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.
The Sundance Film Festival has announced that in 2010 they’ll launch a new programming sidebar called NEXT, designed to reflect the fact that “a new aesthetic enlisting low-and no-budget filmmaking techniques has been on the rise.” According to the press release sent out this morning, Sundance “staffers refer to the new section with the symbol < = > which literally translates to ‘less than equals greater than’.” That the new section is happening is not a total shock — Sundance’s John Cooper and Trevor Groth hinted that it was coming at a panel at Cannes — but I must say, the emoticon caught me by surprise.
See the press release in its entirety after the jump.
Shortly after Sundance 2009, Paul wrote a post explaining why he walked out of one of the festival’s biggest buzz-suckers, the romantic comedy 500 Days of Summer. “I figured I’d never write, “It was so-so” for a review, so I left,” he wrote. Acknowledging that he couldn’t “write a “review” of a movie I didn’t fully watch,” he instead decided to “write a review of my decision to walk out a half hour into it,” using a particularly glowing blurb about the film as a bounceboard. Pouncing on a much friendlier comparison to Garden State, Paul wrote 500 off as a weak copy of Zach Braff’s break-out: “It’s kind of like if Garden State had been turned into a TV series, recast, cancelled, then bought by USA network and restarted.”
I did see (500) Days of Summer all the way through (the parentheses were added to the title after Sundance, presumably in a nod to one of the film’s visual tics), so I can review it, but I can’t say Paul’s instinct based on the first thirty minutes was off the mark. The film begins with an on screen disclaimer, an “author’s note” declaring that what we’re about to see is not based on real people or events (punchline: someone named “Jenny Beckman” is nonetheless a “bitch”); shortly after the picture begins to roll in earnest, a deep-voiced gentleman narrator informs us that “This is not a love story.” The aggressive out-of-the-gate broadcasting of all that (500) Days of Summer is not foreshadows what it actually is: a film full of signs with nothing to signify, a mashup of a decade’s worth of Sundance cliche, a confirmation of the obsolescence of the notion that “independent film” could seek to subvert business as usual.
Downloading Nancy has become one of those films indelibly scarred by the knee-jerk reaction of the first people to see it; if you know it at all, you know that it was hated at Sundance. I wasn’t at the infamous press screening where, as Michael Lerman wrote in a piece on SpoutBlog late last year, “Audiences fled the theater mid-picture as Nancy and her new companion engaged in depressingly violent sexual activity, padded with an icky sensitivity that makes each viewer feel like they should go home and shower after just being present at the screening.” Watching it 18 months later — alone, so doubly removed from the kind of festival fever that can cause the first opinion to become the only opinion that matters — I can understand how a viewer could have been scared away by the film’s synopsis (frankly, the equation of unhappy housewife + internet + S & M = salvation is probably what kept me away from that press screening in the first place.) It’s also understandable that the film’s first scene of brutal (although by no means explicitly shot) sexually violent game-playing would send viewers to the exits, although that seems slightly less reasonable for people who watch movies for a living. What I can’t understand, is how anyone could make it through the full film and not have some kind of admiration for the way Downloading Nancy is shot, scored and staged; for the vanity-free performance by Maria Bello and the seductively morally ambiguous work of Jason Patrick; and for the magic trick it works, lending unspeakable trauma a kind of grace.
(Spring Breakdown, a very strange film [at least, as far as studio-financed comedies go] that premiered at Sundance earlier this year, comes out on DVD today. This is a slightly edited version of a piece I published during that festival.)
Variety’s Todd McCarthy received mixedreviews for his Sundance 2009 wrap-up piece, in which he lumped together the festival’s two biggest narrative hits, Push and An Education, as part of a trend of films espousing values “emblematic” of “the start of the Obama age.” I’m not sure our recently elected president has much to do with the themes of films that no doubt were conceived years before he clinched the nomination (especially these two films, both of which were based on long pre-existing texts), but I did notice that this year’s crop of Sundance titles seemed more interested in reflecting the times than some of their solipsistic Amerindie ancestors. I saw more films at this festival that tried, earnestly or satirically, to grapple with the state of the union’s troubled-but-hopeful psyche, than I’ve seen in any single ten day stretch in my professional life.
Even better, I saw this concern with The State of Things seep into films as disparate as the tacky, raunchy Rachel Dratch/Amy Poehler comedy Spring Breakdown, and Deborah Stratman’s extremely classy, short feature-length experimental documentary feature O’er the Land –– two films which, on paper, couldn’t be more different, and yet are both heavily invested in notions of fin de siècle Americana and the peculiar ways in which Americans take advantage of our bottomless freedom. Dense, sometimes silent, always visually complex, and presented with neither binding narration nor immediately evident narrative, Land is probably the purest cinema experience I had at Sundance this year. Bizarrely, while Stratman’s film has continued to play the festival circuit, Spring Breakdown’s Sundance screenings may be the the only theatrical exposure that the studio-produced comedy is going to see.
Once again it’s late March and with the opening salvos of the 09’ festival circuit already fired in Park City, Berlin and Austin, our friends at some of Midtown’s most venerable arts institutions have picked what they see as the cream of the fresh, young crop for their yearly survey of “new” filmmaking. But what’s so “new” about New Directors/New Films, MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s customary selection of a couple dozen features and a half dozen shorts by recently emergent filmmakers, which opened Wednesday night with Cherien Dabis’ Amreeka, a earnest multi-cultural drama about a woman from Ramallah who moves to middle America with her son and ends up working at White Castle? Yes, this is what you crave, you midtown Manhattan cinephiles, you wine and cheese pasties. Amreeka has quickly won a reputation among the cinerati as reeking, for better or worse, rightly or wrongly, of the Sundance Lab and its liberal indie realist orthodoxy, which might provoke some to dismiss it. I won’t hold it against you.
In a warped way, it’s now comforting to see our childhood heroes be every bit as deranged and disappointed as we are, as adults, with the real world. Like The Venture Brothers’ sense of a future gone horribly mundane, DERRICK Comedy’s debut feature Mystery Team turns childhood dreams into a darkly funny hypothetical: what if you never bothered to move past them?
Premiering earlier this year at Sundance, Team focuses on the titular trio who, originally their town’s plucky mascots, forgot to grow out of their adorable roles of Jason the Boy Genius (DC Pierson), Duncan the Strongest Kid on the Block (Dominic Dierkes) and Charlie the Master of Disguise (Donald Glover). Of course their achievements never get past childish levels –– the genius can only recite quirky facts, the strongest kid can’t lift a dumbbell and the Master of Disguise relies on silly mustaches and sombreros to pass as a gentleman or a plumber. Annoyed that they’re not taken as “seriously” as they once were, the chocolate milk-drinking group find a silver lining when a little girl asks them to solve the mystery of who killed her parents.
Call it the Rorschach theory of criticism: some movies function best as mirrors, inspiring writing that says more about the writer than the film. Watchmaker Films’ fabulous new DVD release of Eagle Pennell’s The Whole Shootin’ Match, the 1978 DIY feature which famously inspired Robert Redford to launch the Sundance Institute, which would eventually take over the Utah/U.S. Film Festival where he saw it play, includes an unusually artful documentary by Pennell’s brother/composer and nephew, an interview with the filmmaker, a soundtrack CD and an extensive package of writings on the film from the likes of Paul Cullum, Emmanuel Levy, and SXSW founder Lewis Black.
Two reviews by Roger Ebert are reprinted: the critic’s original three-star assessment from the Chicago Sun-Times, dated April 9, 1980; and a reevaluation pegged to the film’s 2007 restoration. Upping his rating by an additional star, Ebert focuses much of his second Shootin’ piece on Pennell’s alcoholism (the filmmaker essentially drank himself to death shortly before turning 50 in 2002) and the ways in which it can be seen to inform every frame of his first feature. Ebert remembers seeing Shootin’ for the first time at Telluride in 1980: “I went for a walk on the mountain-side with Eagle and mentioned that he had made a film about alcoholism. He said that had never occurred to him, though he thought I was right.” If this lengthy CHICAGO magazine profile on the critic is to be believed, that conversation took place just a year after Ebert entered treatment to deal with his own drinking problem.
It’s possible that this is just that time of year and I have SXSW on the brain, but when I watched The Whole Shootin’ Match a few days ago, more than seeing the film as a love/hate letter to the bottle, more than spotting its shared DNA with various films by Richard Linklater and Andrew Bujalski (and, to a lesser extent, Wes Anderson and Gus Van Sant), I saw it as a catalyst for a conversation about Austin’s evolving film cultural history.
The International Documentary Association threw a party for and tribute to the filmmakers nominated for Oscars for short and feature length non-fiction films last night, and most of the best jokes of the night had to do with Man on Wire’s star wirewalker Philippe Petit. Sort of. In introducing a clip from the film, host Lily Tomlin asked, “What does it take to be arrested for the crime of the century? Apparently more than a meltdown on the set of I Heart Huckabees.” Cue insidery guffaws.
Earlier in the evening, IDA’s Eddie Schmidt tossed off a Petit joke that was less funny ha-ha than funny remarkable as an answer to a thrown gauntlet. Without naming names, Schmidt responded to Alexandra Pelosi’s claim to the New York Times that “it’s like a dirty little secret” that documentaries “are boring.” In the same story, Pelosi also proudly declared that she won’t make films longer than standard broadcast length, and refuses to submit them to film festivals — thus marking her supposed populism in firm opposition to the entire cinematic ethos that IDA was celebrating. Schmidt offered a rousing rebuttal: “The only person who is allowed to say that anything is boring is Philippe Petit, because he has walked on a tightrope between two buildings.”
Since nominee Werner Herzog was absent, Petit (seen above, apparently praying for a miniature version of the man behind him) was the most charismatic character in the room, and even after a year on the festival circuit, he and director James Marsh inspired a standing ovation. But it was a clip from Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World — the scene where the demented penguin goes his own way towards certain death — that got the biggest laugh of the night. Herzog’s schtick may sometimes seem to be bordering on self-parody these days, but the material it produces doesn’t get old.
Meanwhile, chatter over wine and tomato soup before the tribute program kept circling back to the recent sudden changes at Sundance. More than one person I talked express some degree of bemusement over a non-sourced, sort-of charticle on The Wrap, pegging Sundance programmers John Cooper and Trevor Groth, former AFI programmer Shaz Bennett (whose name The Wrap misspelled) and sometime Sundance programmer and current Without a Box guy Christian Gaines as the top contenders for Geoff Gilmore’s abandoned post. Cooper and Groth were at the event last night, but if either knew the what the future holds for their festival, they weren’t saying. When the topic came up, Groth simply smiled and said, “We live in exciting times.”
Woah. indieWIRE is reporting that Geoff Gilmore, a key player at the Sundance Film Festival for almost two full decades, is leaving that festival to take a job as Chief Creative Officer at Tribeca Enterprises, the New York organization that, amongst other things, is responsible for mounting the Tribeca Film Festival.
It seems too soon to assess What It All Means, but obviously, beyond each Festival’s assorted trials and tribulations, Sundance and Tribeca have had very different identities. Sundance is primarily associated with a certain type of actor-driven independent drama; Tribeca, in its brief history, has been most successful at unearthing international gems.
Of course, this is not the first sign that Tribeca has an interest in moving in more of a Sundance direction. In late 2007, Tribeca announced plans to streamline in the hopes of becoming more significant as an indie film market. At the time, Nancy Schafer lamented, “we haven’t had our Sex, Lies & Videotape yet. That’s what we want, and that’s what the industry wants.” Tribeca 2008 was my favorite installment of the festival yet, but beyond Jury Prize winner Let the Right One in, which was not a world premiere, it came and went without a breakout narrative hit. In light of this, the luring of Gilmore seems like the next logical step towards Tribeca’s long-ago stated mission.
Typically at SpoutBlog, we rarely state the obvious when it comes to a mediocre movie, trying to instead direct our gaze toward a gem that deserves some advocacy. Unless, of course, there’s a danger that said movie is going to overshadow the much earned good buzz around a great film. Such is the case with 500 Days of Summer starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. It’s a movie I walked out of at Sundance 2009, not because it sucked, but because it was lukewarm. I figured I’d never write, “It was so-so” for a review, so I left. But in the past week it has, surprisingly, garnered ovations that threaten to eclipse so many excellent films coming out of that festival.
Clearly the biggest crowd-pleaser at this year’s festival was this romantic comedy from first-time director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael Webber, which covers a year and a half in the relationship between Tom Hanson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Bishl (Zooey Deschanel), the latter a flighty woman who breaks the former’s heart. While some of the ground covered is stuff we’ve seen before, the film is told in an innovative and clever narrative style, jumping around in time from the height of their developing love affair to the months that follow their break-up. Gordon-Levitt creates an infinitely likeable character that both guys and women can relate to, much like John Cusack in his heyday…. What could easily be seen as a “…Say Anything” for the younger generation, the film’s Sundance premiere received a standing ovation from the audience, and one can expect that when it opens in July, it will be another Searchlight hit in the vein of Garden State and Once.
Of course, I can’t write a “review” of a movie I didn’t fully watch. I can, however, write a review of my decision to walk out a half hour into it. In fact, I’ll use the above blurb to record what was going through my mind in the half hour before I left.
Duncan Jones‘ Moon divided critics at Sundance, which is maybe not much of a surprise. A slow, introspective homage to classic sci-fi with one actor (Sam Rockwell in a perfectly modulated dual role), two locations (inside a moon space station, and just outside it), and minimalist special effects, Moon challeneges the viewer to confront what they think they know about space movies and lonely-man-in-existential-crisis movies equally. Audiences that get it seem to really get it, and hopefully Sony Classics, who are scheduled to release the film in June, won’t push the genre elements over the intellectual elements –– or vice versa –– when the victory of the film is the merging of the two. As I put it in my review, Moon “feels more casual and accessible than any cinematic exploration of the Lacanian mirror stage has a right to be.”
Whilst at Sundance, I got a few minutes alone with Rockwell and Jones, and we chatted about their mutual love of early-80s sci-fi, the technology and technique behind the dual performance, and the real life potential of Moon’s alternative energy fantasy. Beware: there’s a possible spoiler immediately after the jump.
…And the Oscar for most sorrowful face goes to… Mickey Rourke! Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler grabbed our heart, slammed it to the mat, and showered it with tears. But does Mickey Rourke’s resurrection have what it takes to beat Sean Penn’s transformation in Milk?
Karina gives an update about IFC’s Festival Direct, a way to be among the first to see new indie films even if you can’t spring for a festival pass. Also, an odd run-in with Steven Soderbergh, who may or may not have a bone to pick with our intrepid blogger.
We debate which is the most absurd piece of Che merchandise sent in by listeners, and respond to feedback about usefulness of subjecting terrible, exploitative horror movies to the rigors of film criticism.
Celebrating the films of 1999, Rotten Tomatoes kicks off a 12-month, retrospective series of features with an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of The Blair Witch Project. The groundbreaking, record-smashing indie horror flick made its debut at Sundance ten years ago this month, and RT writer Joe Utichi does a great job of reminding us of both the film’s legendary story and its lasting influence.
While I left The Blair Witch Project out of SpoutBlog’s five-day series of “Sundance Stories of Yore,” I wouldn’t have paid as great a tribute as Utichi has. Personally, I never appreciated the film in any way, but thanks to this video I’m now thinking differently about the merits of the production. I may never need to watch the actual film again, but I have to give the filmmakers credit for how they went about getting their 20 hours of footage.
That’s why it’s even more unfortunate that directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick haven’t done anything noteworthy since. At least Blair Witch actor Joshua Leonard has just made his “comeback” with a starring role in the 2009 Sundance hit Humpday. In the past ten years, he’s had small parts in films like Men of Honor, The Shaggy Dog and Prom Night, and interestingly enough he provided the voice of “Tyler Durden” in a video game version of Fight Club(another landmark film from 1999). But with Humpday, which like Blair Witch utilizes his talent for improvisation, he’s in the foreground once again. Now someone needs to give Heather Donahue and Michael C. Williams their due spotlights so we may continue to celebrate a Blair Witch renaissance.
Set in alternate-universe present day versions of frozen-over Russia and the Manhattan theatrical intelligensia (the latter resembling something Charlie Kaufman might have come up with, minus the self-deprecating suspicion of success that leads him to mock the careerist stars of Needleman in a Haystack), Sophie Barthes‘ very strong first featureCold Souls stars Paul Giamatti as an actor named Paul Giamatti, a movie star struggling to get into the character of Uncle Vanya on the stage. His agent points him to an article in the New Yorker about an extraction and cold storage facility for souls on Roosevelt Island. At the end of his rope, Paul goes through the procedure, but find that soulless, his performance is even worse — imagine Vanya as interpreted by a handsy William Shatner. It’s when Giamatti attempts to get back his original soul (shaped, in one of the film’s best running jokes, like a chick pea) that he discovers that the pristine New York clinic where he had the procedure is a front for a roiling Russian soul black market, and with the help of an attractive female soul mule (Dina Korzun), embarks on a journey to St. Petersberg.
In an interview at the Sundance Film Festival last week, Barthes discussed reading Jung, dreaming about Woody Allen, and why she hopes Putin doesn’t read film blogs.
So why would Paul Giamatti’s soul look like a chickpea?
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
Celebrating the films of 1999, Rotten Tomatoes kicks off a 12-month, retrospective series of features with 
