Sweating Like Ebert

Dokk's Top 100 Tunes of 2011 by iTunes Playcount

2012-01-01T13:13:00.002-05:00

I saw Edgar Wright do this on his blog last year, and thought it was an awesome idea. So here's my list of the songs I played most often over the last 12 months. Some happy discoveries of 2011 were The Vaccines, Wye Oak and The Juan Maclean, but there are some dusty old classics on here too... And then there are inevitable Fall tunes...

The play count never lies : )

Reset for 2012! Happy New Year..!

Rank Title Artist Play Count

1 NY Excuse Soulwax 36

2 One Touch LCD Soundsystem 35

3 Kick Out The Chairs (Tom Boy Remix) Munk Feat. James Murphy 34

4 Feel The Pressure Franz Ferdinand 31

5 Hey Guy tomandandy 27

6 In The Company Of Women Yummy Fur 27

7 Just Getting Started Dikta 25

8 That One Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs 25

9 Norgaard The Vaccines 25

10 Give Me Every Little Thing The Juan Maclean 24

11 Disco Infiltrator LCD Soundsystem 24

12 Drunk Girls LCD Soundsystem 24

13 Crush The Liberation The Juan Maclean 23

14 Take My Time Junior Senior 23

15 Ready For The Floor Hot Chip 22

16 I Can't Stand It The Hotrats 22

17 If You Wanna The Vaccines 22

18 Psychic City YACHT 22

19 Thunderbird Yunioshi 22

20 Walkabout (w_ Noah Lennox) Atlas Sound 21

21 Katherine Hit Me Franz Ferdinand 21

22 Play Your Imploding Ax Right Julz-A & Progenitor 20

23 Two Small Deaths Wye Oak 20

24 So What About It? (Remix 3) The Fall 19

25 Boys / Girls Huntemann 19

26 Buy Nothing Day The Go! Team 18

27 Wooden Simian Mobile Disco 18

28 If You Fall Azure Ray 17

29 Thank You Dikta 17

30 VHS FM Belfast 17

31 Losing My Edge LCD Soundsystem 17

32 I Can Change LCD Soundsystem 17

33 Family Feud Von Südenfed 17

34 Life Begins at the Hop XTC 17

35 In Yer Face 808 State 17

36 Sing! Harpy The Fall 16

37 Telephone Thing The Fall 15

38 Paintwork (remastered) The Fall 15

39 Feeling Kind Of Anxious Franz Ferdinand 15

40 Glitter Freeze Gorillaz Feat. Mark E Smith 15

41 Boys Of Melody The Hidden Cameras 15

42 Hip Hop A Lula Junior Senior 15

43 Dance Yrself Clean LCD Soundsystem 15

44 Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks (movie version) The Rapture 15

45 Alright Supergrass 15

46 Morse Code From The Cold War Dieter Schmidt 14

47 Thirteen Big Star 13

48 Mr. Pharmacist The Fall 13

49 A Past Gone Mad The Fall 13

50 Theme From Sparta F.C. The Fall 13

51 Do Or Die The Human League 13

52 Show You The Way To Go The Jacksons 13

53 The Future Will Come The Juan MacLean 13

54 All I Want LCD Soundsystem 13

55 Tom Hark Piranhas 13

56 Finest Worksong R.E.M. 13

57 Some Guys Have All The Luck Robert Palmer 13

58 We Belong Sin Fang Bous 13

59 No More Heroes The Stranglers 13

60 In Motion Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross 13

61 Here Comes the Summer The Undertones 13

62 The Rhinohead Von Südenfed 13

63 Kennedy The Wedding Present 13

64 When Yunioshi 13

65 Something Wicked This Way Comes (Edit) Barry Adamson 12

66 Song 2 Blur 12

67 Magic Spells Crystal Castles 12

68 In Ear Park Department of Eagles 12

69 Love Has Come Around Donald Byrd & 125th St. NYC 12

70 Why Are People Grudgeful? The Fall 12

71 My New House (remastered) The Fall 12

72 99 Problems (Produced By Rick Rubin) Jay-Z 12

73 It's For You Out Hud 12

74 A Familiar Taste Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross 12

75 Intriguing Possibilities Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross 12

76 Lets Go! Yunioshi 12

77 Cübik 808 State 12

78 Scorpios Adam And The Ants 11

79 Battle The Art Of Noise 11

80 Summer Fun Barracudas 11

81 The Ballad Of El Goodo Big Star 11

82 Dont Stop (project runway mix) Brazilian Girls 11

83 Say No Go De La Soul 11

84 Colours Donovan 11

85 Hands Off...She's Mine The English Beat 11

86 O.F.Y.C. Showcase The Fall 11

87 Chino The Fall 11

88 Murder she said Fun Boy Three 11

89 Thrills LCD Soundsystem 11

90 Home LCD Soundsystem 11

91 Messages OMD 11

92 Young Folks (Feat. Victoria Be Peter Bjorn And John 11

93 Preaching to the Perverted Pop Will Eat Itself 11

94 We Will Become Silhouettes The Shins 11

95 Little Girl (feat. Julian Casablancas) Sparklehorse 11

96 Helpless Sugar 11

97 It Catches Up With You Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross 11

98 Wetsuit The Vaccines 11

99 Under Your Thumb The Vaccines 11

100 Oh Lori Alessi Brothers 10

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 05/23/10

2010-05-23T18:11:00.006-04:00

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...

"Scratching" by Matt Brown (via @shootingpeople) a boy drifts inward after he sees his mom die suddenly...

"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 1 Pt 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

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 05/09/10

2010-05-09T14:33:00.011-04:00

A month since my last update. Never mind the quality, feel the width:

"Rolly Dial's Defining Moment" by Jim Flewitt :: could the babysitter be a witch...?

"Innocent Eyes" by Alex Vivian :: a girl trapped by domestic abuse is offered escape by a new neighbor

"Stalk of the Celery Monster" by Tim Burton :: ...this stuff sells itself, really. an unfinished work

"Grave Misfortunes" by Eugene Thomas :: a lonely cemetery worker stumbles upon a distressed woman...

"Getting Started" by Richard Condie :: a classic animated short about procrastination from @thenfb

"List"by Will White :: Pt 1 :: Pt 2 :: ambitious student short (via @Raydachic)

"Validation" by Kurt Kuenne :: a fable about the magic of free parking (via @s_sachiyo)

"Girls on the Air" by Allesio Valori :: can community radio make change in Afghanistan?

"Two Men and a Wardrobe" by Roman Polanksi :: some baggage just makes life harder (via @shortcinema)

"Run To Me Run From Me" by Ben Garchar :: (via @ShootingPeople) a High School athlete's anorexia & sexual fantasy

"Meet Meline" by Virginie Goyons & Sebastien Laban :: a weird creature sparks a little girl's curiosity

"Salim Baba" by Tim Sternberg :: a man in North Kolkata entertains kids using a hand-cranked projector

#shortfilmSunday extra::
"Pixels" by Partick Jean :: no story, just 8-bit video game love - Pixels attack NYC

In Celebration of First Features :: John Sayles' "Return of the Secaucus 7"

2010-05-04T14:59:00.027-04:00

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.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 04/11/10

2010-04-11T17:57:00.003-04:00

another bi-weekly update ::
"The Last 3 Minutes" by Shane Hurlburt :: a mundane existence unfurls into hypnotic past (via @loudpics)

"The Birth of the Goalie of the 2001 F.A. Final" by Mike Leigh :: From his 1975 series "Five Minute Films"

"A Day In Paris" by Benoit Millot :: via @BoingBoing - a "dreamy live-action + 3D animated short"

"Vive La France" by Luke Andrews :: via @shootingpeople - In Nazi occupied France, a child's act of defiance unravels everything.

"Stolen Clothes" by Lee Tarrier :: a photo in a wallet binds a would-be thief & his city-worker victim

"Dark Room" by Johnny Hardstaff :: part of Philips' project selling their Ambilight TVs (via @dutchdosher)

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 03/28/10

2010-03-29T21:03:00.004-04:00

another bumper crop...

"Staring At The Sun" by Toby Wilkins :: an expat Scot, obsessed with his future, seals his own fate.

"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.

In Celebration of First Features: #6 - Troy Duffy's "The Boondock Saints"

2010-03-14T18:00:00.019-04:00

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...)

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 03/14/10

2010-03-14T17:48:00.004-04:00

"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)

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 03/07/10

2010-03-07T13:51:00.004-05:00

I didn't have time to update this last week, so this week is a bumper double issue : )

"The Unrecoverable Loss of Eugene" by Patrick Loehr :: (via @JPeep) a troubled man & his beloved puppet

"Cracker Bag" by Glendyn Ivin :: (via @Kevin_Slack) fireworks and the coming of age

"Britain Isn't Working" by Rocky Palladino :: (via @ShootingPeople) a satire: when everything totally breaks down, what do you do?

"The Open Doors" by James Rogan :: (via @Futureshorts) based on H. H. Munro's story, starring Michael Sheen

"Tangerine" by Alison Peebles :: One man's way of adjusting to retirement

"Cutlass" by Kate Hudson :: ...two young girls who need to learn that good things don't come easily

In Celebration of First Features: #5 - The Wachowski Brothers' "Bound"

2010-02-22T01:06:00.011-05:00

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.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 02/21/10

2010-02-22T00:45:00.005-05:00

"Rabbit Punch" by Kristian Andrews :: (via @Futureshorts) a stellar animated short ...kids making life interesting in a small town.

"Prey Alone" by Stephen St. Leger & James Mather :: a stylish action thriller - a cat-and-mouse hunt and a race against time.

"Light Rain" by Neil Horner: "...if we can get through this, we can get through anything" (via @shootingpeople)

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 02/14/10

2010-02-14T09:55:00.003-05:00

"Asparagus" by Roman Wyden :: A seemingly perfect family, and the forbidden desire between two cousins.

"Love" by Cristian Solimeno :: A passionate romance and the ultimate act of love.

"Voice On The Line" by Kelly Sears :: an experimental animation about Cold War paranoia - an official Sundance 2010 selection.

www.alwayswatching.net :: 16 Short Films Turned Feature Films (And the Filmmakers Who Made it Happen)

2010-02-11T23:22:00.004-05:00

"...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.

Staying Inspired :: My Top 5 Go-To Movies

2010-02-08T10:03:00.016-05:00

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.

The Two Indie Movies That Changed The Game For Me In 2009

2010-02-07T12:50:00.022-05:00

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...

"INK" 2009 DOUBLE EDGE FILMS
Directed by JAMIN WANINS

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."

Amen.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 02/07/10

2010-02-07T11:16:00.004-05:00

"I Love Sarah Jane" by Spencer Susser :: Young love and the zombie apocalypse...

"The Raftman's Razor" by Keith Bearden :: Two geeky teenage boys follow the story of a superhero.

"Can't Stop Breathing" by Amy Neill :: The price of isolation on a mother & daughter's relationship.

In Celebration of First Features: #4 - Dylan Kidd's "Roger Dodger"

2010-02-01T00:07:00.018-05:00

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.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 01/31/10

2010-01-31T12:20:00.004-05:00

"Night School" by Ben Soper :: two teens break into a school after dark, looking for intimacy...

"Bitch" by Dom Bridges (via @futureshorts) a man buys a can of tuna & gets more than he bargained for.

"All You've Got" by A.E. Griffin :: a battered wife becomes emotionally attached to the cat burglar robbing her house.

2009 - my year in review

2010-01-24T20:44:00.019-05:00

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.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 01/24/10

2010-01-24T13:53:00.003-05:00

"Terminus" by Trevor Cawood :: A man's sanity is tested when he is tailed by strange, ambiguous beings.

"Marcus" by Olu Fashakin :: A social worker gets more than she bargained for when visiting Marcus' mother.

"Ark" by Grzegorz Jonkajtys :: A stylish animated short. With almost the entire human population destroyed, one man leads an exodus.

In Celebration of First Features: #3 - Neil LaBute's "In The Company of Men"

2010-01-18T01:03:00.014-05:00

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.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 01/18/10

2010-01-18T00:51:00.006-05:00

"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.

In Celebration of First Features: #2 - The Coen Brothers' "Blood Simple"

2009-12-13T15:18:00.041-05:00

Choosing this first feature is so obvious it's almost redundant. But watching it again I'm struck by how much I've taken this film for granted... "Blood Simple" is as complete & bold a cinematic vision as any of Joel & Ethan's subsequent films. The opening voiceover is writing as beautiful & specific as ANYTHING the brothers have delivered these fifteen years since (in my opinion better than the voiceover in "The Big Lebowski," or "The Hudsucker Proxy")...

It's as if the Coen Brothers emerged on the independent film scene as a mature visual storytelling force without any fumbling first steps. To revisit this now, embarking on my first feature, is as overwhelming as it is unnerving....

Up until the release of "Blood Simple" the names of Joel and Ethan Coen were known to few outside the context of assistant editing for "The Evil Dead" director Sam Raimi. I lack hard details, but apparently both brothers had an early interest in cinema - as children working for neighbors in order to save money for a Super8 camera that they went on to make a slew of films, not only remakes of favorites but also a host of original titles like "Henry Kissinger - Man on the Go," "Lumberjacks of the North" and "The Banana Film." It was Joel who went to NYU to study film, and it was he who worked in industrial and music video, until joining Sam Raimi's post-production team opened new doors of opportunity to broader horizons.

As Matt Murray puts it in his review, "Blood Simple" is a "near-perfect example of what good planning can get you." Clearly the film is an exercise in clinical execution - nothing about this film feels accidental or haphazard. According to DVD release notes, Sam Raimi advised the brothers to raise $1.2M to shoot the film on their own terms - following Raimi's lead the brothers wrote the script and shot an elaborate trailer to use on their year-long struggle to successfully find investors.

And maybe this pre-production story is not so unusual or unexpected, and it's certainly not why I felt compelled to write about "Blood Simple." What struck me about this film is just how staggeringly CINEMATIC this film is. Without any preamble, Joel and Ethan serve up this measured and methodical genre thriller with a visual vitality that transcends budget, genre and their first-feature status... The pacing of the scene where John Gentz's adulterous bartender discovers the corpse of cuckolded bar-owner Dan Hedaya, and the subsequent drive into the stark, black open country to dispose of the body... or M. Emmet Walsh's climactic confrontation with Frances McDormand... for me bring to mind the storyboarded diligence of Hitchcock's cropdusting sequence from "North by Northwest" and apartment scenes from "Dial M for Murder."

Watching this film with my own feature debut firmly in mind, I'm confronted by how the cinematic flair of the Coen Bros first feature is precisely the kind of filmmaking I got into this business for in the first place. Through careful camera placement and stylish editing, the Coen Bros build a world for the audience as specific and idiosyncratic as any film they've made since. Their's is not a "slice of life" so much as the "slice of cake" Hitchcock always said his own filmmaking was about.

Being reminded of all this has given me another set of creative options... even creative imperatives... for approaching the production of "Single Malt." I can't speak for anyone else, but I catch myself falling into the same mental trap time and again - that digital video isn't cinematic... And I don't even know where that assumption comes from.

It certainly doesn't have to be the case.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 12/13/09

2009-12-13T15:05:00.004-05:00

"The Shade" by Mohammad Gorjestani :: a hot day, a flat tire outside Tehran, and a chance encounter...

"The Last Time I Saw You" by George Pursall & Caitlin Catherwood :: via @shootingpeople ...20 years of a father's remorse...

"ALPTRAUM" by This Lüscher :: a comical fairytale from @Film_Movement - soccer dreams can come true

In Celebration of First Features: #1 - Ridley Scott's "The Duellists"

2009-12-06T13:54:00.025-05:00

As I gear up to produce my first feature film, part of my development process has been revisiting first features by directors great and small. Some are the expected naive folly of neophyte storytellers, same the exuberant dabblings of dedicated fans of the big screen, and some are extraordinary exhibits of genuine talent tested for the first time. One particular example of the latter is Ridley Scott's feature debut, "The Duellists."

The 1977 film "The Duellists" is an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad story, "The Duel," by a young English director whose previous experience had up until that point been episodic television drama and commercials, most notably the idyllic television campaign for Hovis. I saw this film when I was very young - my father being a huge fan of this film for reasons he never fully explained to me.

As a child I had already been seduced by the bubblegum charms of what is now ponderously known as "Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope", and by then my father had introduced me to the magnificence of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now" which, truth be told, were somewhat lost on me at that age. But for me, as a formative filmmaker, it was "The Duellists" that struck me as something new and remarkable.

The cinematography is without question the most compelling aspect of Scott's production, with Frank Tidy's work creating a rich canvas upon which Scott paints this period narrative. Scott's use of long takes, using the grandeur of the natural landscape as the epic backdrop for the unfolding human drama, is impeccable. And the attention to detail and texture is both precise and hypnotic - a truly visually arresting spectacle. As Vincent Canby in the New York Times described, Scott's haunting imagery is "a memory of almost indescribable beauty, of landscapes at dawn, of over-crowded, murky interiors, of underlit hallways and brilliantly sunlit gardens." But more than this, what strikes me now is the gentle hand Scott uses with the story, a quality too often missing in contemporary cinema.

Like many in his generation Scott exhibits the influence of Stanley Kubrick's film making style - not only the extraordinary attention to detail, but also the deliberate pacing and the palpable sense of place and time. Here we see a reinterpretation of Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon," embellished as it is for a more commercial audience. But where Kubrick used modernist techniques to create distance between subject and audience, Scott applies a different approach.

What truly brings this film home to me, now as it did when I first saw it, are the moments of naked, unstructured performance - the wild card in this otherwise carefully cultivated film world: The moment at the start of an early duel when D'Hubert (Keith Carradine) interrupts the fight to sneeze, or the awkward naturalism of D'Hubert's proposal of marriage while being distracted by a horse determined to win his attention - all these moments temper the grand epic canvas with a human naturalism that is beguiling and disarming. For a boy brought up on bombastic cinema served up on a bed of hyperbole, to me this small, delicately crafted film was an exhilarating breath of fresh air.

This is not a perfect film, though. The greatest flaw, perhaps, is the unfortunate casting of Keith Carradine in the lead role. A perfectly competent actor as he is, Carradine lacks the weight to balance Keitel's deliciously ludicrous and vain Feraud. Carradine never quite blends with his surroundings This has the unintended side-effect of submerging Keitel's Feraud into the background, making him seem more at home in this world than D'Hubert, and as a consequence he appears more reasonable than he should. It is D'Hubert, rather than Feraud, who seems absurd to the audience, even if only unconsciously.

That said, the film is a remarkable achievement. Everything here serves the story - the images, pacing and score. A Kubrick film for the masses perhaps. Scott would go on to use his affection for Kubrick's meticulous detail, as well as a handling of naturalistic performance, to staggering effect in his next feature "Alien." But it began here, in Scott's marriage of classic cinematic splendor with moments of simple, frail and flawed human reality.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 12/06/09

2009-12-06T13:30:00.002-05:00

"Forever's Not So Long" by Shawn Morrison:: via @jessebdylan ...the perfect time to lose everything...

"Path Lights" by Zachary Sluser :: via @DLFTV, a short film based on a Tom Drury short story

"Black Button" by @DarkHeartProd :: recommended by @kingisafink A Faustian pact... in the mold of "The Box"

Life and the Short Film

2009-11-29T13:26:00.045-05:00

The problem with making narrative short film is always one of how do you find your audience? With the current glut of online video content portals to choose from, how do you an already overloaded audience to take you seriously enough to commit the 10-30 minutes to watch a dramatic short that has no star power or media buzz?

One approach is the anthology feature film - a 90 minute film constructed from a collection of short films, connected by a common theme. "Paris, Je T'aime" is an intriguing example, where each short film takes place in a different district of the city of Paris, geography connecting each disparate story.

My initial intention for the afilmabout.us project was to create an anthology feature - the body of work would carry more weight at feature length, it would be easier to program at festivals, and it was a measurable goal for the people working on the projects. The problem was that the shorts I was making didn't have a consistent theme. I never found a satisfactory way of dealing with that, and so I let the idea slide. Besides, I had plenty of other things to worry about.

And then last month I was invited to see an anthology feature project that had an innovative solution...

The Wonder Project is the brainchild of the participants of the DnA group (short for "Directors and Actors"), a weekly workshop for storytellers who collaborate to develop their craft. In her article for Filmmaker Magazine, Wonder Project episode director Shari Carpenter explains how the film is comprised of shorts that use the same lines of dialog. In an exercise similar to one featured in the televised filmmaking competition "Project Greenlight," all the directors participating in The Wonder Project were given the same blank script - dialog without any stage direction or scene information - and an entirely free hand to interpret the circumstances of the script and how the lines were delivered. Suddenly you have both a rigorous structure to build an anthology around, and an unfettered creative canvas onto which each director can paint their distinct narrative vision.

DnA director and Wonder Project instigator Dutch Doscher invited me to a lock screening of the Wonder Project last month at Planet Hollywood Time Square, in large part because I'm an outspoken advocate of short film on Twitter (which is how I met Dutch in the first place). I was invited as a blogger, but I was concerned that perhaps I was there under false pretenses - I mean I blog, but I'm not a committed blogger (which you've already noticed if you've spent any time reading this site). Plus I've never reviewed an unreleased film before - a delicate task for someone as opinionated as myself... Regardless, as a filmmaker I was definitely curious to see what Dutch and his partners had done with this short film anthology format. What follows are my entirely subjective reactions to that screening:

The blank script structure was set up with the opening title animation - a brisk overview of all the lines in the blank script as they are both read aloud and projected onto the screen. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the words are the thing. The first two shorts, a couple breaking into a lakeside summer home in "Lake Wonderful," and a psychotic love relationship imploding on the sidewalk in "Wonder/Love," lead the audience into pretty traditional short territory, and set the tone and expectations for this micro-budget production. The third, "Wonder of See Saws," where two couples eating at the same restaurant get into an argument, shows real flair and humor, and segues into the dark and dense "Wondering Darkness," a Chris Cunningham-esque vignette about people trapped in a behavioral study gone wrong - subjects and researchers alike. All four of these shorts attempt story arc and character development, which for me, to be honest, is when short film works best.

"Wonderlust," on the other hand, is something of a shaggy dog story - a visual gag that zips through the blank script so fast the film barely makes an impression. This is followed by the equally light "The Cats of Wonder" - a frothy film that sets two cats with questionable French accents (read Pepe La Pew) as the protagonists. It doesn't last long enough to outstay its welcome. However in the next short it's speed, or rather haste, that is the fatal flaw. "Will of Wonder" focuses on a patient's pivotal visit to his psychologist's office, but the short races through the psychological twists and turns in such a way that defangs the effectiveness of the piece and left me wishing we'd spent more time with the characters.

By now, of course, the pattern of dialog has been made abundantly clear to the audience - the repetition of the lines ceases to be intrusive and becomes the real pleasure of the piece: How will this line be read? How will they fit in that line? A palpable sense of anticipation is created that genuinely ties these films together.

The last two shorts highlight both the strengths and the weaknesses of this project - "The Wondrous Bliss" falls flat for me when we're asked to believe the two young, good-looking and well-groomed actors are supposed to be heroin junkies driven to steal in order to feed their habit... Having recently watched "The Wire" on DVD this conceit really tested my credulity, even though the performances were wonderful - Margaret Donlin in particular.

The last short, "Eye Wonder," on the other hand, was the strongest of the bunch - a love triangle that is revealed when a young man takes one lover to a tarot reading and is horrified to discover his other lover is the card reader. Where the previous shorts felt in some way unbalanced - performances that are stronger that the interpretation of the script, or ideas that needed more development before being committed to camera - this short showed a thoroughness of execution that becomes the keystone to the entire project. If you end strong, I've always said, the audience will forgive you just about everything. This is most definitely a strong ending.

Like I told Dutch, the unevenness of these shorts works in a way that means no one piece overshadows the others, creating a truly complementary anthology with a strong connective vision. I'm told there is likely to be a re-structuring of these shorts - removing the literary quotes that appeared between the shorts in the edit I saw, and re-ordering the sequence the shorts appear in. I can't say how these changes will affect the piece, I can only say that I liked the anthology as it was presented that night and found it to be very effective.

In the end I absolutely admire the ambitions of this project. I'm a dedicated short film advocate, but the truth is that, instead of being easier to get shorts seen, new technology is making it harder for a single short to find any kind of audience. With so many outlets to see videos of all shapes and sizes, unsupported short film releases are getting drowned in the online video deluge. What The Wonder Project offers is a workable paradigm for emerging artists, to pool their resources collaboratively and build a means for experimental short-form content to find a larger audience.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 11/22/09 AND 11/29/09

2009-11-29T13:05:00.007-05:00

missed a week, so here's a double dose ::

"Boomerang" by Carla Drago :: Sometimes just being human is embarrassing.

"Combat Rock" by Blake Hamilton :: a boy discovers a love of music - (techno-kiddies may be excited to know this is shot on a Canon 5d Mark ii)

"The Lunch Date" by Adam Davidson :: A classic - a woman in a train station is confronted by her prejudice

"The Red Balloon" by Albert Lamorisse (recommended by @Kevin_Slack) another timeless classic, this one from 1956

"Rusalka" by Alexander Petrov :: (suggested by @jaypea_aitken) a truly astonishing and beautiful glass-painting animation

"Spirits" by Keith Boynton (via @reel13) ...part of the "12 films, 12 weeks" project... nicely done

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 11/15/09

2009-11-15T15:54:00.003-05:00

"Dunny" by Phillip Van :: a lovelorn 11-yr-old boy tries to deliver letter to his object of desire...

"Swipe" by Max Blustin :: A lazy young man, refused cash by his girlfriend, resorts to other means.

"Bulletproof Vest" by May Lin Au Yong :: Nine-year-old Jyeshria wants a bulletproof vest.

a film about who?

2009-11-09T00:31:00.006-05:00

When you don't have money but regardless you want to produce something worthwhile, something that speaks to your ambitions of making indelible motion pictures, then the penalty is always time and pure sweat equity. Well, at least it has been in my case.

afilmabout.us is my experiment in visual storytelling - crafting compelling visual narratives within a set of limited circumstances using limited resources, but with an overriding ambition to make unforgettable motion pictures, and in the process become a better storyteller.

When I started this project my goal was to build a team that would produce 8 short films for $2,000 per title in one year. Each film would be a snapshot of who we are as filmmakers at that precise moment - warts and all - so that by the end of the production cycle we would have a road map of our storytelling growth. The company would use equipment owned by the filmmakers, who would also write/direct/edit/score everything themselves. Because my particular trade is post-production, I'd develop scripts that would lean heavily in that direction, to relieve some of the burden of production value during shooting. As supervising producer for the project, my unifying idea behind all these proposed shorts was nothing more than "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

As vague as this notion was I wanted to work with other talented filmmakers to make this happen. I was able to attract the incredible talents of Peter Haas, a working editor I had the good fortune to go to college with, Larry McGovern, an engineer by trade and a stellar grip and AD, and Ron Moreno, as hard-working an actor as anyone could want to meet. The four of us made up the core filmmaking team, each bringing a passion and commitment this kind of no-budget endeavor really requires.

In some post-KLF fit of whimsy, I believed that if the same people were involved in all the projects that were developed under the afilmabout.us banner, then our true, undiluted collective creative voice would emerge irresistibly from that body of work... maybe not discernible close-up, but step back a ways and you'll see it.

And this is still probably true, but in the last eighteen months the "we can do it" bravado has given way to a more sober reality about our initial targets. My personal goal was to grow as an independent producer - learn the mechanics of "proper" film production, which I initially believed specifically meant working with SAG actors.

What I actually learned from my producing experience was (1) the scripts I was writing were too ambitious for the scope of production within my immediate means, (2) not every person who displays emphatic enthusiasm when volunteering their services just for credit and experience are going to pull through for you, so you better have a back-up plan, and (3) you simply can't ever, ever give up.

I know now, for example, how much it will realistically cost to produce the 11 page screenplay called "Footcandles." I also know that the sci-fi scripts we've been developing are a tad out of our reach at the moment - but that won't always be the case. These days I write scripts intended to be affordable and compelling (to me, anyway) and that can be shot efficiently with the tools that we've already developed - the proof of that being the more contained but no less dramatically ambitious short script currently entitled "On The Table."

"Undone," the web series that started it all, is in the last leg of post-production. I'll tell the story of that long, long production cycle some other time. But as the final stages approach it's tempting to frame that as an ending, but that's not the case. As it was always intended to be - it's a beginning.

2010 will be a very different year for afilmabout.us

...this was all intended to be a preamble to a discussion about another short film anthology project I had the good fortune to see, a project called "Wonder..." - but that'll have to wait till next time. So until then... good night, and good luck.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 11/08/09

2009-11-09T00:26:00.003-05:00

"Angel of the Night" by @dannylaceyfilm :: (via @indiemoviemaker) a debut short horror film

"Myles West" by Bryn Chainey :: Kid steals his brother's iPod to live a fantasy secret agent life.

"Signs" by Patrick Hughes :: (via @mjodirector) Where do you find love? Sometimes you need a sign...

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 11/01/09

2009-11-01T13:26:00.005-05:00

Here are this week's links, somewhat hampered by YouTube being closed down for maintenance::

"Itmanna: Make a Wish" by Cherien Dabis :: (via @TribecaFilm)
a Palestinan girl goes to the bakery...

"Her Name Is Laura Panic" by @AdamWingard
...a sequel to his "Laura Panic", which is available on his website here

"Foster" by Jonathan Newman :: (via @shortcinema)
...a multiple award winning short featuring an impish leading actor...

Back to basics...

2009-10-29T10:33:00.011-04:00

Great things are afoot, but today I'm thinking specifically about the feature script I'm developing for The dotUS Project. We're adopting the practical filmmaking philosophy of Marc Price, director of the no-budget zombie film "Colin" that dazzled Cannes this year with its reported $70 out-of-pocket price tag. I read a quote from Price (can't find the article now) where he encourages filmmakers to embrace making a feature with the resources they have access to right now, instead of waiting for the money.

So that's what we're doing. The script I'm developing takes place in one location (the place where I live), has five speaking parts, and doesn't require anything except minimal props and make-up - a thriller, currently entitled "Jacob," that takes place in a residential building in downtown Brooklyn.

Like 'Paranormal Activity' the film focuses exclusively on the interior of that shared living space. We're going for a lo-fi aesthetic, but to bring some richness to that we're embracing the cinematography of early 20th century horror - films also made for minimal budgets (by today's standards, certainly) that used striking expressionist lighting and camera, the kind pioneered and embraced by the German filmmakers of the 20s and 30s.

And you can help - we're making a list and checking it twice - the most striking horror films of that period that we're going to use as our role-models. Any and all suggestions for films we should watch are absolutely welcome. Here are a few lists I've found so far :

Cinematical Seven - The Best Black and White Horror Movies

Filmsite - Horror films

Obscure Horror Movie Categories - Black and White Films

Share and enjoy : )

Tempus Fugit on Twitter

2009-10-18T13:32:00.003-04:00

Good grief. Time has flown by since I updated this blog last. I've got a couple of good reasons - one being the ongoing post-production struggle for my most recent short film, the unfortunately titled "Undone" (Larry, my A.D., has long suspected that I've totally jinxed myself with that one... I choose to be less superstitious than that). More on that project later.

The other reason is Twitter.

I doubt I have anything new to say on the subject (of Twitter in particular or social networking in general), but I will say that when I finally embraced Twitter it was with the intention of becoming part of the independent film-making community. And I'm there. I've seen films I wouldn't otherwise have seen, films made by passionate outsiders to the commercial filmmaking industry, driven by passion and commitment to their craft - dream chasers all. And I'm proud to count myself among their number.

I could go on and on about what I've seen and who I've encountered on there... but it's something you have to experience for yourself. Like blogging, or in fact anything in this life, you get out of it what you put into it. If you haven't already, dip your toe in the wide river of flowing information on Twitter. There's something for everyone there... Maybe join me... @d0kk... Everyone I follow on there is absolutely worth following.

And 'Undone'? We're getting there, inch by inch. I approached this project as a neophyte producer, determined to learn from my mistakes. And I've made plenty. But we're nearly there. I'll keep you posted as we approach the first public screenings. Stay with me. It'll be worth it.

Inaction

2008-04-01T16:05:00.006-04:00

Still digesting the roundtable discussion I went to at the Lincoln Center last Sunday, which was part of the the New Directors series being screened there this month. It's not so much what was said, because there wasn't a whole lot of new information. I was struck by the general lack of energy from the panel. The panelists were all filmmakers who had screened during previous New Director series, and the discussion was in part to illuminate how being included in that program had facilitated their careers as marginal, independent filmmakers.

Basically, it didn't. Oops.

I think that's where the lack of energy came from - the misconception of the panel discussion in the first place, and the awkward position that put the panelists in. Tamara Jenkins, for example, director of last year's acclaimed "The Savages," was animated when she spoke about her filmmaking experiences, but had little to add to the Q & A discussion about technology and distribution, about funding and the fight to get films made period. Likewise Michael Almereyda, Lodge Kerrigan, and the particularly bitter sounding Jim McKay.

The conversation was also mired by some indie posturing about how hateful it is to be casting for cash, the necessity to please funders in order to make movies, and lamentation of the lack of the state funding that is enjoyed overseas. The most positive and useful comments came from Su Friedrich and Tom Kalin, who at least appeared to grasp and engage the process of indie filmmaking. Both, interestingly, are prolific directors of short films, and coincidentally don't have the economic handicap of trying to raise families while working in the film industry. McKay's unhappy remarks about his needing to work on the TV show Law & Order for the money brought home the latter consideration.

It was also interesting to see how few people on stage wanted to take the reins of their own careers. The whole online distribution discussion, for example, was largely sidestepped, because none of the panellists have engaged that medium at all. Which surprised me. I don't think there was anybody talking who was that much older than me, but there was an uncomfortable reluctance to do more than speculate about what is involved. Kerrigan was clearly appalled at the idea of self-promotion, framing it with the word 'branding' and letting the post-Naomi Klien angst association envelope the room. 'Brand,' in the context of market awareness, is just another word for 'identity', and few at the table were able to articulate their filmmaking goals in those terms. I certainly didn't hear anybody mention David Lynch's nominal success in that department.

Perhaps the suggestion that the internet is somehow a panacea for independent filmmakers' distribution woes is just too naive for them to contemplate. The whole thing had the air of people too long stuck in the trenches, unable to see beyond the lip of their own foxhole. I hadn't really expected to see a bunch of people old before their time feel kind of helpless and sorry for themselves, but there was more than a little of that.

As was pointed out by the more than slightly jaded McKay, it's a young person's industry (apparently).

Action

2008-03-21T10:05:00.002-04:00

So I'm less than twenty-four hours from the start of principle photography on "Undone", the first short film in the collective that will be known as aFilmAbout.us

Hindsight being 20/20, I realize I should have documented the process of getting here more thoroughly. It's such a small production that I've ended up doing a lot of the legwork myself, and this blog hasn't been too high on the list of priorities.

But I had a good night's sleep, I'm working on the shot list, and I'm feeling as prepared as I could be given the limitations and the other crap going on that has nothing to do with this production (and how on earth did Easter end up in March this year? I'm not saying that the Christian religion is arbitrary or anything, but come on...)

Not much more to say about it than that at the moment. The last few weeks have been all about being concerned with what could go wrong, but this last run up to the shoot my job is to be worried about what I can make go right. The train has left the station, the cards have been dealt - choose your metaphor, it's all the same. I have fantastic actors to work with, a dedicated crew that has gone above and beyond to make this weekend happen.

Let the chips fall where they may.

It starts tomorrow.

My name has traveled further than I ever will...

2008-03-06T21:31:00.004-05:00

My Italian is non-existent, and BabelFish isn't much better, but as far as I can tell they're saying nice things about me.

The future isn't what it used to be, fellas.

The Invisibles, or No Job Is Worth Having Your Earlobe Fondled By Skip Gates

2008-02-24T14:06:00.011-05:00

I'm an assistant editor by trade, which makes me something between a janitor and nanny. I clean up the mess editors make, generally keep the equipment functioning, while doing the grunt work of data management and information tracking. At the same time I do a lot of the actual organizational thinking for handling the media elements, advise editors how to use the tools, and most often perform a post-production supervisory role where I'm doing the strategic planning for getting the show to online with the correct elements in the correct formats.

I mean, read that list again. I'm basically a producer, with the only material difference being that I'm not given a budget or any input into the creative process.

It drives me nuts.

I work on a lot of low budget broadcast documentaries, which by and large have longer production cycles from the bulk of the broadcast television you see. Some of the Food Network shows, for example, are turning out half hour shows in a matter of days, whereas the show I'm working on now has a ten week post production cycle for an hour long PBS show. So it could be worse for me, certainly. I get to choose, to a limited extent, the shows I work on, so while I'm not getting paid what I deserve, I at least get to be involved in some worthwhile or prestigious shows with some talented people.

But it's still a dead-end job.

It's possible I lack perspective, but there doesn't appear to be any opportunity for advancement when you make yourself indispensable as a support system. I don't get to learn anything about the craft of editing (which is basically storytelling through artful omission). I'm most often hired by people who are underfunded and uninformed about the post-production process, and my job is to prevent them from totally shooting themselves in the foot while rushing to get the show finished. (Lack of planning is a big handicap in post-production, surprise surprise). Not only don't I get to participate in the creative process, however, but by being branded 'assistant' I'm totally denied the credit due for getting some of these shows finished at all.

Humbug.

Believe me, I'm not about to get into some Chuck Palahniuk rant about how the downtrodden should rise up blah blah blah. But after engaging the business at this level for this long it becomes apparent that the system is unsustainable. There's no degree of 'apprenticeship' for assistants like there has been for generations of filmmakers before - I don't even get to interact with the editors most of the time. So where are the next generation of editors going to come from? Options for aspiring editors are few and far between. Assistant editing work just gets you more assistant work. Directors often cut their own movies, inspired by the likes of the Coen Bros and Soderberg. And other working editors are scrambling to get paid just like I am, so why would they help me get my first job when they have a mortgage and kids to feed? Is it alarmist to say editing is becoming a dying art? Um.. Probably, but I'm taking a pretty short-termist, myopic view here.

If producers could buy a version of Final Cut Pro that did the editing for them automatically (control/apple/Edit), we'd all be out of a job.

As another editor pointed out to me, if I really want to start editing professionally I need to get a job on one of those Food Network or Home Gardening shows, working for peanuts with no time to finesse the edits or grasp the 'story' (if you really want to call it that). Not sure if I want to commit those terms, frankly. For me, the most practical advice I've been given since moving to NYC was when Paola Gutierrez-Ortiz pointed out that I should stick to working on shows that I believe in. I've amended that to also include working with people I enjoy and respect, and so far that's worked out okay.

Apart from that glass ceiling.

So I'm developing my own material. Finally. The only way for people take take me seriously is for me to start taking myself seriously. I'm working on a collaborative project that is going to pull myself and a few other of my fellow 'invisibles' into the foreground. If only for a few moments. There's too much talent around to go unnoticed and unrealized. At least that's how I feel about it.

More as it happens.

The 'O' stands for nothing...

2008-02-05T12:42:00.000-05:00

If I thought for a second anybody was actually reading this I'd update more often. Maybe I will anyway, but regardless, I read this article by Jeremy Smith today on www.chud.com. As a comment on how the public (as opposed to dysfunctional cineastes like myself) appreciate film, the piece struck me as incisive and timely. But maybe that's because I don't read other peoples' blogs.

"We're not commenting anymore; we're reinventing our populist masterpieces with a corporate mindset. And it's not about thrilling, but suckering. Hitchcock needed word of mouth; today's filmmakers just need an opening weekend."

http://chud.com/articles/articles/13485/1/FOR-NO-GOOD-REASON-ROGER-O-THORNHILL-YET-LIVES/Page1.html

CONTROL: or How Can You Lose Something That You Never Had In The First Place?

2007-10-28T14:21:00.000-04:00

At best I'm ambivalent about the whole blog culture, the unnecessary compulsion to confess/opine/drivel on about this and that to an audience that is both invisible and probably non-existent. I'm already bored with this blog, because what I've been writing has that almost desperate "me too" kind of feel to it. Who cares what I think about movies anyway? It's not connecting to anything in my life anyway, except for the experiences that revolve around sitting in darkened rooms with a couple of hundred strangers. I'm not a critic. I'm not even a critical observer, or haven't been lately. If you want to call it an epiphany, be my guest, but that was the thought that presented itself to me this week.

I've been participating in a Directors' workshop this month, a harrowing group activity where I and other directing hopefuls workshop scenes together under the instructive gaze of Adrienne Weiss. After a director gives their performance, the kangeroo court is in session, and all and sundry give their feedback about the process, the delivery, and the overall impact on the audience. Except that my feedback always sucks, is rarely inciteful, and is often drawn out of me out of necessity, rather than real desire to contribute. I'm the one who says "well I enjoyed such-and-such doing this with that line" or "I enjoy so-and-so's take on this character" etc. It's more painful than I can set down here.

But the reason for this is the same as the reason for these indifferent and irrelevent blogs about movies I kind-of liked but sort-of didn't like. I miss, and apparently still cling to, the childlike experience of just enjoying a movie because someone put it out there for me to see. I pay my $10 (or whatever) and base my judgement on how much of a sucker this movie takes me for. Beyond that I'm ready to be entertained, and it takes a pretty bad movie to vent my ire.

So, in the context of the Directors' Workshop, I'm committed to change. All well and good. But how does that reflect itself in the everyday? Am I going to turn into one of those technically aware bores that I despise seeing movies with? (I mean, granted, "3:10 to Yuma" is not an amazing, nor relevent, nor even necessary film, but I enjoyed it for all of that. It was a refreshing change from the relentlessly predicatable and generally hateful movies I've seen lately)

Who knows, but I guess I'll find out...

Originally I'd intended this entry to be about how this blog wasn't just about movies I felt compelled to apologize for or defend, and that I could write unnecessary reviews about movies I disliked too. Which brings us to "Control", Anton Corbijn's feature debut based on the last few years of Ian Curtis' life, specifically his marriage and his experience in the band Joy Division. Now with the onset of the British Independent Film Awards loading the nominations with this film for multiple categories, I can't hold my tongue any longer.

It's not a good film. Pure and simple.

It's not a terribly BAD film, either, but regardless it is a minor work brought to the screen by a noted stills photographer and music video director, who brings the same sense of superficiality to this more 'significant' work. It is as vaccuous as Corbijn's portraits of U2 for the Joshua Tree album, with rich, resonant images of stioc, majestic popsterism captured in the deeply textured grayscale of gritty 35mm. For sure, Corbijn squeezes every ounce of exposure latitude out of every frame, but in the effort to capture what? There's just no story here.

Okay, is it a love story? Well, not particularly. While the set up for the relationship between Curtis and his wife-to-be Deborah is touching, economic, and effective, once the marriage is in full swing, all we get are landmarks, and tritely displayed at that. It becomes like a coach tour of Italy - some of the sights, but none of the flavor or personalization. Where he should have referenced the very book this film was supposedly adapted from ("Touching From a Distance", Deborah's account of her relationship with Curtis and subsequently with Joy Division), Corbijn retreats to a safe distance and paints the picture with the broadest, most clumsily obvious of strokes. I have nothing but contempt for the tacky obviousness with which the score swells with "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and exactly the most painfully obvious and unrewarding moment of the film. Better to have never used the song again - I mean, how many people seeing this film HAVEN'T heard this song before?

So is it a biopic of an artist as musician and collaborator? Not even close. Embarassingly, Michael Winterbottom's interpretation of the same events, constituting the first half of "Twenty-Four Hour Party People" has more insight, simple information, and dramatic weight than the entire telling encompassed by 'Control'. And that was intended to be a satire, a cartoon. And it was half a movie. There's no sense of his relationship to the other band-members, there's no sense of how the music was created, nor how the dynamic within the band made these creative choices inevitable. Curtis is aloof and above all of this in 'Control', like it doesn't matter. And yet we're clearly supposed to believe that it does.

The greatest crime for a film that is supposedly adapted from an account by one of the central characters, is that Deborah is robbed of a voice in this film. In fact, there are only two female characters that have speaking parts - Deborah and Curtis' mistress Annik - and neither have ANYTHING to say of any material benefit to the story. The emotional presence of women have been sucked out of the universe Curtis inhabits in this film. This robs the narrative of any meaningful insight, because he never has anything to challenge his world view, not even the acknowledgement of the existence of another outside of his own. The audience is invited to accept his take on the world at face value (and given that this can only be an interpretation of Curtis' life up until his final moments, we're really talking about Corbijn's view of Curtis' world) and never question his artistic right to shit on everyone around him for no better reason than his vanity and his lack of vision.

So what we have then is a music video about a superficial interpretation of some selfish arsehole's life, leading up to his melodramatic suicide in the kitchen of a semi-detached in Manchester on the eve of his greatest success. Like the act itself, the film is self-involved, near-sighted, and ulitmately worthless. Using a man's life as a visual framework to play some great music over doesn't sound like such a terrible idea, but there's so little life in this film that the music itself often feels trite and innappropriate, and THAT, I'm afraid, is a crime I cannot forgive.

An absolute miss. Don't give these people your money.

Brian de Palma's righteous retread

2007-10-13T12:23:00.000-04:00

I'm one of those hopeful romantics when it comes to Brian de Palma. Like Terry Gilliam, he has underdog cache and a track record of some noteable hits amongst his bloated misses that still fuel my optimism with every new film. I really liked 'Black Dahlia', and so, with cautious enthusiam, I bought my ticket for his New York Film Festival screening of 'Redacted' last Thursday.

'Redacted' is a competently told story about troops on the ground in Iraq, numbed by the daily grind, who incite a number of violent acts and are victim to exponential retribution from the locals. That's the plot, but what the film is actually about is how the news media and communication technology in general has merged with the act of war to the extent that the passive audience is as culpable as the soldiers in the field. Passivity is condemned, but positive action is futile.

While that theme is not so terrible in itself, I was viewing 'Redacted' in the context of having recently subjected myself to Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" (1997). Rendered with all the subtlety of a ransom note, 'Games' is an obnoxiously smug rumination on the audience's guilt by association with violence as depicted in film (and presumably, by extension, in other media). The film is weighed down by its own belligerent arrogance, and by a moral self-righteousness that is utterly counter-productive. Haneke here is a filmmaker on the offensive, with the audience as the object of his contempt.

De Palma, on the other hand, is more interested in the characters in his story (not to mention the actors portraying them), and with the new communication technologies that permeate the world so very distant from that of the first telling of this combat rape story, his Vietnam centered 'Casualties of War' (1989). As one of the weaker aspects of the story, de Palma's use of the internet (news media video streaming, insurgent snuff movies, YouTube diatribe from self-righteous teenager) is a brute-force insertion of contextual information that doesn't always add to the core narrative. Without the window dressing, 'Redacted' is not so much an inspired re-interpretation of his Vietnam text, but a digitally re-packaged rehash of old, familiar material. Worse, the horrific events portrayed in the film never resonated more than they shocked. The fact that the troops themselves are at best 'archetypal' and at worst, ethnic stereotypes (and I consider good-old-boys from the mid-west an ethnic minority), brings nothing new to the scenario. The audience is instead encouraged to make cozy assumptions about how soldiers who lack formal education and economic opportunity are the cause of aggravated sexual assault and pre-meditated murder in foreign territories.

Regardless, the audience's patience is rewarded by a brutal closing montage of Iraqi civilian war casualties, themselves redacted (allegedly because of legal panic from the executive producers at 2929 - see the YouTube clip and decide for yourself if this is honest disagreement or viral marketing at its most insidious). Except for the final image - the teenage girl whose rape and murder is the centerpiece of the film. The censored pictures leading up to this aggressively placed and beautifully photographed fresh corpse is nothing short of assault on the audience. On that level it's a very effective film.

But as sensational and trite as de Palma might be considered as a storyteller, he is not the self-righteous goon Haneke is. De Palma sincerely wants you to feel the same outrage he does, and, in this allegedly censored version he himself decries, that very shock and outrage could not possibly be more effectively communicated.

Blade Runner 2007: More Human Than Human

2007-09-30T11:53:00.000-04:00

So what exactly is new in the latest release of "Blade Runner"?

Well, not a whole lot.

I'm not really interested in sparking yet another debate about whether directors should go back to their films decades later for a nip and a tuck. There are examples of when this kind of behavior was a bad, or at least an unnecessary, idea ("Star Wars," "E.T. The Extraterrestrial," "Apocalypse Now"), just as there are examples of when it was a really good idea ("THX:1138"). "Blade Runner", however, is unique in that at the time of its original release it was considered a critical and financial failure, and yet over the years has accumulated such a loyal fan base that the expectations for a new, remastered, "definitive" release are incredibly high.

But after seeing the film at the Rose Theater last night I don't believe Ridley Scott had any intention of meeting those expectations. What we saw last night was not a grand Coppola-esque reimagining of the original narrative material, or even the digital retooling of antique visual effects that Lucas executed on his blockbuster trilogy. All Scott has done with "Blade Runner" is one hell of a final polish, leaving the original material basically alone. Douglas Trumbell's visual effects, for example, are unaltered, but remastered digitally with dazzling clarity. (Nothing makes me wish people still worked with optical effects more than this film, and this is no less true in this version)

The real technical achievements appear in aspects of the film that first-time viewers would never notice, but that are the kind of details that will make people who are familiar with the existing iterations of this movie sit up. You don't get new flying car or cityscape shots, or the inclusion of previously deleted scenes, or even alternate cuts of existing scenes. What you do get is arguably a perfect version of Ridley Scott's 1982 film, and another chance to experience the story with a fresh eye and a new context.

The biggest surprise, and perhaps the greatest revelation of the entire evening for me, was that, for all the hype, this is still a great movie.

So maybe it wasn't all hype after all.

Go Go Pundit Power...

2007-09-25T12:56:00.000-04:00

The power of dogmatically-delivered opinion should never be underestimated. Forbes has compiled a list of the television pundits who have "the most influence by appealing to those most sought after by advertisers." And guess who comes out on top. The hardest working opinion-maker in the business - Roger Ebert.

Bless you, big man.