As I hinted at a bit yesterday when I posted about some of the best undistributed films of the year, I have a love/hate relationship with the idea of movie ranking. The idea that any of us––critic, blogger, professional, amateur…to the extent that any of those words mean anything anymore––could be indisputably “correct” in our individual execution of such an activity is insane; and of course, any attempt to draw each of our subjective takes on The Year in Movies into a consensus waters down everything that makes an individual list idiosyncratic and thus interesting. But in the end, I do believe that what’s valuable about these activities is valuable enough to outweigh what’s annoying: if you read this blog regularly and have come to draw a bead on my tastes in relation to your own, maybe seeing a list of my favorite New York theatrical releases of 2008 will help jog your memory about films you meant to see (or avoid), and now that many of these are available on DVD, maybe you’ll make it happen (or not).
My full ballot is posted at indieWIRE now. I chose not to rank the titles from 1-10, but they did reel out of my brain in a particular order, and that has to mean something. Below the jump, my theatrical favorites, with links back to previous coverage, and notes on where/how each film can currently be seen.
Every year some over-hyped award-laden independent film faces a critical backlash, dissenting writers who cry it ain’t all that. This year it’s Ballast. To quote Armond White, from the NY Press:
“Director-writer Lance Hammer shows a black Mississippi family torn apart by a double suicide attempt, drugs and alienation. But you have to see through these ludicrous black phantoms to the actual white middle-class fantasies at the film’s core.”
Maybe “backlash” is a strong term for a handful of disgruntled critics, but I detect a similar sense of unrest in the audience.
The second time I saw Ballast, I dragged a friend along to Manhattan’s Film Forum (where it recently closed after a brief run). I told her that this film was everything I had been arguing for in American cinema (mostly on internet message boards, in my drawers—sad, really): Its angelic patience, its reverence for faces, silences and subjective experience (with more watchful over-the-shoulder shots than a ‘Nam combat doc) could teach American audiences how to look and listen again. Second time around, I was able to appreciate these qualities even more, as the story became fairly transparent, cleverly delineated though it was. Second time around, it was all about the beauty.
I suspect it was the story that had some of the folks in the Film Forum audience sighing, whispering and even snickering uncontrollably. Story-wise, Ballast can be easily mistaken for an entry in the Why We Be Black genre—films which depict underclass African-Americans scratching and surviving and tearing each other apart. Such films are said to exist mainly for the delectation of white liberals who like to think of poor blacks as lovable to the degree that they are irrational, impulsive and self-destructive. Mighty Joe Young in a do-rag. The fallacy of placing Ballast in this genre is as tragic as the critical backlash against Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple adaptation, which reduced that film’s towering humanism to Song of the South T-N-T.
According to indieWIRE’s specialty box office report, Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonelymade more money last weekend per-screen than any other film in limited release. The IFC release took in $16,769 in its single engagement at the IFC Center in New York, which is pretty astounding when you consider that a) he hasn’t released a movie in almost ten years, and b) Korine’s last film, julien donkey-boy, made just $85,400 in its entire run. Because today is Lazy Video Link Day, let’s celebrate Harmony’s big-money victory by watching the scene from julien in which Werner Herzog spends some quality time with a bottle of cough syrup. Oh, and we reviewed Mister Lonely and talked to Harmony about obscene Southern rap and his favorite YouTube videos, too.
We’re bringing back The Media Diet, our long-dormant series of interviews with filmmakers and indie industry people about the movies, music and assorted pop cultural detritus that they like to consume. This week we’re talking to Harmony Korine, whose incredible Mister Lonely (see our review from SXSW) comes out in NY and on IFC On Demand tomorrow. After the jump, Harmony talks about his favorite YouTube videos, his (questionably sincere) love for Patrick Swayze and Triple Six Mafia, and explains why he refused to watch Marilyn Monroe movies in the run up to making a movie about a Marilyn Monroe impersonator.
Michael Tully, who interviewed Mister Lonely director Harmony Korine for the upcoming issue of FILMMAKER Magazine, points to Korine’s latest work for hire, a series of British TV commercials for Budweiser. There are four short clips, featuring two members of the Silver Jews, and they can all be watched at Bud’s UK website.
Cool Hunting has a preview of a beautiful book that’s out in the UK in the conjunction with the release there of Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (which I reviewed at SXSW, and loved). The book includes the shooting script, by Harmony and his brother Avi Korine, as well as photographs from the set, some taken by Harmony’s wife Rachel. According to Amazon, the book won’t be available until August 2008, but you can pre-order it now.
Here is a master guide to all of our reviews, interviews and assorted other coverage from the 2008 SXSW Film Festival. You can also revisit all of our SXSW previews here.
Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, about a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who falls for a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) and follows her to a commune full of celebrity impersonators based out of a Scottish castle, would make an incredible double-feature paired with Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness. Both films deal with people who have fled to the Highlands in denial of real-world mundaneity and in exploration of an escapist fiction. Korine’s long-awaited comeback feature may be a bit more on the nose about the desperate things we do in the name of absolving our lonely fates, but like Build a Ship, it rides the line between pure shtick and genuine emotion to a degree of success that, when it works, can be truly thrilling. Both are patchworky and imperfect, but both are among my favorite films I’ve seen this year.
Korine has always been a filmmaker who plugs story in the gaps around visual one-liners, and while Mister Lonely is a more traditional shot-reverse shot narrative than anything he has done before, from the opening shot the director confirms that, in some sense, he’s up to his old tricks. Luna’s Michael Jackson, decked out in familiar sunglasses, black armband, and standard issue surgical face mask, rides through the streets of Paris on a kiddie motorcycle with a toy monkey tied to the rear. Shot in slow motion, set to Bobby Vinton’s rendition of the title song, this opening scene is both punchline and four-dimensional painting. Lonely is wall-to-wall full of comparable sequences which, though maybe only a step or two away or above the kinds of cultural regurgitations that litter YouTube––Marilyn Monroe, her hair in curlers, comes to Michael Jackson’s room and seduces him by feeding him a strawberry; Abe Lincoln, lit only by strobe light, recites the Gettysburg Address whilst spinning a basketball on his finger––together add up to surprisingly poignant portrait of the willful abandonment of reality in favor of pop cultural oblivion.
Before Saturday’s screening of his incredible Mister Lonely at the Alamo Ritz here in Austin, director/notorious bullshit artist Harmony Korine took the stage and, wired mic in hand, paced back and forth whilst grasping for the appropriate words to mark the occasion. “I’m not used to theaters where people eat like this,” he began. “I saw somebody back there choke on a nacho.” Pause for effect. “I got excited.”
Korine then launched into a story about the last time he was in Austin, which, he claimed, was at age 16, when he was picked up on a hitchhiking road trip by a guy who drove whilst eating raw sticks of butter. Long before Korine got to the punchline, the guy sitting next to me, who earlier said he was friends with the filmmaker, started laughing. He leaned over and whispered, “None of this is true.” Not that it matters––it was the best stand-up comedy I’ve seen in a while.
Exciting news! Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (which I love) and Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (which I’m totally excited about, even if shouldn’t admit it) are among the titles recently added to the lineup of the 2008 SXSW Film Festival. Other titles announced today: Stuart Townsend’s Battle in Seattle, starring Woody Harrelson and Michelle Rodriguez; Crawford, described as “a balanced and comprehensive documentary look at the town of Crawford, TX and how it evolved once George W. Bush moved there”; The Promotion, a comedy starring Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly; and live action/animation hybrid The Toe Tactic, directed by Emily Hubley. The rest of the lineup drops February 5.
Yet another filmmaker moonlighting as an ad director: Harmony Korine directed the above TV advert for Thornton’s, a British department store chocolate store [thanks, Marie!]. There are some unmistakeable Korine touches here (and even vague references to images from julien donkey-boy and the upcoming Mister Lonely–which, by the way, is AWESOME). But still, it’s somewhat ironic that I’m able to show you a more-or-less conventional, Holiday season-timed TV ad directed by the bad boy of 90s independent cinema, and a short film made specifically for the web by a canonized, old-guard, Oscar winning filmmaker that goes out of its way to upend standard conceptions about online advertising. Interesting, no?
Where has Harmony Korine been in the eight years between his 1999 Dogme 95 effort Julien Donkey-Boy, and his IFC-acquired, Cannes/Toronto entry Mister Lonely? It has something to do with a fire, a screenplay about pigs, and a cult of Amazonian fishermen called The Malingerers. He talks all about all of that, and also why he’ll never make “genre films”, in this video interview (which doesn’t seem to be embeddable, but if you can figure it out, let me know). Is it truth, or some kind of Herzogian fantasy? You decide.
Robert Greenwald, who has made a living making unabashedly partisan documentaries about Wal-Mart and Iraq since scratching Xanadu off his resume, has teamed with Senator Bernie Sanders to launch a viral video campaign against Fox News. The first video, which you can see at FoxAttacks.com, calls for viewers to put pressure on the mainstream media to put pressure on the Bush administration. My favorite line from the Hollywood Reporter story: “One media observer said the video lacked balance and journalistic credibility.”
IFC has picked up three films expected to screen at the Toronto Film Festival, including Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely. In keeping with their previously announced plan to focus their attention on the First Take initiative, IFC will release all of these new acquisitions simultaneously in theaters and on VOD.
“Jeff Goldblum and his hometown of Pittsburgh, whether it likes it or not, have combined to create a surprising summer delight,” effuses an un-bylined AP story floating over at The Hollywood Reporter. That’s an, uh, interesting way to introduce the pay-cable debut of a film that made its festival debut 15 months ago and hasn’t been heard from since.
Via Filmmaker Magazine, The House Next Door, and a typically bratty excoriation from Reverse Shot (”America\’s favorite dunderkind is back. And this time financed, inexplicably, by fashion magnate Agn
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.
filmcouch-114
As I hinted at a bit yesterday when I posted about some of the best undistributed films of the year, I have a love/hate relationship with the idea of movie ranking. The idea that any of us––critic, blogger, professional, amateur…to the extent that any of those words mean anything anymore––could be indisputably “correct” in our individual execution of such an activity is insane; and of course, any attempt to draw each of our subjective takes on The Year in Movies into a consensus waters down everything that makes an individual list idiosyncratic and thus interesting. But in the end, I do believe that what’s valuable about these activities is valuable enough to outweigh what’s annoying: if you read this blog regularly and have come to draw a bead on my tastes in relation to your own, maybe seeing a list of my favorite New York theatrical releases of 2008 will help jog your memory about films you meant to see (or avoid), and now that many of these are available on DVD, maybe you’ll make it happen (or not).
Cool Hunting
Exciting news! Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (which I love) and 
Robert Greenwald, who has made a living making unabashedly partisan documentaries about Wal-Mart and Iraq since scratching 
