With Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist being branded as a debacle and other highly-anticipated auteur premieres drawing shrugs (Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock) and measured praise (Jane Campion’s Bright Star), the rest of the press and industry chattering classes have settled on Jacques Audiard’s undeniably well-made crime drama A Prophet as 2009’s sole breakout thus far. I walked out thinking it’s fine for what it is, but not much more. In the hours since exiting that two-and-a-half hour examination of spiritual and socio-economic transcendence via criminal calculation, I’ve gone back and forth between pondering a potential political subtext, and wondering if said pondering was more than the actual primary text required; I’m not yet ready to render a verdict, but I’ll let you know when I am.
Meanwhile, I spent much of my second full day in Cannes thinking about a Directors’ Fortnight double feature I caught the night before: Like You Know it All, the latest ode to drunken paralysis and hungover confusion by Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo (see my review here); and Go Get Some Rosemary, the second Fortnight feature in as many years from Red Bucket Films and their 20-something progenitors, New York-based brothers Josh and Benny Safdie. Both films are (at least) semi-autobiographical portraits of men who work in film but languish on the far margins of what we think of as “the industry”; both use humor to ingratiate us into the worldviews of protagonists who, at best, display a thought process that’s skewed, and at worse, exhibit behavior that cannot be excused. Where the former may depend on a familiarity with the director’s previous work to complete the joke, the latter’s blend of slapstick and surrealism in what should be super-serious situations helps to crystalize the Safdie style sketched out in last year’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed. Fueled by a go-for-broke lead performance by Frownland filmmaker Ronnie Bronstein, the Safdies’ follow-up should win over at least a few skeptics who failed to see the charm in their debut.
Newsflash: a major metropolitan newspaper known to be struggling to stay afloat has allocated resources to something not totally shameless! The Los Angeles Times has launched a weekly column on independent film, called Indie Focus, to be written by freelancer Mark Olsen. Olsen’s first Indie Focus story, on the perhaps unlikely double feature of Frownland and The Pleasure of Being Robbed beginning on Thursday at the Silent Movie theater, is online now; it’ll appear in the print edition of Sunday’s Calendar section, which is kind of a big deal. A newspaper attempting to combat their industry’s total desperation with a gesture that says indie film reporting (or really, any kind of arts coverage that demands an audience beyond 12 year old boys) is not only important, but worthy of the highest-profile platform that they have to offer? More like this, please.
Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello have drawn an increasingly large following as the decade as worn on, but this year their cinematic profile has raised dramatically. In Berlin this year Madonna unveiled her Filth and Wisdom, staring frontman Eugene Hutz, and now comes a full blown tour documentary filmmaker Margarita Jimeno, Gogol Bordello Non-Stop. The film made its North American bow at AFI over the weekend and screens again this Wednesday at the Arclight. The Bogota, Columbia born, Williamsburg based Jimeno, who has made shorts and worked in the art and editorial departments of NYC indies for a decade, caught up with us to discuss her fascination with There Will Be Blood, her desire to adapt Que Viva La Musica! and where to catch Sid Vicious on You Tube. …Read more
As the hipster kleptomaniac at the center of Josh Safdie’s adorable debut feature The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Eleonore Hendricks steals a lot of things, but mainly the audiences’ hearts. The twentysomething actress, despite her newfound indie cinema fame, still works at the video store Cinema Nolita and binges on way too much Lukas Moodysson. After just wrapping Eric Juhola’s short film The Nowhere Kids (a fictional speculation on Gotham Award nominee and Slamdance winner Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa), Hendricks is getting ready to begin production on Safdie’s new project, Go Get Some Rosemary. In the meantime, I caught up with her to chat about Barbara Loden’s Wanda, her extra special week of moviegoing and why she gave up listening to WFMU. …Read more
This review originally ran during the SXSW Film Festival. The Pleasure of Being Robbed opens in NY today and is available on IFC Video on Demand.
What a lark this film is, what a caustic joy! As with his shorts, Josh Safdie’s first feature film, The Pleasure Of Being Robbed, is too articulate a work to describe as whimsical, turning into a pejorative what would seem to be the best adjective with which to describe it. I could describe it as entirely unique, but then I couldn’t discuss its cinematic precedents, which are probably myriad but which I’d narrow down to the one that keeps springing to mind: Bresson.
It’s like nothing Bresson has ever made, but the entire film, with its heightened naturalism and precise spontaneity, seems possessed by Bresson’s notion of cinematography - not the lighting and photography, but the art of cinematography with which he delineated between those films that elevate the medium and those that are restrained by the trappings of the theater. I guess means that the best compliment I can pay Safdie is that his work makes film better. And it’s here that I feel the need to quote his own synopsis of the film, which ends with this quizzical postulation: “It’s a comedy?”
I’m running off to the airport shortly and will be away from the computer until Friday afternoon Cannes time, but here’s a quick look at the news coming out of the festival as of Thursday morning:
Un Conte de Noel, Surveillance, and The Pleasure of Being Robbedhave been picked up. The former two were bought by IFC; the latter two deals were all but confirmed before the festival began.
David Lynch’s production company is putting together ALejandro Jodorowsky’s next film. Described as a “metaphysical spaghetti gangster film,” it’s set to star Nick Nolte, Asia Argento, Marilyn Manson and Udo Kier. Also, Lynch himself will allegedly team with the so-hot-right-now (tee hee) Werner Herzog on My Son, My Son, “a horror-tinged murder drama based on a true story,” set for a “guerrilla-style digital video shoot on Coronado Island” in March.
Baby Mamahad a big weekend. The Tina Fey comedy made $18 million dollars, beating Harold and Kumar’s take by about $4 million and easily enough for the top box office slot. Still, the stoner comedy more than made back its production budget in its first weekend, and that’s cause enough for Warner execs to take credit for handling their first post-merger New Line release successfully.
The Hollywood Reporter says IFC is in “final negotiations” to distribute The Pleasure of Being Robbed, the Josh Safdie feature which has been the subject of much chatter since it was announced as the only American film to screen at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.THR’s Gregg Goldstein is calling this turn of events ” a final triumph for SXSW producer Matt Dentler,” who selected the film for his final Emerging Visions sidebar before departing for Cinetic.
Idiocracy is not even mentioned in this Variety story about Mike Judge’s next project, a workplace comedy called Extract which is set to star Jason Bateman. Pay no attention to the political satire which spawned an energy drink even though the film itself was barely released––me want more Office Space!!!
Despite (or, perhaps, in reaction to) grumblings in France that too few of the home country’s filmmakers had found a slot on the schedule for the Cannes Film Festival, the just-announced Directors’ Fortnight sidebar is overwhelmingly made up of French co-productions. Oh, and the closing Fortnight film? Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed.
Baby Mama will compete at the box office this weekend from its comic polar opposite, Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. As keeping a notebook puts it, it’s like “a psychic microcosm of the democratic primary. Baby Mama is to Hillary as Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo is to Barack!”
Jimmy Fallon, having apparently abandoned his movie career after Factory Girl, will soon be announced as Conan O’Brien’s replacement as host of NBC’s 12:30 pm chat show.
“Smart, absurd and heartwarmingly innocent, Joshua Safdie’s The Back of Her Head is a dessert short, that euphoriant treat that could in endless play still mesmerize with its sweetness and richness of story,” writes Noralil Ryan Fores at ShortEnd Magazine. The above clip “is in a way, a trailer for the film,” according to its YouTube synopsis.
This is as good an excuse as any for me to point you to redbucketfilms, the YouTube channel of Josh and Bennie Safdie and their filmmaking cohorts. There’s a bunch of stuff there: shorts, trailers, fragments, a minute of footage of Albert Maysles walking around an art gallery (and then, sitting and yawning epically) billed as “an observational documentary about a man at a party, who makes observational documentaries.” Etc.
In his round-up of the various stories on Matt Dentler leaving SXSW for Cinetic, David Hudson pays tribute to Dentler’s years at the festival. “As I’ve said here in the past, any history of American independent cinema in the 00s is going to have to include a passage on the impact of Matt’s smarts, instincts and sheer guts as a programmer.” David also links to Scott Kirsner, who has some reservations about the digital division of Cinetic that will becomes Dentler’s new home, at least in terms of its potential attractiveness to filmmakers.
Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind may have failed to make much of an impact at the box office, but as Liz Shannon Miller reports at NewTeeVee, it did touch off a serious wave of low-budget remake making on the web. Of the three “Sweded” mini-masterpieces she considers, by favorite is the above take on An Inconvenient Truth. Watch it, and join the fight to keep polar bears from taking our jobs. Related: this plus The Pleasure of Being Robbed makes two recent works to employ use of a fake polar bear. I just have to find one more fake polar bear in popular culture, and I can pitch a trend piece to the New York Times!
What a lark this film is, what a caustic joy! As with his shorts, Josh Safdie’s first feature film, The Pleasure Of Being Robbed, is too articulate a work to describe as whimsical, turning into a pejorative what would seem to be the best adjective with which to describe it. I could describe it as entirely unique, but then I couldn’t discuss its cinematic precedents, which are probably myriad but which I’d narrow down to the one that keeps springing to mind: Bresson. It’s like nothing Bresson has ever made, but the entire film, with its heightened naturalism and precise spontaneity, seems possessed by Bresson’s notion of cinematography - not the lighting and photography, but the art of cinematography with which he delineated between those films that elevate the medium and those that are restrained by the trappings of the theater. I guess means that the best compliment I can pay Safdie is that his work makes film better. And it’s here that I feel the need to quote his own synopsis of the film, which ends with this quizzical postulation: “It’s a comedy?”
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
Newsflash: a major metropolitan newspaper known to be struggling to stay afloat has allocated resources to something not totally shameless! The Los Angeles Times has launched a weekly column on independent film, called Indie Focus, to be written by freelancer Mark Olsen. Olsen’s first Indie Focus story, on the perhaps unlikely double feature of Frownland and The Pleasure of Being Robbed beginning on Thursday at the Silent Movie theater, is online now; it’ll appear in the print edition of Sunday’s Calendar section, which is kind of a big deal. A newspaper attempting to combat their industry’s total desperation with a gesture that says indie film reporting (or really, any kind of arts coverage that demands an audience beyond 12 year old boys) is not only important, but worthy of the highest-profile platform that they have to offer? More like this, please.
I’m running off to the airport shortly and will be away from the computer until Friday afternoon Cannes time, but here’s a quick look at the news coming out of the festival as of Thursday morning:
Baby Mama
While I gather my final thoughts on the 
