If there’s a single crippling irony to the explosion of web video over the last half decade, it’s this: no single piece of media created specifically for online distribution has so far engaged the masses as deeply as the bits of cultural detritus, from cat videos to classic films, that end up online unofficially, accidentally and/or illegally. Taking into account his own viewing habits and those of the post-internet generation, with Stingray SamCory McAbee set out to make a film that could be watched in discreet ten-minutes segments while still maintaining the narrative and image quality of the widescreen experience.
And so several months after premiering at Sundance, Stingray Sam became available for purchase in a variety of different formats from McAbee’s website, while the filmmaker continued to tour the world accompanying the film to festival screenings and other theatrical events. When the six-part musical space western screened last month at Fantastic Fest, McAbee and I met up at the new Alamo Drafthouse-adjacent clubhouse The Highball to talk about science fiction as political allegory, the peaks and valleys within the landscape of web video, and the further adventures of Stingray and the Quasar Kid.
At the screening last night, you said that Stingray Sam is political, whereas your earlier film, The American Astronaut, was personal. What are the politics, as you see them, in Stingray Sam?
Right after the US bombed Iraq, a woman from Copenhagen came and interviewed me for an art magazine. She was talking about American Astronaut, and she said, “Right now, Europeans are very angry at America because of what your government is doing, and they’re starting to feel like they don’t like Americans.” But, she said, Europeans always enjoyed loving American culture, and The American Astronaut had all the things they enjoyed loving about America.
In addition to winning Best Picture (and seven other awards) at the Oscars last week, Slumdog Millionaire passed a major box office benchmark. It has now grossed more than $100 million in the U.S., which is pretty astonishing for a film with one-third of its dialogue in a foreign language. But is Slumdog’s popularity a one-shot in terms of its audience’s interest in India, or are moviegoers actually now more curious about the nation and its own films?
Some websites are simplifying the question of whether or not Slumdog will be a gateway film with polls asking if American moviegoers will now “go Bollywood” (40% of Cinematical readers flat out answered, “no.”), which is rather silly since Danny Boyle’s movie bears no resemblance to the majority of Bollywood pictures. In fact, Americans have in the past received far greater entry points into Indian cinema by way of films involving Anglo or NRI (non-resident Indian) protagonists directed by culturally bridging filmmakers (such as NRI helmers Deepa Mehta, Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha), than the more-touristy type of filmmaking represented with Slumdog.
If someone truly wants to become familiar with Bollywood, he or she should probably just jump right in and then patiently get used to the style, which can be quite difficult for Westerners to immediately grasp. The extremely interested might benefit from reading the section on popular Indian cinema in Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham’s Asian Cinemas: A Reader & Guide, a book that does a really great job acquainting the Western spectator with Eastern film form. Or, the more casually curious cinephile could simply follow our guide to accessible Indian (or India-based) films for the Slumdog lover to watch next: …Read more
This has been a good week for remakes (or a bad week, depending on how you feel about them), but while announced redos of our beloved mystery comedies, sci-fi actioners and neverending fantasy flicks are shocking enough, there’s not a blogger in the world who saw a new “contemporized” version of Damn Yankeescoming. Let alone one starring Jim Carrey and Jake Gyllenhaal as Mr. Applegate (aka Satan) and soul-selling baseballer Joe Hardy, respectively.
Yet Hugh Jackman and the rest of the all-singing-all-dancing stars of Sunday’s Oscars telecast did tell us that the musical is back, so maybe we should be making bets on what classic songfest gets reworked next (I’m putting money on West Side Story). This isn’t even the first musical remake we’ll be seeing in the next few years. New films of My Fair Lady, Carousel, Bye Bye Birdieand Jesus Christ Superstarare apparently already on their way to theaters. Anyhoo, let’s see how the ol’ blogosphere reacted to the Damn Yankees news today:
FilmDrunk learns us that Michel Gondry directed an episode of HBO hipster musical sitcom Flight of the Conchords last night. Behold a dance number from the episode.
The big love for Let the Right One In and high expectations over the impending release of Twilight has sparked some chatter about vampires as a symbolic narrative construct — or, as Jeff Wells puts it in a post condescendingly titled “Girls Vampire Club,” “the romantic whatchamacallit vampire metaphor.” At this point, it’s not even much of a metaphor: in the fifteen years between the birth of the Buffy franchise and the release of the two teen vampire films named above, the plight of the brooding but well-meaning undead has become so synonymous with teenage alienation that fiction about the convergance of the two “outsider” groups has just about run out of points to make. It’s become refreshing to see vampires function as unambiguous villians, an evil to be dealt with sans angst.
And so you’ve got to give it up for Barackula, just a little bit, just for refusing to engage in the “vampires are romantic subjects too!” cliche. This short, online-only musical (which we first learned of months ago, before it went online, but only got around to watching after last week’s election) re-imagines a young Obama’s circa-1990 induction as president of the Harvard Law Review as song-and-dance-off between our hero and a clan of literally bloodsucking would-be lawyers. Its not exactly a game-changer as far as musicals go, but it’s exceptionally narratively tight and polished for what amounts to a dramatic user-generated campaign ad, and its anticipation of what would become the major themes of the campaign all the way up to Election Day is truly remarkable.
Ladies and gentlemen, a new meme is born: the literal version of the 80’s music video. This isn’t the first from Youtuber DustoMcNeato — his literal version of A-Ha’s Take On Me scored over a million views in three weeks. The above video is currently just over 100k.
The success is no surprise. The videos follow a well proven formula for viral video success. Take a simple concept that produces both absurd humor and a sense of “why didn’t I think of that?”, combine it with catchy music, keep it around five minutes or less, and you’ve got a viral hit on your hands. If you don’t believe the formula is that simple, go back and re-watch: OK Go - Here It Goes Again, Evolution of Dance, Daft Hands - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, Crazy Indian Video… Buffalaxed!, and I could go on.
I’d like to see DustoMcNeato milk this a little longer, but move on once the imitators start coming in droves. 80’s music videos work pretty well, but what about song and dance numbers from classic Hollywood musicals? Some of those are even more absurd than a chimp in a library.
According to Variety, Steven Soderbergh “is plotting a 3-D live-action rock ’n’ roll musical about Cleopatra,” for which he “is courting Catherine Zeta-Jones” for the title role. We’re sure this will never actually happen., because obviously, S.S. is just pulling a fast one on the trades by convincing them that he’s moving on to Cleo immediately after Che. Right? He must have either lost it, or have lost the ability to make a convincing joke… right?
John Patrick Shanley’s Doubtwill replaceThe Soloist as the opening night film at AFI. A better win-win couldn’t have been planned.
The Academy is parcelling out almost half a million dollars in grants to various film fesitvals, including Sarasota, Seattle, and Ebert Fest.
There’s no denying that Repo! The Genetic Opera has plenty of imagination, but right now it’s still spinning around in my brain and I’m trying to decide if I like it or not. The first time I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I thought it was one of the worst movies I’d ever seen, despite Tim Curry’s stellar performance. Is Repo! destined for the same cult status? The only answer I can come up with is… maybe.
Based on a 10 minute opera called “The Necro-Merchant’s Debt” by Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich (who plays the Graverobber in the movie), Repo! later become a stageplay, and then they brought Saw sequel director Darren Lynn Bousman on board, and now a movie. It’s an epic opera set in the future, where a corporation called GeneCo has mastered the art of creating synthetic body organs. However, they come at a steep price, and if you don’t pay up, the company will send Repo Men after you to reclaim their property. Which of course usually results in the death of the implantee.
Adam Del Deo and James Stern didn’t start out thinking they’d get into the documentary business, but Every Little Step marks their fourth documentary together as co-directors. It’s an emotional film that follows several hopeful dancer/singer/actors who hope to get cast in the 2006 revival of “A Chorus Line” on Broadway. I honestly didn’t think this would be too interesting of a film for me, having never seen the musical or the Michael Douglas movie version, but it was extremely compelling without taking a turn for a reality television style, which I’d feared would happen.
Stern, who also serves as the CEO for Endgame Entertainment, had earlier produced Legally Blonde: The Search for Elle Woods which was a reality show about casting the “Legally Blonde” musical, and I still can’t believe that even exists. He’s worked on Broadway for many years, which helped him secure the legendary reel to reel recordings that consisted of show creator Michael Bennett in conversation with dancers. These tapes not only helped Bennett to create A Chorus Line, but they also serve as the backbone to the film.
Read on after the break to find out what it was like making this film, how they got the tapes, and what they think about the current state of documentary filmmaking in America.
Is Bruce Wayne, as John Carney wonders at Dealbreaker, “exactly the ‘better class of criminal’ that the Joker describes”? Spoileriffic analysis of Batman’s white-collar misdeeds follows.
Mike Jones weighs in on the sale of indieWIRE to SnagFilms. “Despite the owners’ (which included myself, to a very small extent) desire to sell under the right terms, indieWIRE seemed destined to be independent.” Buuut…”The difficult truth about being independent is that it’s mostly for the young.”
Glenn “Lists are Bullshit” Kenny offers 14 numbered thoughts on Mamma Mia!He begins by contemplating “the comingled semens of Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard, and Colin Firth competing in the fallopian tubes of Meryl Streep”; he ends with the admission, “I kind of want to have sex with Christine Baranski.”
Blake Edwards will exec produce a redo of his 1979 comedy 10 along with son Geoffrey, who was an assistant editor on the original. I’d ask what young starlet you’d most like to see in cornrows, but of course a newcomer is being sought to fill the iconic Bo Derek role.
A new version of Papillon, or at least a new adaptation of Henri Charriere’s autobiography, will be produced by two-time Oscar winner Branko Lustig (Schindler’s List; Gladiator). Could a remake receive more love from the Academy than did the original? It’s been done before…
Like, totally bitchin: MGM is developing a musical remake of Valley Girl. Isn’t the ’80s music nostalgia thing over yet?
The “remake” of Tim Burton’s Batman(don’t you remember this video?) is now in theaters, and blah blah blah record-breaking theater count blah blah blah possible record-breaking non-holiday weekend gross blah blah blah, as Karina would put it.
Serge Bozon’s La France is a generic clusterfuck, but in the best way––a stunningly confident, category-defying, broken-down dream piece about loss and being lost. It’s a film about war in which soldiers are not only never seen actually fighting for their land, but in fact seem to have lost their way in vague and vain pursuit of a lost land to reclaim as their own. It’s a musical with just one song, performed by non-performers in a handful of mutations throughout the film. And it’s a love story, soaked in romantic delusion but ultimately fatalist in regards to the actual odds that love can overcome existential crisis. After a 14 month festival run (including stops at Cannes, New Directors/New Films and LAFF), it opens for a week in New York at Anthology Film Archives on Friday.
I don’t exactly know why this is necessary, but 100,000 dudes on YouTube apparently disagree. MEAN Magazine did a photoshoot with Kate Beckinsale “in homage” to Anna, the 1967 musical starring Anna Karina and featuring songs by Serge Gainsbourg, over which I marveled a couple of months back. In the above video, footage of Beckinsale on set is woven into Anna’s iconic dance number, “Rollergirl”, in which Karina’s nerdy cartoonist literally lets her hair down and sings about her fantasy life.
Though Beckinsale actually copies a few poses directly from the original scene, her interpretation couldn’t be more different in tone. It’s all Bardot hair, thick eyeliner and studied hyper-sexiness, with barely a nod to Karina’s goofy-geeky abandon. Not be one of those assholes who’s all, “old is better than new!” but, um…old is better than new!
Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues is a strange and beautiful little film, a potentially wispy slice of autobiography smartly elevated through irresistible, orgiastic style. The 82 minute feature cross cuts between the story of the director’s own divorce, and a loose retelling of the ancient Indian myth Ramayana; we’re led back and forth between the two milieu by three silhouetted figures who colloquially comment on the events in Indian-inflected English. There are also musical numbers, set mainly to songs by 1920s jazz siren Annette Hanshaw, which drop psychedelic Bollywood versions of the Ramayana characters into Busby Berkeley configurations. It’s an infectiously personal work, and all the more admirable as a sterling example of animation meant resolutely for adults.
So this afternoon, I’m banging my head against the wall trying to finish this thing I’m writing about the Pierrot Le Fou Criterion release, and as I always do in times of trouble, I turn to YouTube for guidance/inspiration/distraction, and I find the above clip from Pierre Koralnik’s 1967 TV musical Anna. I’ve never seen the film, but I remembered reading a Filmbrain post about it a couple of years back. Anna Karina, singing songs by Serge Gainsbourg, stars as a love-lorn, bespectacled ad agency illustrator who apparently fantasizes about transforming into some kind of comic book biker vixen … ? I don’t know, but this clip made my day.
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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This has been a good week for remakes (or a bad week, depending on how you feel about them), but while announced redos of our beloved 
According to Variety
Is Bruce Wayne, as 
