“There is, of course, cause for concern, and even alarm.”
These were some of the first words out of moderator Annette Insdorf’s mouth, at the start of a panel called Snip Snip: Are Cutbacks in Film Distribution and Criticism Affecting Quality Filmmaking? in Telluride on Sunday. She ticked off all the alarming factors––studio-funded arthouse distributors like Paramount Vantage and Picturehouse are shutting down; marketing costs for the average film have risen to the $20 million range, which means that true indie distributors can’t compete; there’s a glut of films in both festivals and in theaters; print outlets dedicated to film have all but disappeared, and general interest publications have come to see critics as a luxury. She closed this listlessness-inducing laundry list with the question, “Will we simply have to read blogs to be informed about non-Hollywood cinema?” The distributors and journalists on the panel (including Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics, Anne Thompson of Variety and Scott Foundas of Village Voice Media) ended up taking this querie and running it into a lively, contentious debate. But first, Paul Schrader declared that he’s already heard the death rattle of cinema as we know it.
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I saw The Wackness (which has its New York premiere tomorrow at the Tribeca Film Festival) at a special screening held for the critics participating in the Moving Image Institute last week. Afterwards, Sony Classics president Michael Barker was asked about critical response to the film thus far. Barker disclaimed that “most major critics” hadn’t yet reviewed the film, but then said something surprisingly candid about the makeup of the film’s detractors. “What’s the demographic of the critics who don’t like it?” he began, starting a statement with a question in expert post-Robert Evans mogul style. “Female. Single. Mothers with teenage kids––they don’t like the movie.”
Who ever’s doing research over at Sony deserves a raise. I fit just two of those descriptors, and I don’t like it, either.
Maybe it’s true that even professional critics struggle to get beyond their own natural demographic biases. A certain (very young, very male) segment of the film blogosphere lashed out at Sony for buying The Wackness towards the close of Sundance––not because they didn’t like the film, but because they loved the film so much that they were moved to protect it from what they saw as the risk of a mis-managed mainstream release. I thought this campaign was absolutely inane at the time—in the virtually non-existent narrative buying climate of Sundance 2008, the boys should have been happy that their pet project was picked up at all––but having finally seen the thing, I’m at no loss to explain why those writers have embraced this film. With its full-on, fully uncritical glorification of adolescent male self-indulgence and permanent immaturity, The Wackness is a kind of cinematic embodiment of certain tendencies that make the sub-AICN movie web go round.
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Liv Ullmann, the recipient of the Sarasota Film Festival’s 2008 Master of Cinema Award and the star or director of a dozen films on the Festival schedule, sat down with Sony Pictures Classics president Michael Barker last night for a chat before a packed and fawning crowd.
Dressed in a low-cut black pantsuit bracketed by diamond earrings and killer heels, quick with self-deprecating quips and eager to offer candid, perfectly paced anecdotes, her faded Noweigian accent occasionally taking on the lilting cadences of a woman a third her age (she’s a big fan of the word “whatever”), Ullmann came off as loquaciously eccentric and yet completely clear-eyed about past, present and future. Paying special attention to Ullmann’s triumphs with Ingmar Bergman and failures in 70s Hollywood, Barker and Ullmann traced the actress/directors career from the making of Persona to the psychic impulse that led her to visit Bergman on his death bed. Highlights after the jump.
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