Nikal Saval has an admittedly cranky but masterful takedown of I’m Not There at N + 1. Calling Todd Haynes’ pastiche the Worst Movie of 2007, Saval scratches particularly aggressively at Haynes’ habitual referencing and naked larceny: “Haynes is drowning in his film school education, just as his audience is drowning in allusions, and not a single original idea floats by to rescue him or us.”
Erin at Steady Diet of Film has a helpful translation of what Jason Reitman, John Sayles, Adam Shankman and Joe Wright were REALLY saying on a recent episode of Sunday Morning Shootout. Useful information gleaned: Reitman, who “hates going to awards shows because he has to stop dressing like he’s homeless,” has a masterful death stare, but Sayles is not impressed.
Lots to report today on the Berlinale front, including the news that Martin Scorsese’s long-delayed Rolling Stones doc Shine A Light will finally make its premiere at the festival–and on opening night, no less. David Hudson has tworoundups.
At The Envelope, Tom O’Neil has a no-names-named recap of what went on at yesterday’s New York Film Critics Circle vote. First: the inside story on I’m Not There’s aforementioned non-showing:
I’m Not There did surprisingly well in many top races today. It didn’t win any awards, but it came in third place for best picture after champ No Country for Old Men and runner-up There Will Be Blood. Ditto for its helmer Todd Haynes, who placed third in the directors’ lineup behind the winning Coen brothers and second-placed Paul Thomas Anderson…In the supporting-actress race, Cate Blanchett came in second place.
I don’t know how “surprising” that really is, considering that three of the critics in the room are on the record as giving the film a score of 90 or higher. I think the only surprise is that the staunchest suckers for Haynes’ soulless scrapbook schtickdefenders of the film actually let it leave the room without a single honor, and apparently without a fight. But let’s move on…
Amy Ryan has snagged at least five awards in the past four business days (I lost count after the NBR, New York critics, LA critics, DC critics and San Francisco critics) for her work in Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone, and has thus usurped Cate Blanchett as the presumptive frontrunner in the Best Supporting Actress Oscar race. This is, to me, a fairly shocking turn of events, and judging by the noise it’s creatingamongstOscarbloggers, I’m not totally alone in my surprise.
It doesn’t help that Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There––the film that prompted Harvey Weinstein to promise to shoot himself if it didn’t net Blanchett an Oscar nomination––has been all but shut out of the critical derby thus far. I was particularly surprised to see the film earn nary a nod from the New York Film Critics Circle–it certainly has no shortage of local, effusivedefenders. And yet, the film has sort of slunk into the shadows of the season. Putting Harvey’s silly, trigger-happy bravado aside, it’s no secret that The Weinstein Company is hurting for hits, and so far, There is part of the problem; still on less than 150 screens and consistently dropping 30% from weekend to weekend, I don’t see how the distributor will be able to justify any kind of expansion unless there’s a major, major reversal in awards momentum.
The question is: where’s the loudest man in pseudo-indie distribution when his films really need him?
We didn’t do a New in Theaters last week, and many Thanksgiving releases are expanding this weekend, so this is basically a recap of every film we’ve reviewed that’s been released in the past two weeks.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Paul was “blown away” by Julian Schnabel’s latest at Telluride; at NYFF, Karina called the film “an almost excessively beautiful aestheticization of misery [that's] often a little too good at conveying Baudy’s isolation within his own head.” Check out today’s podcast, which includes an interview with Schnabel from Telluride, and an argument between Karina and Paul.
The Savages: At Telluride, Paul called Tamara Jenkin’s long-awaited feature follow-up to Slums of Beverly Hills “a really rich movie, full of dark humor you have to develop when things aren’t funny.”
Starting Out in the Evening: Karina caught Andrew Wagner’s second feature in Denver and had this to say: “[Evening] unfolds in comfortably-worn indie drama territory: New York academics and struggling artists collide cross generations, their almost complete lack of self-awareness failing to keep them from brutally criticizing and actively manipulating one another…but Lauren Ambrose and Frank Langella make each moment on that path feel startlingly real.”
Protagonist:Guest SpoutBlogger Pamela Cohn on Jessica Yu’s experimental tackling of Euripedes: “Juxtaposing live interviews with four different male characters, and using archival footage of their lives intercut with highly-stylized scenes of puppets reciting Euripides‘ in the original Greek acting out the tragedies being narrated on-screen, Yu orchestrates a provocative and deeply-thoughtful chorus based on the structure of a Greek tragedy…yes, it is quite challenging to watch, but far from boring.”
Fox barely released Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, but now they’re partnering with something called Redux Beverages to release a line of energy drinks called Brawndo, named after the puke-green beverage that replaced water (and destroyed all agriculture) in the film’s future world.
Charlie Wilson’s War: Jeff Wells is cranky that the HFPA has declared it eligible for nominations in the Musical/Comedy categories at the Golden Globes; LIBERTAS is pissed that it’s “premised on a whopper of a lie that undercuts the entire film turning it into yet another 2007 piece of liberal propaganda.” Pick your own battle, I guess.
Future of Classic informs us that today would have been Busby Berkeley’s 112th birthday. They offer a list of “five things you might not have known about” the dance director of the greatest psychedelic-socialist musical numbers of the 1930s; oddly, the fact that he was a raging alcoholic didn’t make the list. Oh well. Too bad YouTube appears to be broken, because I bet I could find a clip from Take Me Out to the Ballgame that would prove it.
Todd Haynes new Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There comes out in a few weeks. In case you haven’t heard the schtick, Dylan’s multiple personas are played by different actors, including Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett, among others.
I was a nominal Dylan fan in college, but the film made me fall in love with the man again. My renewed affections for Dylan were called into serious question however, when I stumbled upon the above video on the YouTube homepage. I know Dylan has been many things over the years, but corporate shill for GM? Come on!
As I thought about it more, I started to realize that maybe I missed the point of Haynes’ film…
At the Filmmaker Blog, Scott Macaulay points to Pitchfork’s effusive (for them) review of the soundtrack for Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. In every way, it seems to be the audio mirror of the film: it’s a two-disc set of Bob Dylan covers by (by my count) 30 artists, each with a different style of interpretation. And like the film, the soundtrack is a massive undertaking that’s by turns interesting, boring, a failure and a success. You can listen to three tracks, by Sufjan Stevens, Cat Power and Calexico, here.
I agree with Stephen M. Deusner of Pitchfork that Stephen Malkmus’ songs are pretty good, and certainly better than most of what he’s done in the eight years or so since the dissolution of Pavement. But I’ve been having kind of a reniassance of late with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I still can’t reccommend Karen O’s god-awful verson of “Highway 61 Revisited”, which you can sample here. I understand that the idea was to commission a number of artists to record covers specifically for the movie, but man … they would have been much better off recycling PJ Harvey’s version, from her 1993 record, Rid of Me, and calling it a day. See her performing it live above. And if you must, use the comments to vilify me for accusing Todd Haynes of being a 60s narcissist, while I’m clearly just as bad when it comes to the 90s.
John Landis gossips about Alfred Hitchchock, Don Ameche and the “shitty” Universal Studios cafeteria
On our weekly podcast FilmCouch, Kevin and Paul covered A.J. Schnack’s Kurt Cobain: About a Son, and Karina ranted about one of the few documentary selections at NYFF, The Axe in the Attic.
At Tuesday’s press conference following the press and industry screening of I’m Not There, writer/director Todd Haynes talked about referencing Godard and Fellini (but not, he insists, Don’t Look Back), the ability of film to collapse time, and why he chose to cast a woman and a black child to represent two of the six disparate facets of Bob Dylan’s life. We have audio from the press conference after the jump; to skip to a specific section of the 28-minute clip, see these handy show notes:
00:01: Getting Bob Dylan’s music and life rights
04:03: Why six Dylans?
04:49: Working in different film stocks/formats
05:41: Dylan didn’t have approval of details
06:29: The collapse of time, in the film and in Dylan’s work
09:21: On breaking free of the constraints of the biopic
11:23: Casting
12:51: Don’t say Don’t Look Back
16:05: References to other films
21:41: Fitting the strands of the story together
23:48: Why have Dylan played by a woman?
25:45: Portraying Dylan’s cultural influences, and Dylan-as-wannabe
Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There is a postmortem–but of what, exactly? It opens with the examination of a corpse, played by Cate Blanchett; the press notes tell us we’re supposed to connect this image to Bob Dylan’s 1968 motorcycle accident, in which he almost died but didn’t, and after which he was allegedly never the same. So on some level, it’s a love letter to a dead man whose body is still with us-–although, at the press conference following the New York Film Festival screening of the film yesterday, Haynes kept referring to Dylan in the past tense, as though his own private Dylan was long gone and never to return–but it’s also a catalogue of various shards of the dead culture of the 1960s. It’s as vital as it sounds: like so many of Haynes’ films, it’s based on a provocative concept that plays in practice like a museum piece.
It’s a collage of personality impressions and visual styles. Grainy, fluttering black and white gives way to a bottle green landscape, spotted with the second best psychedelic lens flares of the NYFF thus far. The film’s hallucinatory logic seems at first to defy any kind of stricture, until the references start to stack up: visual quotations from Dylan album covers, The Beatles doing silent comedy, La Strada; actual, scripted quotations from at least two Godard films. Each of the six protagonists is a walking (though hardly living or breathing) quotation, a riff on a Dylan phase or personality thread. A young ruffian who uses poetry to deliver uncomfortable truths to The Man. A prepubescent compulsive liar. A misunderstood prophet who finds his true calling by turning to God. An aging cowboy in hiding, laying low in a town obsessed with Halloween. A bad actor who becomes a big star and neglects the woman he loves. A put-opon speed freak who uses pop music to deliver uncomfortable truths to The Man.
Nikal Saval
At The Envelope, Tom O’Neil has a no-names-named recap of what went on at yesterday’s New York Film Critics Circle vote. First: the inside story on I’m Not There’s aforementioned non-showing:
We didn’t do a New in Theaters last week, and many Thanksgiving releases are expanding this weekend, so this is basically a recap of every film we’ve reviewed that’s been released in the past two weeks.
Fox barely released Mike Judge’s 
