Eye.
• In his round-up of the various stories on Matt Dentler leaving SXSW for Cinetic, David Hudson pays tribute to Dentler’s years at the festival. “As I’ve said here in the past, any history of American independent cinema in the 00s is going to have to include a passage on the impact of Matt’s smarts, instincts and sheer guts as a programmer.” David also links to Scott Kirsner, who has some reservations about the digital division of Cinetic that will becomes Dentler’s new home, at least in terms of its potential attractiveness to filmmakers.

FilmCouch is coming from the exotic Austin, TX. Guess what we talk about.

That’s right.

Movies at SXSW.

To name a few: Yeast, Medicine for Melancholy, One Minute to Nine, Wellness, The Promotion and the unforgettable Andre Williams (Agile, Mobile, Hostile). Note: After we recorded this podcast, Wellness won the SXSW Grand Jury Award.

 

 FilmCouch 61 [26:36m]: Play Now | Download

FilmCouch 61

SXSW news, reviews, interviews and discussions

Festival hopping, from True/False to SXSW. To help kick off our South by Southwest coverage, Paul and Kevin reflect on Medicine for Melancholy, and talk with writer/director Barry Jenkins about race, identity, and San Fransisco. Between festivals, Karina manages to find time to share some stories about the True/False Film Festival. The small town Missouri fest is fast becoming a premiere destination for non-fiction film. Karina offers her thoughts on Forbidden Lies.

FilmCouch 60

Transcript of the Barry Jenkins interview after the jump…

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Visually more sophisticated than the bulk of features to yet come out of the new wave of DIY independent American cinema, narratively smoother and yet still boundless in mold-breaking ambition, Medicine for Melancholy offers a self-contained rebuttal to claims that precious, naturalistic dramas about the existential dilemmas of hipster singles are exclusively a white man’s game. But the most exciting thing about the film is that director Barry Jenkins doesn’t seem interested in rebutting anything, or in playing any sort of game but his own. His mission: to talk about what it feels like to be young, black and artsy in a city in which people who fit that description make up a minuscule fraction of the population.

Formally and thematically, Melancholy is, in fact, driven by fractions. African-Americans currently make up less than 7 percent of the city of San Francisco. Several decades of gentrification have all but whitewashed the city’s historically non-white communities south of Market Street; the few non-gentrified pockets still standing are under constant threat of being steamrolled by the luxury housing boom. To make that point visually, Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton literally drain the color almost completely from their digital video image (on first viewing, I guessed that the entirety of the film had been desaturated 93 percent to match the racial breakdown, but in a recent interview, Jenkins said the level of desaturation actually fluctuates). The resulting image is soft and smoggy, mostly gray with pastel hints. Melancholy may be more committed to certain of the city’s un-pretty social truths than any other recent fiction film set in San Francisco, but ironically, as a sheer portrait of the city, it’s also maybe the most beautiful.

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