We’re almost 48 hours into the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and Humpday seems to be the biggest break-out hit thus far — and according to Mike Jones at Variety, it could very well soon become the first narrative film to sell during the duration of this year’s festival. Days before the film had its hugely successful Friday afternoon premiere, we published one of our preview interviews with director Lynn Shelton. Last night, post-unveiling, I caught up with Shelton to talk about working like Mike Leigh, her cinematic interest in dudes, and why she’s glad her first two films didn’t premiere at Sundance.
Lynn Shelton’s My Effortless Brilliance (which I reviewed at SXSW) has its New York premiere tonight at Rooftop Films in Williamsburg, before heading to IFC VOD later this summer and DVD later this year. The film was co-written by and stars Harvey Danger singer Sean Nelson, who has given Ann Powers a recap of how he’s spent the last ten years since his band’s one massive hit for her LA Times blog. “10 years ago (pretty much exactly), we had the number one song on KROQ, and sold out the Troubadour, The Roxy and The Viper Room during the summer,” he writes. “Next week we’ll play in front of 60 people [at LA's Largo]. And we’re happy.”
More from Nelson, including details on the “exaggeratedly autobiographical” nature of the character he plays in Brilliance and his recent experience singing with R.E.M., here. You can buy tickets to tonight’s screening (which actually will take place not on a rooft, but on the lawn outside a Williamsburg high school) at the Rooftop Films site. In addition to Brilliance, there will also be a happy hour, a performance from Drew and the Medicinal Pen, and an open bar afterparty at inner Greenpoint bar Matchless.
Chris Thilk points to Mark Bell’s take on that “asinine piece that appeared in The Hollywood Reporter that seems to hang the failure of independent movies on their inability to get a major newspaper reviewer.” Says Bell: “I know that an audience exists for indie film; I am a part of that audience. I don’t think that audience is waiting or needing to be pandered to by the print promotion and corporation whores anymore, though.”
In a recent New York Times column, Maureen Dowd made an offhanded analogy comparing George W. Bush to the late Gene Kelly. Kelly’s widow was not amused. “To suggest that “George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly” represents not only an implausible transformation but a considerable slight,” fumes Patricia Ward Kelly at the Huffington Post. “If Gene were in a grave, he would have turned over in it.”
Sean Nelson, star of Lynn Shelton’s SXSW Competition entry My Effortless Brilliance (see review here) blogged his festival experience for The Stranger. “Though there are several competitions—narrative, documentary, short, etc.—within the festival, the atmosphere among the artists is 100 percent noncompetitive. Even when you’re all drunk.” Via GreenCine Daily.
Lynn Shelton’s My Effortless Brilliance plays something like an overtly comic remake of Old Joy, with mountains swapped out for woods, and a third man wild card pushing the narrative along. It’s not quite like nothing I’ve ever seen before, but it’s a nicely rendered, novella-esque character study with some impressive naturalistic performances.
Sean Nelson plays Erik, an exceedingly shlubby, thirty-something author trying to match the unexpected success of his first book with his third. Terribly insecure, he turns every interpersonal reaction into a grand performance with him as the star. When asked if he’s hungry, he answers, “Yes. I am INCREDIBLY hungry!” He seems right away to be faking it like he’s still making it, and eventually we get confirmation that success was something that came and went very quickly for him, a moment he was unable to grasp and fully enjoy before it floated away. Years after his fifteen minutes, he spins party stories out his failure to assimilate into the world of fame: “I got to be at the table with Liv Tyler, but I only got to talk to her ass.”
Lynn Shelton’s second feature, My Effortless Brilliance stars Sean Nelson of the band Harvey Danger (whose biggest hit, “Flagpole Sitta”, was memorialized in a ridiculously popular web clip last year) as Eric Lambert Jones, a novelist whose self-obsession costs him his relationship with his oldest friend. Struggling to recapture the success of his first book with his third, Eric takes a detour from a book tour to drop in on said friend’s cabin in the woods in an attempt to try to repair the friendship. Brilliance will be screening in the Narrative Competition at SXSW. Shelton’s last feature, We Go Way Back, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Slamdance Film Festival. By now, you know how this goes: trailer above, Shelton’s answers to the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody below. Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.
My Effortless Brilliance is like My Dinner With Andre meets Deliverance. With a cougar thrown in for good measure.
It’s about narcissism, the crippling effects of success, the terror of failure, and, most all, the limitations of friendship.
I got the idea for making a film like My Effortless Brilliance while I was in production on my first narrative feature, We Go Way Back. That experience was truly eye-opening for me because it was my first time working on a traditional movie set. Although I’d been making films for over a decade, my educational background had been in photography and theater and I’d always approached filmmaking like a painter in a studio might–it was a totally solo experience. I had worked on other people’s narrative work, but always as an editor so I was totally unfamiliar with the culture and life of a film set.
And I loved it, I loved being on a real movie set, the busyness of it, the way that everyone worked together to form this gigantic functioning creative organism. Having creative collaborators was terrifying and liberating and astounding and it totally changed the way that I approached making art–it all became about relationships for me. Relationship-based filmmaking you could call it.
As life-changing and wonderful as the experience was however, I was frustrated by the way that traditional movie-making seemed almost custom-designed to obstruct the central work of the project–that of the actor. I immediately started fantasizing about trying to find a way of making films that would be as easy on the actors as possible–a completely performance-centered process: small unobtrusive crew, minimal eqiupment, 360? lighting, long takes. Plus, characters based on the actors themselves and words that would come straight out of the actors’ own brains: improvised lines.
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
Lynn Shelton’s My Effortless Brilliance (which I reviewed at SXSW) has its New York premiere tonight at Rooftop Films in Williamsburg, before heading to IFC VOD later this summer and DVD later this year. The film was co-written by and stars Harvey Danger singer Sean Nelson, who has given Ann Powers a recap of how he’s spent the last ten years since his band’s one massive hit for her LA Times blog. “10 years ago (pretty much exactly), we had the number one song on KROQ, and sold out the Troubadour, The Roxy and The Viper Room during the summer,” he writes. “Next week we’ll play in front of 60 people [at LA's Largo]. And we’re happy.”
Chris Thilk
