Until his passing April 4, 2013, Roger Ebert was a celebrated author, journalist, film historian, screenwriter and Pulitzer Prize winning film critic. I, on the other hand, can only aspire to be what Ebert became. Maybe if I apply his determination and commitment to building my career in the world of motion pictures... well, then I might just earn myself a place at his table.
Keep sweating, Roger. We miss you.
I'm considering collating the entire Twitter posted collection to a gallery page. I've been posting #shortfilmSunday for over a year now, but only the last few months are included here right now. It's a humongous task, but there's a lot to savor...
In any case, another bunch from the last two weeks...
"Thinning The Herd" by Rie Rasmussen :: a young albino returns home to find a vicious killer waiting...
"The S from Hell" by Rodney S. Ascher :: a short, tongue-firmly-in-cheek documentary about the scariest corporate symbol in history: the 1964 Screen Gems logo.
"The Door" by Juanita Wilson Pt 1Pt 2 Oscar nominee: a girl & a nuclear accident
"M.Archer" by John Dayo :: Dad comes home to find some unpleasant surprises...
"Connected" by Jens Raunkjaer Christensen & Jonas Drotner Mouritsen (via Pleasure for the Empire blog) :: survival and greed in a post apocalyptic wasteland
I accept that some films aren't made for me - they don't speak to me about any kind of world I know or care to know, communicating an experience that maybe isn't completely foreign to me, but is certainly one that I don't need to subject myself to for two hours.
"Return of the Secaucus 7" is one of those movies.
That said, John Sayles was a graduate of Roger Corman's low-budget film production hothouse, and this was his 1978 feature debut (released in 1980). Reported as being shot in 25 days for $40,000, what can be gleaned from this inessential movie for a feature director today?
Like most low budget features from first time directors, this one leans heavily on dialogue and action is rare, which isn't a problem in itself. The biggest issue for me is that the characters all blur into each other. The film, for those who haven't heard about it, is about a group of friends who met through a web of random connections. They bonded during an arrest during a protest rally in New Jersey, and who have since become touchstones throughout each other's lives. They all congregate ten years after that jail cell incident in a small town in New Hampshire, and, well, not much else happens. Except I can't tell these people apart, except for their hairstyle.
Exhibit A ::
Part of the story is that these people are all so close that they present a hive mind, a united front, as elaborated through the introduction of an intimidated new boyfriend to the group (who is, by the way, quickly assimilated). I mean, what happens when you write scenes with people who all agree with each other? Not drama, that's for sure.
The dialogue doesn't sparkle like some of Sayle's later work, falling lifeless and awkward from the mouths of these less-than-stellar actors, although David Strathairn makes an early appearance here, limited as he is by the underdeveloped script.
But what really works here is the way Sayles handles this flaccid material in the edit. While his scenes are shot without dramatic arc or tension, Sayles gets around this by interweaving scenes, intercutting between conversations in a way that gives a sense of scope, a sense of a world that exists outside of the individual. This is especially helpful with scenes that have little or no coverage.
Letting these wordy scenes play out in one continuous shot would be torturous for the audience, and in many cases Sayles had no hinge shot to cut away to that would hide obvious jump cuts if he were to omit sections of dialogue. Cutting out of one of scene into other parallel scenes, however, not only gives Sayles the chance to trim his dialogue, but also to open up the claustrophobic framing into an interconnected network of tiny scenes that spread out like leaves on a pond, creating a larger dramatic canvas for the audience to appreciate. Like Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia," but without the sizzle.
This approach to handling, um... challenging material really hit home with me while watching "Altered States" by Ken Russell. Granted, the only thing these films have in common is the sheer volume and density of dialogue that's delivered in this film. But Russell does a great job of breaking up these slabs of difficult words into manageable chunks, by having the actors moving through the scene space while talking, or alternatively having the actors spread the scene across a number of "sub-scenes" - William Hurt, for example, follows Blair Brown from room to room while arguing the finer points of evolutionary biology and the benefits of isolation tanks - the first 1:34m of this embedded clip::
Each nugget of necessary information is isolated and dramatized in such a way that the audience gets the point before we move forward, and staged in such a way that energy and momentum is maintained throughout these long and detailed speeches.
Sayles, in a limited fashion, uses this strategy to great effect - the pace rarely languishes even though the drama limps and falters throughout. If he'd had a dramatic story arc to play out in this way the film would really have come alive. Perhaps in the end this film just doesn't have anything to say, and in that way is a reflection of it's time - hobbled by a kind of paralyzed nostalgia, like that found in "American Graffiti" or "The Big Chill." I don't think those kinds of films get made anymore, but if they do, they're not for me.
"Plastic Bag" by Ramin Bahrani :: a discarded plastic bag searches for its maker through a barren American landscape. Voiced by Werner Herzog.
"Personal Jesus" by Joe Carter :: a slacker wonders why Jesus can't afford to buy a round of drinks.
"Second Wind" by Ian Worrel :: two old friends, a cat & a old man, take a journey that becomes a story about life & death.
"405" by Bruce Branit & Jeremy Hunt :: acclaimed short - a jumbo jet crash-landing on a busy LA freeway comes as a surprise to some...
"The Finger Trap" by Julia McLean :: animated short - an elderly man gets stuck in a Chinese finger trap while preparing a surprise anniversary for his wife.
This is another legendary indie film that has been talked to death. We'll skip the production stories here - that's all been abundantly documented elsewhere, most notably in the documentary "Overnight" directed by Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith (a version of the story Duffy hotly disputes). I'm more interested in (1) how does this stand up as feature directing debut, and (2) what can we learn from the film and its execution?
OK? Here we go...
When I mention that I like this movie, it becomes immediately apparent that this is a movie that polarizes audiences. It's the epitome of a cult classic - people either loathe it and dismiss it out of hand, or they adore it and defend it to the hilt - there doesn't seem to be room for middle ground. My memory of seeing it in 2001 is of a badly made low budget action movie, of which I've seen plenty, but re-watching now I see a bit more than that going on. Granted, my perspective has changed given the number of low budget films I've seen since, but even back when I first saw it I didn't hate "The Boondock Saints."
Perhaps people object to the film's jet-black working-class vigilante morality, which, while celebrated in characters wearing capes and cowls, or in hard-bitten cops and ex-military types, it's despised in movies about regular Joes who happen to be Catholic.
Or not. Who knows...
I absolutely understand that the script is flawed, and flawed in the most male-oriented and sophomoric ways - there are no positive female characters, and the pervading philosophy is that true justice can only be served via the barrel of a gun. In this regard it's a throw-back to the morally reprehensible but nevertheless popular vigilante films of the 70s like "Dirty Harry" and, more appropriately, "Deathwish". There was no place for that in the landscape of independent cinema at the turn of the 21st century, as Tarantino inspired as it was. In a post-9/11 world, living in the aftermath of the vengeful U.S. foreign policy, it all seems so troubling and appropriate now.
But, then again, I'm just speculating...
For my money, as a first feature directed from his own script, Troy Duffy's debut is quite spectacular. Yes, it died at the box office, but "The Boondock Saints" has gone on to serve a loyal niche audience that embraced the movie on DVD. I heard about it while I was in film school, adored as it was by the very sophomores whose morality this movie reflects. And when I watched it I did enjoy Willem Defoe's scenery-chomping performance as the gay, cross-dressing FBI investigator hot on the trail of the celebrated Saints. But it was something about the fanboy adoration of the movie that turned me off. This was a movie that wasn't made for me, and that's just fine as far as I'm concerned.
After seeing it again on the film's 10th anniversary, it's refreshing to step back and see the craft behind the hype. While the script has some huge arc problems and significant plot holes, on a scene-by-scene basis the film is quite successful. The action sequences are inventively low-budget and fun, and it's not until the movie wades into irretrievably bleak moral territory that the fun evaporates and the black-hat world view is exposed.
That's where it all falls apart, really.
But it's in the earlier scenes, when the playful, exuberant tone dominates, where Duffy shines. Even taking into account the transparently "Reservoir Dogs"-esque scene-within-a-scene narrative compression when Dafoe's investigator describes the Saints in action (which does get a bit repetitive, I don't deny), and the excessive cat explosion that echoes Marvin's untimely backseat death in "Pulp Fiction", Duffy infuses his chatty gun-buddy scenes with lots of vigor and more than a little "Man Bites Dog" cynicism and charm. In fact, I'd go as far as to say "Saints" has more in common emotionally with that disturbing French mockumentary than it does with Tarantino's florid genre escapades.
Regardless, Duffy's first feature follows a fairly typical indie film format - a genre film that puts into play certain minority-driven narrative elements that place the film into a narrow demographic. Duffy targets a very specific niche and drills down on the themes and tropes that inspire his audience - guns, drinking, loyalty to your friends, moral outrage - all good right-of-mainstream conservative values in contemporary America. More than that, he frames his fairly standard shoot-em-up within the Irish subculture of South Boston, which crystallizes his audience demographic even more narrowly (the fact that I saw the film in the days leading up to St Patrick's Day was no marketing accident, put it that way).
Troy Duffy himself received so much name recognition from this film that it's a wonder he didn't become the next (or should I say "another") Kevin Smith - an indie director churning out derivative but profitable niche movies for decades. Instead of being able to capitalize on this, however, Duffy disappeared from the scene until his recent lackluster and inessential sequel to "Saints", which, I suspect, is the final nail in the coffin of what could have been an interesting career.
(Note to self: I need to write about something that doesn't involve mobsters and guns next time...)
"Logorama" by François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy & Ludovic Houplain :: 2010 Best Animated Short Academy Award winner: see it now in all its CGI glory - it's a hoot
"McCain's Theory" by Marc Cluchler :: "less talk, more eating" - a French short that won the Kodak Award for Best Film
"The Butterfly Circus" by Joshua Weigel :: a story about finding hope in the Great American Depression... (via @GClugo)
I was planning on writing something profound about "Bound", about how this was the film that laid the groundwork for "The Matrix", about how this is where the Wachowski Bros found their voice, about how this is a signature low budget genre film made with an indie aesthetic, but really... it's not that kind of film.
Profound, I mean.
Andy and Larry (now Lana) Wachowski were screenwriters with a background in comic book fiction. They had recently had one of their feature scripts, "Assassins," produced as a Hollywood movie directed by Richard Donner, and their words were butchered on the screen. So part of their motivation to get "Bound" made with funding from Dino De Laurentiis was to protect their writing. Who better to realize their vision than themselves, right?
The other factor in becoming multi-hyphantes was their larger goal to get "The Matrix" into production. Everybody was passing on their sprawling action sci-fi script - their track record was thread-bare and they needed the credibility of a feature under their belt to even get in the door. So there was a lot at stake in this directing debut for the untried brothers.
But the Wachowski's were no fools - they went into their first directing gig with a very specific philosophy :: "We're of the opinion that film is still first and foremost a graphic medium and should be about images more than it should be about talking heads. Talking heads are nice and all, don't get me wrong, but novels do talking heads a lot better than movies do. And I think that movies should take advantage of the fact that they are about images and pictures. I don't think people take advantage of that enough."(1)
"Bound" is a hardboiled mobster heist genre flick - leaning heavily on "Double Indemnity"-esque dialog, mood and theme, while bringing a very measured visual technique that echoes the Hitchcock style found in "Dial M for Murder" and "Psycho," to mention the two more obvious influences. From the outset, the Wachowskis wanted to position this as a niche film, making the protagonists a lesbian affair that leads to the stealing of dirty mob money through a high-stakes and convoluted scheme.
The lesbian sex scene, that the brothers wouldn't consider removing, created to problems casting their leads - name actors turning down the roles at the mere mention of a scene involving girl-on-girl sex. But, determined not to compromise, they ended up with Jennifer Tilly as Violet and Gina Gershon as Corky.
Yikes.
Gershon more than earned her keep, however, by suggesting they cast Joe Pantoliano as Caeser, the mid-level mob captain in a juvenile power struggle with the boss's sociopathic son. And it's Joe who brings this film alive, with a sizzling performance that elevates every scene he's in. His delivery of the off-screen murder of the embezzler is almost worth the price of admission alone - selling a key scene through exposition alone is no mean feat. Caeser's downward spiral into paranoid despair and ultimate spiteful vengeance is just dazzling, and the strongest card this movie plays.
But Tilly in particular has problems selling this torturous hard-boiled verbiage, and the film hangs on her and Gershon's ropey performances. It's difficult, if not impossible, to feel sympathy for Tilly, though Gershon gets by with her rockabilly swagger and fuck-you attitude. Nuanced, however, this is not. The Wachowski's cope with this by turning up the volume on their use of camera - high angles, deep focus and small but dynamic action sequences keep the screen vigorous and busy, while the editing, crisp and deliberate, folds the narrative in on itself and always keeps the tension where it needs to be.
In the end, this is a finely crafted film that is let down by weak central performances. The script, however, is an excellent example of a tight genre flick, aimed at a specific target audience, that was made on a small budget with a quick turnaround (the Wachoskis are quoted as saying the schedule was initially 38 days, the implication being there were reshoots not figured into that schedule). And in terms of their goals, the Wachowski's were 100% effective. They got their greenlight for "The Matrix", and now they have the pull to get their scripts made on their own terms (scripts not directed by them are directed by their close associate James McTeigue).
So there's a lesson in there somewhere. Being focused on your goals, and managing your expectations based on that, can deliver results.
"...In more rare instances though, a filmmaker is granted the opportunity to stay within their medium, but do so while extensively expanding the concept and scope of their original vision, and in turn, a floodgate of possibilities are opened in terms of what can be achieved in that medium."
Posted by Adam Quigley, ostensibly as an ad for the Blu Ray release of "9," this is a remarkably thorough article with the shorts included. Hat's off to you, sir.
Like any list I make that has anything to do with movies, this list of the top five films I put on the DVD player when I'm feeling in need of a kickstart changes almost daily, depending on any number of random factors, including fatigue, boredom, and booze intake. That said, below is a short list of the films that most often make the cut. Since I'm not trying to impress anybody with this list, it'll probably say a lot more about me than it was ever intended to, but here we go anyway...
In no particular order ::
24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE, directed by Michael Winterbottom
Call it nostalgia for a place I've never seen, but something struck me the first time I saw this film back in 2002 that stayed with me ever since. Maybe it's Steve Coogan's hapless Tony Wilson, who strives for greatness but can't get out of his own way to prevent disaster, or maybe it's the music from the period that reminds me of me as a teenager going to the Virgin Megastore on Princes Street in Edinburgh to buy the latest New Order album on vinyl, or maybe it's Michael Winterbottom's loose, improvisational directing style that creates a cinematic immediacy out of pure mythology and hearsay. Or maybe it's just a funny film with a great cast.
THE THING, directed by John Carpenter
You know this was the first film I saw Wilford Brimley in. That's how I always think of him - his hand stuck in Donald Moffat's face, or sitting in the frozen hut begging Kurt Russel to be let back into the compound. But this film, arguably Carpenter's finest hour, has a mood and a pace that's rarely seen in Hollywood cinema, and the ambiguity of the film's conclusion speaks volumes for the times this movie emerged from, a farewell to the paranoid 70s as we stood on the cusp of Spielberg's stranglehold on American cinema ("ET" was the alien movie of choice that year, "The Thing" sank without a trace). Brooding, deliberate, shocking at the time... A fantastic film. And this scene is just amazing...
GOODFELLAS, directed by Martin Scorsese
Ok, no points for originality with this selection, but holy shit what a great film. It never gets old. Scorsese squeezes every ounce of drama and tension out of this story - every performance is pitch perfect, every scene has shape and direction and purpose, and the pacing follows Henry's emotional arc in sublime ways. I mean, take a look at the economy of this scene. You've seen it a dozen times, when Billy Batts, fresh out of jail, gives Tommy shit for not being respectful. From the shot of the jukebox through to Jimmy offering Billy drinks on the house, this entire scene is three camera setups - the camera on Billy tracks back from the jukebox and holds on Billy's side of the conversation for the duration, dollying in and out for emphasis, the second camera is on Henry & Jimmy and follows Tommy's entrance and exit, again with dollying, and the third is the brief shot of Henry reacting to Tommy's rage that continues to follow Henry and Tommy to the door. That's it. Three setups. What a scene. What a genius.
OUT OF SIGHT, directed by Steven Soderbergh
I know a lot of people who just adore Steven Soderbergh, and there's nothing wrong with that. I've never really understood the loyalty his mediocre and often pretentious movies provoke - "The Limey" was a great idea smothered in the execution (but oh what a fantastic commentary track on the DVD, where the writer takes SS to task... now that's entertainment), "The Underneath" was abysmal and "Erin Brockovich" and "Kakfa" are at best forgettable. So I have no idea what the circumstances were when I first saw "Out Of Sight" - it doesn't matter, frankly, because this is the one Soderbergh movie, with the possible exception of "Ocean's Eleven," that I can watch and say in all honesty that it's a fantastic bit of cinema. And this scene in particular, with its delicate pacing and intercutting of verbal and physical foreplay, is just a gorgeously mature bit of moviemaking from Mr. Soderbergh. I'll never forgive him for that turd "Ocean's Twelve," though.
HOT FUZZ, directed by Edgar Wright
You know, I would've put "Sean of the Dead" here instead, but I'm a bit sick of zombie movies right now, so I tend to favor this, the second feature film by Edgar Wright. Certainly in the US this film was pitched as a cop buddy movie, and I guess it didn't really work for me on that level. But once I heard about how this film is more of an homage to the Italian "giallo" movies it all made much more sense to me, and I was hooked. Edgar co-writes and directs a breathless action/comedy/horror, drawing pop cultural references from all manner of places as he goes - the gunfight at the end is a bit too long, but stay for the fantastic performance from Timothy Dalton. This movie is a breath of fresh air - like hitting a reset switch when the days are just getting too long... enjoy.
I decided to get off my arse and tackle a feature film this year for lots of reasons, the big one being that feature films are why I got into this business for in the first place, and spending time doing anything else is just a huge mistake. I needed to begin 2010 with that end in mind... Last year my focus wasn't on that goal until I saw two films that woke me up - "INK" by Jamin Winans, and "MISSION X" by David Baker. If you haven't seen them, you need to rectify that error right now... There may be spoilers ahead : )
I've delayed writing about these movies for a couple of reasons - (1) they are flawed, a fact David Baker readily admits, and I didn't want my criticism of these films' faults to get in the way of my tremendous appreciation for their creative and material successes - and (2) I wanted to talk about these films outside of the context of their online marketing campaigns, which I actively supported, and talking objectively about these films could have been seen as contradicting my enthusiasm for both filmmakers and their projects. But today feels like the right time to be talking about what these films mean to me, and why they more than anything else I saw last year made me step up my game...
I had the good fortune to see "INK" at Cinema Village in New York last July. I knew very little about the film, other than it was getting a lot of buzz on Twitter, and that the film was produced on a shoestring by Jamin and his wife Kiowa. I'd seen their short film "Spin" and so I knew I was in for something that would be as polished as their means allowed. But I've also seen a lot of independent feature films by first time directors that fall short of their promise, and knowing how hit-and-miss this experience can be I had pretty low expectations. I simply wasn't prepared for the sheer ambition of the film that I saw that night.
"INK" is a love-letter to every movie that delighted me as a fan-boy in the 80s and 90s - Alex Proyas' "Dark City," Terry Gilliam's "Time Bandits," and the Wachowski Bros' "The Matrix" are the most obvious parallels that leap to mind, though there are many others. There's a fine line between "inspired by" and "derivative" when it comes to movies, and Winans walks that line precariously at times. But what is abundantly clear, certainly once the film really gets going, is the affection Wanins nurtures for the material that's inspired him, not to mention the lengths that he will go to in order to honor his inspirations.
While Winans' strong suit isn't his script, what he DOES have is real cinematic flair. Winans' visual vocabulary is extensive, and when "INK" works best it's when the characters are doing instead of saying. What first took my breath away was the fight scene in the suburban home... very physical, very inventive... I hadn't seen anything this fun in a low-budget movie since Ryuhei Kitamura's "Versus." The film really flies once the action starts, and there's a fair amount of action. The car crash is surprisingly effective, and the dazzling third act in the hospital still boggles my mind... How did he get access to that location, with 20 characters running around kicking the crap out of each other...? The action scenes alone are a triumph of staging and logistics.
The other aspect of the production is how EPIC it feels. Winans has his characters racing through a wide array of impressive locations, using the inherent beauty of the Colorado landscape superbly as a backdrop for many scenes in the second act. While Winans wouldn't divulge the size of the budget at the screening I attended, it's clear the bulk of the budget went on the production, while pre- and post-production were handled by Jamin and Kiowa on their own. Every dime they had to spend is up on the screen where it belongs. What "INK" showed me was the value of commitment and the investment of sweat equity into a project you utterly believe in. For all it's flaws, "INK" has a lot of genuine integrity that I find absolutely inspiring.
"MISSION X" 2009 WILD ONE ENTERTAINMENT Directed by DAVID BAKER I didn't know anything about "MISSION X" or David Baker before I started following him on Twitter last summer. I was supporting a lot of indie films at the time, and David had the added novelty of being Scottish - I like to support the home team, after all. But what drew me into the project was David's passion, and his commitment to his career and to his audience. I had to wait until December before I could actually see the movie itself, but I had six months of David's engaging online campaign to soak in before the DVD arrived.
David's story is already well documented - check out Joke and Biagio's extensive three part interview with David here. David's achievement, quite apart from shooting a heist movie for next to nothing, has been his clarity of purpose. David opened my eyes to the power of high-concept filmmaking, to knowing who your audience is and where your film fits into the grand scheme of things. When the "MISSION X" DVD arrived, I knew EXACTLY what I was getting into.
While "INK" has an epic sweep, David takes the opposite approach with "MISSION X." This is a small, intimate movie - very few locations, a largely loose and improvised feel that underscores the faux-documentary format, and a structure that hangs the film less on action than on the interactions of the characters in the build up to the heist itself. The film starts really strong - with an opening sequence that shows eye-witnesses talking about the heist in the past tense, and an introduction to the principle characters that sets up the stakes quickly.
Once we meet the gang the film starts to wander, faltering during a repetitive sequence of scenes that fail to either raise the stakes or develop the characters. But the real joy of the film is the supporting players David cast along side himself and co-star Grant Timmins. Their naturalistic interactions at the bar, and in the warehouse before the heist, have some real moments of freshness and honesty. There is a real sense of being in the moment with this film, and perhaps the only crime this film commits is portraying the crushing banality of waiting for an event to happen TOO convincingly.
In the last year David Baker has become a champion of self-distribution for independent filmmakers. He's an advocate who practices what he preaches, which is inspiring to watch unfold and, in some small way, be part of. David has embraced participant filmmaking and leads the way. As he said in his Live For Films interview last year:
"The secret is to 'move.' People will follow you if your script is good, you have drive, and you know exactly where you are going with it."
The origin of this movie is legendary - writer/director Dylan Kidd, recently graduated from NYU, was in possession of a script he utterly believed in, but was failing at every turn to find the money from the usual sources to go into production. So while he worked a variety of odd jobs to stay alive, Kidd aggressively sought his leading man as the gateway to getting what he needed.
As the story goes (1)(2), Kidd traveled everywhere with his screenplay, prepared for any opportunity. When Campbell Scott sat at a neighboring table in some Greenwich Village cafe, Kidd seized the moment and pitched Scott the story of "Roger Dodger." Campbell took the screenplay to read, and not only called Kidd three weeks later, but also brought other name talents onto the project to flesh out the cast and facilitate that necessary green light.
The script was written to be filmed on a limited budget - a minimal set of protagonists, a limited number of locations, and a clear, concise through-line. Kidd shot "Roger Dodger" with an appropriately low-budget sensibility. The majority of the camerawork is handheld, allowing for quick setups and flexible blocking on location - when money is tight everyone needs to be nimble. The cinematography also appears to use only available light, which provides a bold, if at times murky look.
The framing of the action is often catastrophically tight - a characteristic of Neil LaBute's debut "In The Company of Men" - which, while mostly serving the story, gives the film an oppressively limited canvas and absence of environment. This, plus the swimming motion of the handheld camera gives the entire film a drunken, unfocused aspect that confounds rather than amplifies comprehension and atmosphere.
But the strength of "Roger Dodger" is most definitely the script. I saw this film when it was first released and I dimly recalled not liking the film, presumably being turned off by the lazy feeling faux verite cinematography that has since become quite the fashion (see: any episode of Ronald D Moore's "Battlestar Galactica", for example). What I missed, however, was how taut the script is - how the action keeps rolling along, how the dialog mostly sizzles, and how the motivations of the characters are all unique and well drawn. The script has a lot of genuine personality and focused energy, and yet at this second watching something is still missing for me.
At first I laid blame at the door of Campbell Scott, who feels miscast in the roll of Roger. He comes across as totally unlikeable - I can't imagine him getting within a million miles of any sentient woman, never mind Isabella Rosselini. But on reflection the lack rests with Dylan Kidd himself, who fails to embellish Scott's performance with the necessary nuance to make his character play as human. Not that Scott's performance is anything less than meticulous, but the end result feels slavishly one-dimensional.
Roger is angry when he should be charming, contemptuous when he should be playful and knowing... Scott's Roger is a bland intellectual brute instead of an artful seducer - a bastard instead of a rogue. And I feel now that this is a fault of interpretation rather than of the written word. At no point did I feel myself rooting for Roger, or indeed for any character in the film. And that's going to distance your audience, which is the last thing you want to do.
And I say all this in an attempt to address how this film was so critically well received, and yet so failed to find an audience at the box office. The movie-going public has proven time and again, in the years since "Roger Dodger" was released, that shakey camerawork or limited budgets don't necessarily turn off an audience - take a look at Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" as an example of a film that could have been received the same way if not for Mickey Rourke's dazzling, warm-hearted star turn.
Intellectually the script for "Roger Dodger" is fantastic, and technically this film is quite an achievement given Dylan Kidd's first-time director status, not to mention the limited resources he had to work with - all things the critics responded to. No, I believe it is that lack of a spark of fun and seduction, that Han Solo ingredient, that turned off movie-goers. Above anything else a film needs to win the audience over, through splendor as in the case of "Avatar," or more reasonably by being evocative and heartfelt. In this case, I fear, Roger's cynicism permeates the movie in a way that no tacked-on, feel-good ending can rescue it from.
Last year was not a great year for me creatively. Stalled projects, false starts, fumbled paperwork and disillusioned collaborators litter the twelve months gone passed. But that's fine, because that's life. I set out to learn how to be an independent film producer on my own dime so that the only person these mistakes would affect would be me. And that's just how it happened.
Those are my mistakes. I own them. But they don't own me.
No-budget films, as anyone who's made one will tell you, progress at their own pace. Without the funds to channel into manpower, or to relieve yourself of the necessity of staying gainfully employed, time is your only asset - deadlines had to be flexible as I real-world issues demanded my time. The problem was, of course, that I'd set out with some false assumptions that shaped my strategy - a square peg, if you will, that I was trying to force into a round hole. As external pressures caused my personal deadlines to slip more and more, I wasn't giving myself time to reflect - I was just trying to hammer that same peg into the same wrong hole even harder.
Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I was absolutely driving myself insane.
That had to stop.
In July I'd had the foresight to plan a vacation - a visit with my family in Scotland to see in the New Year. The timing couldn't have been more perfect.
I left my work, and my computer, at home, and took a flight away from the pressure. And I didn't squander that time. I read Philip Hodgetts's"The New Now" and Jon Reiss's"Think Outside the Box Office." I reflected on the successes of my peers, particularly the ever inspiring David Baker, whose DVD of his feature "Mission X" I'd seen in December. And I spoke to other working filmmakers, like Kjeld Gogosha-Clark of Working Class Films notoriety, who gave me fresh and very welcome perspective on what's going on outside my own head in the world of independent filmmaking.
When you're too close to your work, too tangled in the problems to see what's causing them, you have to step away. You have to step back in order to see where the problem lies and to consider how to fix them. A short break can give you the time and the distance to assess your difficulties and formulate a new strategy.
By the time I got off the plane at JFK on January 11th I had a new treatment for "There Is No Drinking After Death" and a new set of goals for myself this year - new habits to make a clean, effective break with last year's disappointments. And since I returned I've also come up with a new strategy for the short film project, afilmabout.us. I'll be sharing those details soon. At the risk of overstating this, taking a break made all the difference.
James Joyce said that mistakes are portals to discovery. Well they are if you let them be. 2010 is going to be a great year. I hope you'll share it with me.
The selection of these first features is anything but random. As I gear up to produce my first feature I'm looking for two kinds of first feature - (1) those first films by directors who go on to become my role models as working professionals, or at the very least become directors whose work I find fascinating, and (2) the first films whose themes and scenarios resonate or run in parallel with the themes and scenarios in the script I'm developing. Neil LaBute's feature debut, "In The Company of Men," falls into the latter category.
Two executives, Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Howard (Matt Malloy), both men with axes to grind over relationships with women, plot to get even with all woman-kind for their past injury. They intend to find a vulnerable woman, vigorously romance her like some tag-team wrestling duo, and then dump both dump her at the point it will cause her most anguish. In that way they both believe they'll be settling some scores. Except, of course, it isn't that simple.
Adapting the film script from his own stage play, LaBute shot the whole film over two weeks for around $25,000 (financed largely by an auto-insurance settlement). Watching this as a filmmaker the money goes as far as it can - most shots feel underlit, though properly exposed. Interiors of the office, especially, often feel like they're night interiors when clearly their not supposed to be... not enough ambient fill splashing around the room, too many deep, deep shadows... But for the most part the camera is where it needs to be. Most shots are locked off with the camera on sticks. The only handheld shot that leaps to mind is the close-up of Chad on the bed with the object of their vindictive scheming, Christine (Stacey Edwards) - an unexpected organic touch that invigorates the frame and gives the scene an unspoken vibrancy.
The film does at times feel cramped because of awkward camera framing compounded by lighting that doesn't compensate for a lack of physical depth in the shot. This, married to the stagey feeling of this adapted screenplay, promotes the amateurish feeling in places. But that aside the characters are clearly written, and the performances are pretty solid - though Eckhart's Chad feels so demonic at times that he verges on caricature. The real strength of this film is the economy with which it is staged, and the energy LaBute tries to put into every scene. This is by no means a kinetic film, as is usually the case with low-budget screenplays, but here the interstitial music cues played during every title card and again over the closing credits are so feverish and bombastic that the non-filmed elements perfectly balance the quieter filmed elements. The music highlights the anger and hysteria of Chad and Howard's mission... a quest for delirious power over unsuspecting victims.
For me the key here is the writing - a solid script that inspires inventive and vigorous performance, not to mention an economy of locations and extraneous speaking characters that all go to making a two weeks schedule possible. My biggest disappointment, echoing what I said in #2 of this series, is that this film isn't more cinematic. The focus is so utterly on performance while little energy was spent in making the camera work more expressive. While it's possible that this was a creative decision on the part of LaBute's, I personally feel the film suffers from a restrained camera - the very stillness of the camera draws attention to itself, especially now in the era of handheld digital camcorders. The performances are left trapped in this inert boxes, with nowhere to run to.
A feature film is cinema, regardless of the production budget. It's the feature director's duty to find a vibrant cinematic vocabulary for themselves, in order to counter the point-and-shoot mindset that often creeps in when time is short and money is tight.
"Little Terrorist" by Ashvin Kumar - nominated for an Oscar in the Best Live Action Short Film category. A Pakistani Muslim boy accidentally crosses the Pakistani-Indian border which is riddled with landmines...
"Between You and Me" by Patryk Rebisz - a short internationally celebrated for its innovative approach to still photography, using the burst mode — a photo camera’s ability to record a rapid succession of images — in the depiction of a chance encounter.
"Time Piece" by Jim Henson - an experimental short film produced, directed, and written by Jim Henson, who also played the leading role.
dokk is a filmmaker and digital animator, a talent forged in the blast furnace of the late 80s video game scene, honed into a crafter of quality motion pictures in New York City's post-production industry, and now thrust upon the world, hungry for glory...
"Thinning The Herd" by Rie Rasmussen :: a young albino returns home to find a vicious killer waiting...
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