(With Sundance wrapped and an intimidating backlog of films to write about, I’ll be publishing a number of brief capsule reviews over the next few days. If a specific title piques your interest and you’d like to see a more substantial review, let me know in the comments.)

The MIssing Person is a present-day film noir starring Oscar nominee Michael Shannon as a private detective hired to find a man who worked in the Twin Towers. The third feature by writer/director Noah Buschel, Shannon stars as John Rosow, a hard-drinking private detective hired by an unseen lawyer to take a train from Chicago to Los Angeles to follow a mysterious man who’s heading West with a young Mexican child in tow. Along the way, Rosow phone-flirts with the lawyer’s tough-girl secretary (Amy Ryan), gets waylaid by a sexy decoy (Margaret Colin), and befriends a cabbie (John Ventimiglia) who, like him, grew up in New York but had to get away. It eventually emerges the detective and his prey are running from similar things.

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Each day this week, Christopher Campbell will take a look back at a “classic” film that played the Sundance Film Festival. Today’s installment: Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991).

Richard Linklater’s breakthrough film, Slacker, almost never played Sundance. According to John Pierson’s book Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes, Competition Director Alberto Garcia “did not particularly like the film.” In fact, Linklater was initially rejected when he submitted Slacker for the 1990 festival, at the time still called the US Film Festival. So, that summer, he self-released the film in his hometown of Austin, Texas, with much success. But the biggest success was yet to come.

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Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to the much-acclaimed Old Joy, stars Michelle Williams as Wendy, a young woman traveling across the continent in search of a canning job in Alaska. Wendy has little to her name but a car, some pocket money and Lucy, her dog. When problems arise with one pole on that trinity, the others follow, as Reichardt takes us through an intimate procedural examination of how quickly a life can unravel when balanced on a precipice.

With Wendy and Lucy opening in New York tomorrow, I sat down with Riechardt to discuss Michelle Williams’ desire for invisibility, smashing the indie film glass cieling, and the “ever-evolving American Dream.”

Karina: I saw the movie in Cannes, and obviously every month it seems like a movie about economic despair is becoming more and more relevant.

Kelly: Give it a week.

Karina: [laughs] When you think about some of these economic problems, so many of them seem to stem from people being in denial, and just sort of a general unwillingness to talk about the how the way that we live has consequences.

Kelly: Yeah. The consequences are like the guy who got trampled at the Wal-Mart.

Karina: Yeah. So when you think about getting the film out there, what audience are you hoping it will speak to?

Kelly: I don’t really have a plan for the audience, just questions. Like, are we related and do we owe each other anything? Are we supposed to take care of each other to any degree?

And we know we’re connected. Because I didn’t run up my credit card, and now my 401K is disappearing. So, we’re clearly connected. I guess, it’s just that question of are strangers… Are we supposed to do anything for each other, or is it each man for himself? What is the American Dream?

Karina: Do you think that the American Dream is something that even exists anymore? This idea of being able to go West, and if you work hard enough you’ll be fine?

Kelly: I think it’s an ever-evolving thing. I once heard a show about this guy who coined the phrase “The American Dream.” Do you know who he is?

Karina: No. I’ll look him up. [Ed: it's this guy]

Kelly: Yeah. I need to look him up. Because I believe that what it was all about was that it was like a frontier kind of idea. And the American Dream at that time was, let’s say it was a really harsh winter, but my crop survived. Your crop died, but my crop is enough to feed both of us. That was the American Dream.

But, that guy never foresaw class. Like he didn’t imagine that there would be class divides in this country. He didn’t anticipate that there would be such a vast divide.

I guess that the idea of the American Dream is an evolving thing, or devolving thing. Has it really just come to my TV is bigger than your TV? What is it? What do we want this country to be - the great experiment? What’s it supposed to be? We just lived through such incredibly dark days. And even though the economy’s crashing now, there is like at least there’s hope. We’re living in the days of hope. [laughs]

Karina: Just because of Obama?

Kelly: I think, he is redefining - he talks about us being connected. He doesn’t talk about poverty a lot, I’ll admit that. But, just to change the conversation from something other than, “Go out and shop.” Or to give the impression that opportunity is just at everybody’s feet and all you have to do is bend down and lift it up. You know, it’s not the same for someone who grows up with an education to someone who doesn’t. At least he’s more aware of that. To not have a total elitist asshole running the country, I think will be somewhat better.

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• Despite critical disappointment with the latest Bond installment, Quantum of Solace had the franchise’s best opening ever, by a lot. The previous installment, Casino Royale, debuted with only $40.8 million, and Bond’s former best opener, Die Another Day, debuted with $47 million. Quantum’s take was $70.4 million, which was unfortunately $400,000 too high for a really good headline. As for the other significant UK/USA co-production, Slumdog Millionaire earned a smashing weekend per-screen average of $35,000 and has grossed $418,000 since Wednesday.

• Meanwhile Quantum is on track to become Bond’s highest-grossing film internationally, as it’s so far made more than $251 million overseas.
• Can Todd Haynes please make a sci-fi film now? By selling half their stake to a venture capital fund, Killer Films is looking to produce films with bigger budgets, though I’m guessing Killer staple Haynes will probably remain a part of its “smaller indie movies” output.
• How on Earth does Guillermo Del Toro have time for another screenwriting gig? His latest project is a dark, stop-motion Pinocchio for the Jim Henson Co. Hopefully it won’t look anywhere near as creepy as Steve Barron’s 1996 version.
• Aaron Eckhart is finally going to be an action hero in Battle: Los Angeles, in which he’ll play a Marine platoon leader fighting off an alien invasion.

• High School Musical 3 had the biggest opening weekend of any musical, ever, grossing $42 million to leapfrog over Saw V’s respectable-for-an-effing-fivequel $30 million. What the latter number will mean for Lionsgate’s reported turn away from genre film is anyone’s guess, but when Saw V grosses another $2 million, that franchise will surpass Friday the 13th as the highest grossing horror franchise in history. Also, Changeling had a ridiculously high per screen average, which might indicate that it’ll be able to hold on through Oscar season despite extremely mixed reviews.
• Richard Linklater and Todd Haynes will participate in a conversation on indie filmmaking at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival. The festival, which will go forward next year under the direction of Janet Pierson for the first time, will also welcome Stanley Kubrick’s brother-in-law/producer Jan Harlan and IMDb founder Col Needham.
• Christine Vachon’s Killer Films will produce its first big-budget action movie, a medieval period pic called William the Conqueror.

• 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.”
• I still haven’t received my copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz (I know you’re concerned; right now, it looks like the problem is with UPS and not Amazon, and I’m working on it), so I’m going to avoid Ed Howard’s episode-by-episode recap of Fassbinder’s series, for the time being. Via The House Next Door.
• 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 two roundups.

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 schtick defenders of the film actually let it leave the room without a single honor, and apparently without a fight. But let’s move on…

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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 creating amongst Oscar bloggers, 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, effusive defenders. 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?

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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.”
• I’m Not There: Kevin saw it and loved it at Telluride; Karina saw it at NYFF and, um, didn’t. Also check out Kevin’s interview with Haynes here, and audio from Haynes’ NYFF press conference here.
• 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.
• 2Girls1Cup might be a new hallmark in user-generated porn memes, but it’s still not appropriate fodder for academic film study, apparently.
• Not technically a blog post, but so good: Jean-Luc Godard says he stole money to finance his own early films, and one of Jacques Rivette’s. Guess he has no grounds to complain about Todd Haynes stealing his ideas (rimshot). Via indieWIRE.

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 saw the film at the Telluride Film Festival and totally loved it. I also got a chance to have a chat with director and all-around nice guy Todd Haynes. Karina didn’t think so much of it.

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…

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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.

New York Film Festival coverage:

• Brian DePalma schedules a last-minute press conference to talk about Redacted.
• Todd Haynes talks about casting women and children in the Bob Dylan-inspired I’m Not There.
• Silent Light: The Best Film at NYFF
• I’m Not There? I’m not a fan.

Chicago International Film Festival coverage:

• Press preview
• Tribute to Roger Ebert

The best of the rest:

• The Lumiere Manifesto Seeks To Dogme-ize YouTube
• There Will Be Blood: The First Real Trailer
• Looking Forward To Desert Bayou
• David Lynch Pays the Mortgage
• YouTube Assumes Online Videomakers Secretly Long to Go To Sundance
• About a Son: The United 93 of Kurt Cobain movies
• Vincent Gallo: Still Anal
• The Movies That Inspired The Simpsons
• SAW Blood Drives: More Porn Than Torture?
• The International Documentary Association’s Top 25 Documentaries EVER.
• 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.

Todd Haynes. photo by Karina Longworth.

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

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