Alejandro Adams‘ Canary screens in Brooklyn at Rooftop Films tonight. Since I interviewed him on this blog way back in February, right before his film premiered at Cinequest, Adams has become something of an uningorable mascot (and sometimes, thorn in the side) of online film culture — or, at least, the microcosm of film culture represented on Twitter. There he is, picking fights about the Dardennes brothers! There he is, challenging this reporter on her choice of avatar! There he is, always, at the center of the conflict, however virtual and/or minor that conflict may be. And now, Canary, a film that virtually no one has seen outside of three specialty festivals and the cineaste Twittersphere, gets a rave in the Village Voice, bumped up in the print edition right next to an assessment of Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania pegged to the umpteenth revival of Jonas Mekas’ signature diary film. The placement in the paper says it all: from zero to avant-garde canon in under six months. But don’t blame Twitter — Adams’ online antics have a tendency to plant expectations that the films themselves subvert. You want to dismiss him as an attention whore, but the films frustrate that impulse. As one filmmaker wrote to me after watching Canary long after knowing of its maker via his Twitter agitations, “Goddammit.”
Seeing the Canary review next to the Mekas write-up on a physical page yesterday reminded me of something Adams had written in the long email exchange we had that led up to that February interview, which hadn’t made it into the published post. I went back into those emails and pulled out that quote, and a few other memorable outtakes, for your persual. The text below the jump may make more sense after a reading (or re-reading) of the initital published interview, but keep in mind that when Adams refers to “you,” he’s generally referring to me. If you’re in New York, you can (and should) buy tickets to tonight’s screening here.
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So Page Six has published an email from a character identified only as “The Final Nail,” claiming that a Weinstein-era Miramax tell-all book is in the works, based on records and audio recordings kept by Stuart Meltzer, an assistant to Bob Weinstein who died in the World Trade Center on September 11. Mr. Nail says his book “will detail the day-to-day . . . manipulation of the Disney company by the Weinstein Bros.”
Maybe last week, this would have seemed like a big deal. But just a couple of days ago, the Village Voice published a long story by editor-in-chief Tony Ortega, based on his “accidental” scavenging of Weinstein’s trash. Page Six couldn’t get a comment from a Weinstein on their anonymously sourced story, but Ortega was able to put together a decent profile of the current state of TWC, and even got Harvey on the record to joke about it: “You want more of my garbage? How about a couple of shirts out of my laundry?”
There’s obviously something tacky about this masked writer peddling a book based on the archives of a 9/11 victim, as if Meltzer was martyred to ensure that the truth of Miramax would someday be known. Why all the secrecy, when it’s apparently copacetic journalism to call Harvey up and tell him you’re going to publish memos that you found in his trash?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two days––and or, don’t read many film blogs, which is the likelier of the two scenarios––you’ll know that Nathan Lee was laid off from his position as second film critic at the Village Voice this week, due to unspecified “economic reasons.” That makes Lee the fourth full-time New York based critic to get pink slipped in the past month, and it’s not hard to see his firing as a sign that, as Lee himself put it in an email to colleagues widely circulated on blogs, “staff film critic…jobs no longer appear to exist.”
For those of us old enough to have put a few years effort towards such a career but too young to have achieved any kind of institutional seniority, this is a pretty troubling state of affairs. Strippers are winning Oscars, but *I* have no future? There’s a great joke here, but because it’s on me it’s up to someone else to unpack.
In any case, I’ll point you to the comment sections on both The Reeler and The House Next Door, where bloggers/internet critics like Vadim Rizov and Andrew “Filmbrain” Grant are chewing over the issues with “old media” critics like Glenn Kenny and David Edelstein. Interestingly, a number of members of the extended Village Voice family weigh in, most notably Luke Y. Thompson, whose comment on Lee at The Reeler (which he now admits was “ill-considered”) touched off a firestorm of bashing.
If Lindsay Lohan can drive a print publication’s subscription revenue up by a low five figures by pretending to be Marilyn Monroe, why can’t columnist/VH1 talking head/soft-sculpted middle-aged gay man Michael Musto do the same for the Village Voice? Interestingly, this slideshow seems to be a trojan horse used to smuggle a cranky old man essay into the weekly, complete with grumbles that today’s nip-slipping, up-skirt courting starlets “never claim an affinity for anyone esoteric, like Barbara Payton, Carrie Nye, or Tippi Hedren.” Cool it with the history, old man––just show us your tits!
