I recently submitted a ballot for indieWIRE’s annual Critics’ Poll, which offers respondents a chance to create two separate lists of the best films of the year: one comprised of films which received theatrical distribution (which is described as, at minimum, a one week run in a commercial theater in New York City, essentially the same type of release required for Oscar consideration); and a list of the best films which weren’t distributed commercially in 2008––ie: those which screened only at festivals, and/or in other non-commercial venues, and/or outside of New York. Because I see so many films at festivals, I had a far greater pool of candidates for the latter list than the former. My “true” top ten list would combine films which were made readily available to audiences via studio subsidiaries (such as Synecdoche, NY and Rachel Getting Married), with films that I fell in love with at a festival and may never get a chance to see again, and with films which had the bare minimum New York release, but nevertheless were probably still seen by fewer people than the average distributor-less festival hit (such as Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness). That said, I understand the purpose of making the distinction––even if there was no other benefit to it, there’s always the hope that some smaller theatrical and straight-to-DVD distributors will look to the annual Best Undistributed list as a reference to films they might have missed. After all, 2007’s “winner,” Hong Sang Soo’s Woman on the Beach, was purchased and ended up in theaters barely a week into the new year.

In fact, I think singling out films which are still on the market, and in a perfect world wouldn’t be, is so worth doing, that not only am I revealing here the ten titles I included in the poll, but I’m adding a few bonus films. The following list is presented alphabetically and should be considered unranked, with the exception of the first title mentioned — they all deserve to be seen by wider audiences, but the reception thus far bestowed on the work of one French master in particular is actually a travesty.

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With Mary Bronstein’s Yeast debuting on DailyMotion tonight, and Joe Swanberg’s Nights and Weekends opening this weekend at the IFC Center, the two SXSW 2008 premieres starring Greta Gerwig will suddenly become available to a non-festival audience simultaneously. When I heard this was going to happen, I dug up some of the press Gerwig has garnered over the past year, most of it pegged to her appearance in the Duplass brothers’ Baghead. I quickly noticed a trend: Gerwig has been covered exhaustively by male writers who a) have a tendency to label her an “ingenue” or an “‘it’ girl“, and b) devote much column space to the question of whether or not Gerwig’s main talent is playing herself.

Certainly, the great success of Hannah Takes the Stairs, the highly improvised project on which the pixie-cute actress collaborated with Swanberg and friends, is that it parts of it seem so lacking in cinematic artifice, they can play as glimpses into lives in progress. But if Hannah seems real enough to reach through the screen and touch, Gerwig’s title character is too exasperating to make that a particularly attractive proposition (or maybe not: almost like a classic femme fatale, it’s hard to deny her appeal even as she’s leaving you for your best friend). So when in Baghead, she plays a pixie-cute actress collaborating with friends on a highly improvised project––who drinks too much, takes little convincing to remove her top, and ultimately ends up with the funny, schlubby nerd––it seems too coincidental to be fiction, and apparently too cute to resist.

Gerwig hasn’t resisted the suggestion that the roles she plays grow out of who she is, but Nights and Yeast add two disparate but fully realized characters to her repertoire. Yeast is, for some, an endurance exercise; for me, it’s a comedy, and on the contrary, it’s the comparatively gentle but fundamentally flawed Nights and Weekends (on which Gerwig is billed as co-writer/director alongside Swanberg, and co-producer alongside Swanberg, Anish Savjani and Dia Sokol) which tries patience. If the latter shows Gerwig pushing a character way beyond adorable, it often feels like an exhausting exercise for all involved. It’s her work as Yeast’s only semi-relatable comic relief that throws up a middle finger at the ingenue concept, literally.

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Last night in Manhattan, Cinetic Rights Management and the video sharing site DailyMotion hosted a special rooftop screening of Mary Bronstein’s indie comedy of female relationship horrors, Yeast. At the event, we learned that Yeast will debut on DailyMotion on Friday night, where it will be available for free streaming for one weekend only. You’ll be able to find the film at the Cinema DailyMotion page. For more info, check out our review from SXSW, and our interview with Bronstein, and co-stars Greta Gerwig and Amy Judd.

FilmCouch is coming from the exotic Austin, TX. Guess what we talk about.

That’s right.

Movies at SXSW.

To name a few: Yeast, Medicine for Melancholy, One Minute to Nine, Wellness, The Promotion and the unforgettable Andre Williams (Agile, Mobile, Hostile). Note: After we recorded this podcast, Wellness won the SXSW Grand Jury Award.

 

 FilmCouch 61 [26:36m]: Play Now | Download

FilmCouch 61

SXSW news, reviews, interviews and discussions

Even before its premiere, the debates over Mary Bronstein’s Yeast already began to simmer. The film intentionally dispenses with any sense of likability, crafting characters that are an embodiment of distasteful id rather than sympathetic figures to whom the viewer can relate. Karina talked with Bronstein and co-stars Greta Gerwig and Amy Judd about dissolving friendships, movies that don’t make you feel good, and cock punches.

Don’t miss Karina’s review of the film here.

SXSW news, reviews, interviews and discussions

 

 Yeast Interview [14:50m]: Play Now | Download

Yeast Interview

Karina Longworth: Mary, last night you were saying that you didn’t make this movie for everybody, and I kind of want to know, who do you think that the audience for this movie is?

Mary Bronstein: Well, when I said that I didn’t make the movie for everybody, I guess, you can only really make movies for people that have similar tastes as yours. What I like to see in a movie is something challenging. I like to go to the movie theater to have some sort of reaction, whether it be something that’s confronting me, some kind of material that is confronting me or challenging me in some way or making me feel something.

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Is Yeast a movie, or a dare? Its official synopsis contains this brag about director Mary Bronstein’s level of experience: “Conceived and made by an actor with no concept of the language of filmmaking, takes traditional dramatic structure and throws it out of the window to be swept away by the street cleaners.” It’s less a pre-emptive defense than a come on, a tease designed to seduce a certain kind of audience into stepping up to the plate. But it’s not pure provocation. Even fans of Frownland (which Bronstein starred in under the direction of her husband Ronald) may not be ready for Yeast’s full-on assault on the senses. This is a film that not only seeks to dodge the audience’s comfort zone, but it actually, actively mocks it. It’s not just abrasive; it’s restless, punishing, totally juvenile in its humor and indifferent to narrative flow or niceties of image. It appears to offers moments of genuine redemption or closure, and then undermines those moments with prankish punchlines. It is resolutely indelicate, and often absurd. It’s a nasty little stink bomb of a film that’s going to instigate a fierce tug of war between supporters and detractors––if it doesn’t completely clear the room. I think it’s a laugh riot and a must-see. Consider yourself warned.

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Frownland [trailer]

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Scott Macaulay reminds that Ronnie Bronstein’s Frownland begins a one-week run at the IFC Center in New York this Friday. More than that, he explains why it’s a must see:

If you’re someone who follows and cares about American independent cinema, you’ve noticed that what passes for independent film today is often markedly different from what we thought of as independent film 20 years ago. In films today, scenes have buttons. Second acts have set pieces. Characters are given “petting the dog” moments to make them more likeable. Films are crafted to appeal to quadrants. In other words, many of them are forced by the brutality of the marketplace to assimilate the same storytelling logic as a studio film. More so than just about anything I’ve seen in the last year, Frownland defies all of this.

I wish I was going to be in town this weekend––I’ve only seen a screener of Frownland, and have been trying in vain for a year to see it on a big screen. Alas, I’ll be at SXSW, where Mary Bronstein’s Yeast premieres on Monday. If you’re in New York and not making the trip to Austin, you can buy Frownland tickets here. And if you’re only familiar with Mary and Ronnie’s work in Butterknife, definitely check out the Frownland trailer above.

BUTTERKNIFE 4: Bongo Board

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This episode of Butterknife co-stars Sean Prince Williams, the cinematographer of Frownland. You can go to Spout.com’s Butterknife page for more info on the series, to watch future episodes, to talk about the show, and to sign up for email updates.

Previous episodes:

Plastic Hassle (with Kentucker Audley)
Sicilian Style (with Tony Baker and Frank V. Ross)
Key Witness (with Michael Tully)

Yeast [trailer]

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Welcome to the first of many posts that we’ll be doing over the next couple of weeks, previewing upcoming SXSW premieres and profiling their makers. I’m so excited to start this plug fest with the work of a good friend of Spout, Mary Bronstein’s Yeast. Mary is featured in the webseries Butterknife, and she also starred in her husband Ronnie Bronstein’s debut feature, Frownland (which, incidentally, will be running for a week at the IFC Center in New York concurrent with Yeast’s debut in Austin).

Mary stars again in Yeast, alongside Greta Gerwig (Hannah Takes the Stairs), and together they explore friendships that are, according to the SXSW synopsis, “Ebola-infested, maggot-filled and bursting at the seams.” You can watch the trailer for Yeast above. Below, check out Mary’s answers to the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody (heretofore known as the 4QWAE). Yeast, which is screening in the Narrative Competition at SXSW, premieres at 7pm on Monday, March 10 at the Alamo Ritz; for more information, go here.

Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.

“It’s like Laverne and Shirley meets Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May…on PCP!!”

Sorry…here’s the real 25 word-or-less: Yeast is a film about a maddeningly oblivious, tyrannical and stunted young woman trying to negotiate two toxic friendships.

Something that the synopsis doesn’t say is that Yeast turned out to be a lot funnier than I had originally anticipated. Another thing to know is that it isn’t a study in realism, or the way people “really” behave. It is more hyper-realism. We were interested in telling the story from the inside-out. Showing on the outside what the character is feeling on the outside. I find this more interesting than dialog about how characters feel. For example, sometimes you may be so frustrated at someone you wish you could just hit that person in the face. In real life you don’t, but you might say “You know, you are like, kind of being a little bit annoying right now.” In this movie you would actually hit the person.

I decided to make this film after I realized that I didn’t want to wait around for other people to make projects. I wanted to make a film about female friendships that dealt with the issues of resentment, hostility and emotional manipulation that often are present in too-close enmeshed friendships of either sex. I wanted to make a film about women that I’ve never seen before, about people who have no business being friends with each other but don’t know how to stop. And I wanted to see if I could pull it off.

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