“Tell me why I should go see a fucking movie that’s in Mennonite!” — Joshua Rothkopf.

Consider the gauntlet thrown down. The above quote comes from a “pubcast” posted last week by Aaron Hillis on his first day as editor of GreenCine Daily. In this conversation between Hillis, Rothkopf, David Fear and Matt Zoller-Seitz, about where film criticism currently is and where they’d like to see it go, the verdict seemed to be that everyone would like to see more clear-headed advocacy, free of snark and academic flourish. The film implicitly referenced is that pullquote Silent Light – which, though made by Carlos Reygadas in an Mexican Mennonite community and featuring a number of real-life Mennonites in lieu of professional actors, is not “in Mennonite,” but the obscure German dialect Plautdietsch. That kind of quibble, of course, doesn’t really matter. What does matter, is a) that Silent Light is finally having its official for-profit US premiere tomorrow at Film Forum in New York City, and b) Rothkopf’s point is valid. The thing most expressed by most Stateside writers (including myself) to audiences about this near-masterpiece has nothing to do with what’s actually on screen. It’s that, since the film’s debut at Cannes in 2007, Silent Light been rather difficult to see.

That wasn’t intended as a pun, but maybe it should be taken as one: though Light’s path to US distribution has been both thorny and worth noting, it’s also a relatively painless thing to put into plain language. The experience of actually watching Silent Light is not summarized so easily. At its basest level, Silent Light is a film about the gulf between what we can explain (based on evidence and experience and a common language for things that happen to all people) and things we can’t, things which push our understanding of the way the universe works and what it means to be a part of it.  Like any number of visually extraordinary epics about big ideas which open up new avenues of interpretation on each viewing (2001 is the example that, perhaps oddly, comes quickest to my mind), words are not always its best advertisements.

This is what I can say, in the plainest language in which I can say it. …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.

I’m finally heading back to New York tomorrow after almost 5 weeks away, and a number of can’t-miss film events are awaiting me. A sample:

• Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light is finally, finally coming back to New York, a year after it screened at NYFF 2007, as part of a retrospective dedicated to the Mexican filmmaker at MoMA. Manohla Dargis raves.
• Natural Causes, the relationship drama co-directed by sometime SpoutBlog contributor Michael Lerman (and featuring yours truly in a teeny-tiny cameo), has a one-night-only NYC preview on Monday night at the IFC Center. You can buy tickets here, and read our SXSW coverage of the film here and here.
• IFP is launching a new series of screenings called First Weekend, in which they help ensure an indie release has a successful first weekend by inviting their members to buy tickets for a special screening featuring a discussion with the filmmakers and an after party. The first film to get the treatment will be Ballast, which we loved at Sundance, and which director Lance Hammer is self-distributing. It all starts at Film Forum on October 2. More info here.

I “eeee!”ed too soon. Yet another snag has come up in the distribution future for the film that’s become my most picked scab over the past year, Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light. Just yesterday, Anthony Kufman passed along news that Palisades Media, the company that purchased the back catalogs of both Tartan Uk and Tartan US, were planning a theatrical release for some time in the vague future. But today. Kaufman says he’s been emailed by Camille Neel of Bac Films International, who own worldwide rights on Reygadas’ film.Though Tartan did release the film in the UK, a report in Screen Daily suggesting that they had purchased US distribution rights to the film was apparently erroneous––whether they wanted to or not is unclear, but the distributor apparently never closed a deal before shutting down. Kaufman quotes Neel, italics mine: “The film is still available today for the US and of course, if we have strong interests, we are still looking for distribution [for] all rights in the US.”

Paging all distributors with notoriously strong interests!!!

Today is my 28th birthday (cue self-reflexive old maid joke). I wasn’t even going to mention it here, but Anthony Kaufman has written a blog post with a promise that, if it ends up coming true, would be a pretty fantastic present, for you and me: I’d get to see Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light get a theatrical release, and you’d get a reprieve from me bitching about it.

Here’s what’s going on: yesterday, news broke that Palisades Media had acquired the left-behind library of recently-shuttered distributor art film Tartan. The Variety story on the matter was fairly vague, and didn’t say much regarding the films that had been sitting on Tartan’s shelf awaiting a theatrical release, including Light, Princesses, You the Living, etc. Kaufman exchanged emails with Palisades about the future of Light, and ‘was told it would “absolutely receive a theatrical screening now,’ with, of course, one caveat: ‘but everything is still TBD.’”

So, you know. Don’t get your hopes up or anything, but … eeee!

After the de rigeur delay at JFK (during which I learned of Tim Russert’s death via a single muted TV in an airport bar otherwise given over to Holland vs. France madness), I arrived in Vegas around 9:30 and went straight to The Palms, homebase of CineVegas and the hotel at which, as a member of the Shorts jury, I have been graciously sequestered

This is only my second trip to the city, but it seems like The Palms is a bit of an anomaly. Of course, a casino is a casino is a casino––there’s no getting around the frosty air-conditioned air, the sense of time having stopped at permanent midnight, the carefully calibrated spectacle apparently meant to foster the illusion that all spending and gambling losses are imaginary (or, at least, less than earth-shatteringly consequential). But at The Palms there are no grandmother types pumping coins into slots, no middle American families crowded around a buffet, no foreign tourists spending obscene amounts of money on luxury kitsch. A spacious, multi-tower complex set several blocks off The Strip, it attracts an almost uniquely young crowd, more or less demographically synonymous with the Real World season that would seem to inspire their tourism. Here the film festival is hidden in plain site, planted in part of the casino’s multiplex and injected into the hotel’s culture; the average Palms guest, if not oblivious, then certainly at least blinded somewhat by the MTV-approved moral suicide mission for which they took the long weekend.

The idea that such an environment could play host to serious films playing to serious cineastes who take it all very seriously might seem incongruous, but so far––and I write this having not seen a single film other than the shorts I’m jurying, though I plan to hit two screenings tonight––this contradiction just seems really exciting. Last night, at the CineVegas 10th Anniversary party, I had conversations about Carlos Reygadas, the degree of wink to the horror element of Baghead, Los Angeles’ newish Silent Movie Theater, and Ronnie Bronstein. Variety’s Robert Koehler valiantly argued the case that CineVegas is the preeminent discovery festival for “semi-narrative and non-narrative” film in North America. Janet Pierson convinced me that I have to see a SXSW 2008 selection that I missed called The Wild Horse Redemption, which she described as “cowboy porn about these felons who become horse whisperers” (hot, right?)

And all of this took place about five paces away from a heavily-bodyguarded Britney Spears.

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• Glenn Kenny considers that “instant hit”, The Incredible Hulk. “If Edward Norton’s idea, if your idea, if my idea, of an intelligent mainstream genre picture won’t play with the money people, where the hell does that leave anybody’s idea of an intelligent mainstream picture, period?” He raises the issue to Norton himself, but ultimately comes closest to an answer via Jay-Z.
• “It’s not just that there were a lot of black and white movies last year — it’s that most of them were fucking awesome,” writes Rich at FourFour. “Among them: Perspolis, Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain!…Killer of Sheep (a 30+ year-old bit of brilliance that didn’t see official release till last year), I’m Not There, in part (and, my opinion, the b&w parts were the only ones worth watching), and Frank Darabont’s preferred cut of The Mist. But my favorite black-and-white flick of ‘07 and possibly of all time is Control.” What follows is a short treatise on that film’s humanity through black and white cinematography; there are a lot of screencaps.
• “When a filmmaker tells a story in such broads strokes, he or she does so because it allows certain ideas to be explored without exposition; when the scope of a story is already understood, already deeply seated in the audience’s understanding of narrative, those audiences are more perceptible to the details and nuances the filmmaker is able to explore and play with within that structure.” David Lowery considers Silent Light at /Hammer to Nail.

• Ellen Burstyn and James Cromwell have been hired to play Barbara Bush Sr and George H.W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush drama, which is currently being called W. All along, the trades have been saying that the goal is to get this sucker distributed around the time of the November elections; today’s Variety story implies that since it’s almost April and they’re still casting the thing, a pre-Inauguration Day release might be more realistic.
• Peter Chernin of News Corp/Fox and Robert Iger of Disney/ABC, who helped negotiate deals with the DGA and WGA, are now expected to mediate talks between SAG/AFTRA and the studios, in an effort to head off an actors strike.
• My beloved Silent Light won five Mexican Academy Awards on Tuesday night, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography.

Wow. AMPAS released their shortlist of nine finalists for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination today, and it’s missing a LOT of familiar titles. Like Cannes winner and presumed front runner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Like festival favorites Edge of Heaven and Persepolis. Like the great Silent Light, which Tartan has still not set a US release date for, and probably won’t now that their hopes for free publicity have been dashed.

Not to take anything away from the finalists (and though I haven’t seen any of them, I’ve certainly heard many good things about some of them, especially The Counterfeiters and Days of Darkness), but I’m sure we can expect to see much grousing about this from fans of the snubbed films, particularly 4 Months. But you have to hand the prognostication prize to Cinemascope, who predicted way back in early December that “the Romanian abortion movie” wouldn’t make the final five “because the style of the movie-making is all but indigestible to American viewers.” Of course, the same post predicted Persepolis as the race’s frontrunner. Win some, lose some, etc.

The films that did make the cut are listed after the jump.

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indieWIRE has released the results of their annual critic’s poll for the best undistributed films of 2007, and Ronnie Bronstein’s Frownland has made the top ten. The Gotham award winner received seven votes, the same number as Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, which is interesting for a number of reasons. For one thing, Ferrara and Bronstein were two of just three American directors to make the Top Ten. For another, in the case of both films, whether or not they’re actually undistributed is basically a question of semantics.

I first heard that IFC had acquired Go Go Tales back at the New York Film Festival in September, and have heard a number of confirmations of that rumor since. Anthony Kaufmann even references those whispers in his indieWIRE write-up of the poll, noting that “for now, [Go Go Tales is] still technically available.” It basically gets to keep its place on the list because IFC hasn’t yet issued a press release.

Meanwhile, Silent Light earned 20 votes in the poll, which would have been good enough to tie for second place…had the film not been disqualified because Tartan quietly acquired U.S. distribution rights last month. I certainly didn’t get a press release about that––I’ve got to be one of the film’s most vocal supporters, and I didn’t find out about the deal until a month after the fact. Frownland, meanwhile, has distribution in France, and due to the number of North American film festivals where it’s played, it’s probably been seen by more non-critics on this continent than the film ranked right below it on the list, Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha.

This is not about me fronting like Silent Light deserves recognition and Go Go Tales (which I’m on the record as having loved) does not, nor am I trying to argue with the rules of this particular poll. But it does seem like proof positive that not only is the line between “distributed” and “undistributed” getting a lot murkier, but the idea of distribution-as-victory is maybe not all it’s cracked up to be.

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Time Out London’s interview with Silent Light director Carlos Reygadas is full of good stuff, but like Ray Pride, I’m most interested in what he has to say about the formulation of the film’s almost incomprehensibly beautiful opening shot. It turns out that its inspiration was surprisingly mundane–just take one part OS X, add one part Icelandic art band, and stir:

I was listening to Sigur Rós before going to bed, the computer was in front of me, and the screensaver came on. I have this cosmic screensaver, a picture of stars moving out of the frame very, very slowly. I looked at that magnificent space landscape with the music of Sigur Rós playing and I thought the movie had to open like that.

After all the breathless sploogery over this scene (my own included), its actual ingredients are kind of a letdown, no?

In any case, as my romance with this movie continues unabated, I was happy to see Anne Thompson name it as a “strong contender” for an Oscar nom. Also, how did I miss the news (now a month old!) that Tartan is distributing the film in the US? (Maybe I was derelict in my feed reading duties that week; maybe one of you should have told me. But let’s not play the blame game, okay?) This should be good news, but with no US release date yet set (it opens in England on Friday), I have to guess they’re waiting for the Oscar nominations to decide how and when to push it out.

At The Circuit, John Hopewell and Emilio Mayorga offer a number of signs that “the mantle of greatness is rapidly slipping over” Silent Light director Carlos Reygadas. I’m surely not going to argue with that, but I do think it’s interesting that Mayorga and Hopewell make it a point to set Reygadas apart from other hot young Mexican directors, such as Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro González Iñárritu, who crossed over to Hollywood success:

Reygadas has a niche in a pantheon - not new Mexican cinema; given the accessibility of and interest in film-making worldwide, the very concept of new national cinemas may be arcane - but new, left-field world cinema, up there with other unorthodoz film-makers such as, say, Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Read: he’s making art films for die hards, and that’s never gonna translate to the masses.

I don’t know. I don’t want to be an elitist. I feel like I’m a woman of the people, or whatever. But I like it that Silent Light requires work to enjoy. It’s hard for me to reconcile the sad truth that popular culture as a whole feels more comfortable with Crash with subtitles.

• There’s not much news to report from yesterday’s strike talks (looks like Nikki was right about that pesky press blackout), but we do know that Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards is a expected to join Tim Robbins and Gilbert Gottfried at a star-studded strike rally today in New York’s Washington Square. Meanwhile, this week Carson Daly will become the first late-night host to cross picket lines to tape his show. Yes, Carson Daly has a show.
• My beloved Silent Light took the best picture and best director prizes at the 33st Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival over the weekend
• Dubai International Capital, an investment corp owned by the ruler of Dubai, has acquired a chunk of Sony. The exact size of the investment is unknown, but DIC characterized it in a press release as “substantial.” In other local news, the Dubai Film Festival has announced its lineup, which will include a tribute to Danny Glover as well as “Jordan’s first feature in 50 years.”