list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Old Joy on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Old_Joy/277115/default.aspx Title: Old Joy
Year: 2006
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Plot: Old Joy is writer/director Kelly Reichardt's long-awaited follow-up to her revered but underseen 1994 feature debut, River of Grass. (She directed a couple of shorts in the interim, including Ode, a Super-8 film inspired by the song "Ode to Bill.") Daniel London and cult folksinger Will Oldham star in the film as two old friends who go on a camping trip to a hot springs in the Cascade mountain range of Oregon. London's Mark is the responsible one with the modest house, the wife (who resents his gallivanting off), the dog (who comes along), and the baby on the way. He listens to Air America, and makes all the right liberal noises. Oldham's Kurt is the free-spirit type with the untamed facial hair and the junker car that looks more lived-in than vehicular. Kurt suggests the trip, and they take Mark's car. Kurt has the directions to the place, and they get lost ("I think we're somewhere...in the area") and spend the night at a garbage-strewn campsite, where they discuss their lives, and Kurt laments the apparent dissolution of their friendship. In the morning, they have breakfast in a diner, and Mark apologizes to Tanya (Tanya Smith) over the phone, explaining that he'll be home later than expected. In the daylight, they find the hot springs, and spend the afternoon quietly unwinding. Reichardt co-wrote Old Joy with Jonathan Raymond, adapting his short story, which was originally written as a collaboration with photographer Justine Kurland. It was shot (on Super-16) by Peter Sillen and features a soundtrack by Yo La Tengo. The film was selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art for inclusion in the 2006 edition of New Directors/New Films. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 3
Number of Lists: 10
Number of blog posts: 14
Number of discussion threads: 1
SpoutRating: 3
]]>Fri, 15 May 2009 02:00:30 GMTOld Joy2006Kelly ReichardtOld Joy is writer/director Kelly Reichardt's long-awaited follow-up to her revered but underseen 1994 feature debut, <a href=/films/118780/default.aspx style='text-decoration:underline'>River of Grass</a>. (She directed a couple of shorts in the interim, including <a href=/films/294310/default.aspx style='text-decoration:underline'>Ode</a>, a Super-8 film inspired by the song "Ode to Bill.") Daniel London and cult folksinger Will Oldham star in the film as two old friends who go on a camping trip to a hot springs in the Cascade mountain range of Oregon. London's Mark is the responsible one with the modest house, the wife (who resents his gallivanting off), the dog (who comes along), and the baby on the way. He listens to Air America, and makes all the right liberal noises. Oldham's Kurt is the free-spirit type with the untamed facial hair and the junker car that looks more lived-in than vehicular. Kurt suggests the trip, and they take Mark's car. Kurt has the directions to the place, and they get lost ("I think we're somewhere...in the area") and spend the night at a garbage-strewn campsite, where they discuss their lives, and Kurt laments the apparent dissolution of their friendship. In the morning, they have breakfast in a diner, and Mark apologizes to Tanya (Tanya Smith) over the phone, explaining that he'll be home later than expected. In the daylight, they find the hot springs, and spend the afternoon quietly unwinding. Reichardt co-wrote Old Joy with Jonathan Raymond, adapting his short story, which was originally written as a collaboration with photographer Justine Kurland. It was shot (on Super-16) by Peter Sillen and features a soundtrack by Yo La Tengo. The film was selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art for inclusion in the 2006 edition of New Directors/New Films. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide3Slightly Tagged (1-5)101413http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s277115.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Old_Joy/277115/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/groups/Weekly_Theme/Re_Weekly_Theme_for_May_11_Camping/625/42279/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: joem18b
Post To: Weekly Theme
Post Date: 5/14/2009 10:00:30 PM
Body: When i watched Old Joy, i didn't know that it was a mumblecore movie (made by Kelly Reichardt, who just did Wendy and Lucy). Low budget, two guys out in the woods - I kept waiting for the broken leg or crazy mountain person or whatever. But no, just an excellent character study. The great thing about Sleepaway Camp is that there are 5 sequels, probably with more to come.
]]>Fri, 15 May 2009 02:00:30 GMTjoem18bWeekly Theme5/14/2009 10:00:30 PMWhen i watched Old Joy, i didn't know that it was a mumblecore movie (made by Kelly Reichardt, who just did Wendy and Lucy). Low budget, two guys out in the woods - I kept waiting for the broken leg or crazy mountain person or whatever. But no, just an excellent character study. The great thing about Sleepaway Camp is that there are 5 sequels, probably with more to come. http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/12/9/38135.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 12/9/2008 2:01:13 PM
Body: Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to the much-acclaimed Old Joy, stars Michelle Williams as Wendy, a young woman traveling across the continent in search of a canning job in Alaska. Wendy has little to her name but a car, some pocket money and Lucy, her dog. When problems arise with one pole on that trinity, the others follow, as Reichardt takes us through an intimate procedural examination of how quickly a life can unravel when balanced on a precipice. With Wendy and Lucy opening in New York tomorrow, I sat down with Riechardt to discuss Michelle Williams’ desire for invisibility, smashing the indie film glass cieling, and the “ever-evolving American Dream.” Karina: I saw the movie in Cannes, and obviously every month it seems like a movie about economic despair is becoming more and more relevant. Kelly: Give it a week. Karina: [laughs] When you think about some of these economic problems, so many of them seem to stem from people being in denial, and just sort of a general unwillingness to talk about the how the way that we live has consequences. Kelly: Yeah. The consequences are like the guy who got trampled at the Wal-Mart. Karina: Yeah. So when you think about getting the film out there, what audience are you hoping it will speak to? Kelly: I don’t really have a plan for the audience, just questions. Like, are we related and do we owe each other anything? Are we supposed to take care of each other to any degree? And we know we’re connected. Because I didn’t run up my credit card, and now my 401K is disappearing. So, we’re clearly connected. I guess, it’s just that question of are strangers… Are we supposed to do anything for each other, or is it each man for himself? What is the American Dream? Karina: Do you think that the American Dream is something that even exists anymore? This idea of being able to go West, and if you work hard enough you’ll be fine? Kelly: I think it’s an ever-evolving thing. I once heard a show about this guy who coined the phrase “The American Dream.” Do you know who he is? Karina: No. I’ll look him up. [Ed: it's this guy] Kelly: Yeah. I need to look him up. Because I believe that what it was all about was that it was like a frontier kind of idea. And the American Dream at that time was, let’s say it was a really harsh winter, but my crop survived. Your crop died, but my crop is enough to feed both of us. That was the American Dream. But, that guy never foresaw class. Like he didn’t imagine that there would be class divides in this country. He didn’t anticipate that there would be such a vast divide. I guess that the idea of the American Dream is an evolving thing, or devolving thing. Has it really just come to my TV is bigger than your TV? What is it? What do we want this country to be - the great experiment? What’s it supposed to be? We just lived through such incredibly dark days. And even though the economy’s crashing now, there is like at least there’s hope. We’re living in the days of hope. [laughs] Karina: Just because of Obama? Kelly: I think, he is redefining - he talks about us being connected. He doesn’t talk about poverty a lot, I’ll admit that. But, just to change the conversation from something other than, “Go out and shop.” Or to give the impression that opportunity is just at everybody’s feet and all you have to do is bend down and lift it up. You know, it’s not the same for someone who grows up with an education to someone who doesn’t. At least he’s more aware of that. To not have a total elitist asshole running the country, I think will be somewhat better. Karina: It should be interesting. Kelly: Yeah. It’s already so interesting. Karina: To make a really smooth segue here, talking about class…you’ve got a movie star in your movie, which is unusual for a film that was made with so little money, on such a small scale. How did Michelle get involved, and were you thinking of her when you started planning this idea? Kelly: Not when I was first planning it. We were always talking about her as an example, but I didn’t think we would get her in the movie. Karina: What was interesting about her? Kelly: I would like to say that I was somehow out ahead of the curve, but I don’t think I was. I saw “Brokeback Mountain” like everyone else and I thought, “Who the fuck is she? She’s really great.” She blew my mind. And then, I went back and looked at all her films. I remember I went and met Todd Haynes right after I saw Brokeback Mountain. We were both like, “Ooh…” I said, “Every filmmaker is at a table right now talking about that.” And then, he worked with her in “I’m Not There,” and became friends with Heath. And he was just like, “You shouldn’t count her out. Let me give her the script. I think, she’d be great for it, and I think she’s up for something like this.” And we had other mutual friends. We had Kim Gordon in common, and anther one of my producers, Phil Morrison. We had people in each others’ worlds. And she saw Old Joy and liked the space the actors had to work. And really, she was just looking to do something outside of L.A. or New York. She said she was really drawn to the idea of playing a character who feels really invisible, which was really different from how she was feeling, so watched. No one recognized Michelle when we were shooting. She looked really different and she was just really on the low down. Karina: I had a conversation with a friend the other day actually about the way she looks in the movie. His theory is that she’s basically gender neutral. That was really different from the way I read the movie. There’s obviously the scene where it seems like there’s a threat to her, but I wonder if watching it, I imposed what I would feel, as a woman in those situations, on the character. Is it relevant to you that she’s a woman, and so she’s in a different kind of danger? Kelly: She is in a different kind of danger, I mean, like just going out and conquering the West and going up to work in the canneries. All those gutter punk kids who are in the beginning of the film…the girls, I don’t know that they travel alone too much, but there are like some really petite, beautiful girls, and they seem way more vulnerable to me than the guys. They all seem vulnerable just because of the way those kids live. They’re all over the country and they live really off the grid and just travel around on the trains. It seems crazy. But, when you see a woman doing it you just say, “Wow, she is more vulnerable.” Karina: Talking about this film in short hand people have called it a story about a girl and her dog. Kelly: Yeah, and I think the dog gives her some kind of false sense of security. Which, I travel around the country all the time with her and it does. Like I’ll stay places I wouldn’t stay alone because I have Lucy. But Lucy, she wouldn’t really help out. [laughs] She’d be like no help at all. But yeah… Plus, people in their 20s do a lot of crazy shit, you know? They just do. Did, I did. People do. Karina: So, are any of the situations autobiographical? Kelly: No, no. Only that I travel with her a lot. No, I mean, I’ve lived in New York for five years without an apartment, couch hopping. But, I was never in her situation. I’ve been really broke, but I’ve always had more of a social net than she did. And she just doesn’t really have the social skills, so she doesn’t have a community of friends. I mean, even the gutter punk kids have a community of friends and that she doesn’t have. Karina: Right. It seems some of her interactions are so tentative. And obviously, in her situation, it wouldn’t be safe for her to trust everyone, but there’s a question with everybody that she meets of what is this relationship going to be like. Kelly: Yeah. Michelle and I were designing her to be just someone who’s really narrowly focused on the task in front of her. So, she’s not taking in a lot of what’s happening around her. She’s just like her whole life is just a to do list. She’s trying to manage something. And she just has a narrow scope because a broader scope would just sort of be overwhelming, to look at her situation in a bigger sense. Karina: I want to talk a little bit about the indie film world in general right now. You went to Sundance with a feature in the mid-90s, and then came back again with Old Joy in 2006. Do you see any major differences, with the way something like Sundance has changed? Kelly: I don’t feel like I have a handle on the independent film scene. You know, I’m in my forties and I teach for a living. I get interviewed all the time and it’s always like, “Is this film going to help you make it?” I’m not 20. I’m interested in making small films with people that I know in sort of private ways, and I really like teaching. Like Old Joy, we didn’t even know if there was going to be a feature, it was just an art project to go off and do a film. And that’s sort of what my film making had become was very small and private and it’s just that that one was shot on Super 16. I’ve been going to festivals during all that time with my shorter films. It’s just that they were more avant-garde and there isn’t all those pressures and there’s no work to do because no one’s interviewing you. So, you just go travel and see places and you’re sort of so off the grid that you just have the pleasure of going and hanging out and seeing movies. Like now, I’m going to festivals and I don’t see the films. So, it’s much more work. But I mean, I just don’t approach it like somehow I’m going to like…I just don’t buy into the whole myth. One of my best film making experiences and life experiences was making a 50-minute, Super8 film, Ode. I made that, I shot with a friend and we made it with two actors. I couldn’t even get any more out of filmmaking than I got out of that experience. Old Joy is probably the next closest thing to that. So, it’s about, for me the goal is like, how can I set up the next experience so that it’s one that’s interesting and challenging? And make a good film and get better as a film maker. But I don’t think that these films are supposed to be getting me somewhere.You know? I find life interesting and I like my life. So, I guess, I don’t go to the festivals with those expectations. I’m certainly here talking to you and doing the work I can do to help Oscilloscope get my film out because it’s great that the Film Forum wants to show it and it’s nice for it to be seen. Karina: My impression of your filmmaking is that you don’t see one film as a stepping stone to something bigger. Kelly: No. Karina: Which makes you very different from many other filmmakers at a place like Sundance or Cannes. Kelly: It’s all just life experience, you know? And trying to become a better filmmaker to become a better filmmaker to become a better teacher. And be a better teacher and learn in teaching how to become a better filmmaker so that the films are good. But, I think, they’re for small audiences. You know, I can look at some men and say, “Well, that looks like a good career.” Karina: Like who? Kelly: You know, Jim Jarmusch gets to live up in the woods and make a film every X amount of years. I don’t know any of the details of his life, this is all superficial. Or, I mean, Todd Haynes still kills himself to make films but you know, he has a beautiful life in Portland and he makes his films with people he likes. Or Gus Van Sant. There aren’t female examples of that. There aren’t women that have the life of where they’re making the films that they want to make that are personal films, and that’s their life and they can also buy a house. Karina: Why do you think that is? Kelly: I think, for the next generation of women behind me that that will be the case, but…It’s certainly better now than when I made “River of Grass.” The door didn’t seem open at all for all those years. Karina: Was it easier to get money and everything for Wendy than it was for Old Joy? Kelly:  Old Joy I made with my own money and it was shot for almost nothing. Then, after I had a cut of it and got into Sundance, I got the finishing funds. Then that same investor gave me money for this movie. I feel for me personally that I’ve found a way. You know, I want to be able to keep making films and the budget should just be whatever it has to be to get it done. The payoff of not having money is that nobody touches your film. Nobody reads my scripts. Nobody that I don’t want to. Nobody looks at cuts of my movies or tells me, “Time’s up, we have to be ready for a festival.” It’s all just integrated into my life. It’s just that I think that it’s OK to be connected to that big black hole of work and that it gives you information for what you’re making films about. But, I do think, at a point, there will be women that have the careers that men have. Karina: Would you give any advice to girls who are maybe in film school right now who look at your work and wonder, “How is she able to do this so independently?” Kelly: Have a day job. Karina: Really? Kelly: Yeah. So that you don’t have all your eggs in having to make a career off films - because these films don’t really make anybody any money. But, I also don’t have this expectation that I should be able to live off it. I don’t necessarily think everyone gets to live off their art and that that is a given. And at the same time, there is the story going on that women don’t have the same opportunities as men and that’s true. But, it is certainly better than when I made River of Grass. But then, I tell any film students to study other things so that you can be an informed maker. And you know, I think what happens to a lot of women in film school is they end up becoming producers because there’s so many fewer of them in the classes that they get herded into just working on guys projects and being the organizers. I mean, that was certainly how it was when I taught at NYU. But, at Bard, it’s an environment that’s all very nurturing I’d say to women, so it’s quite nice. Karina: But, in a way, you’re able to teach because you make art. So, you are in a way making a living off your art. Kelly: Yes. Completely true. I had my eye on Bard for a long time and I didn’t get to Bard until I made Old Joy. I’m completely undereducated to be teaching - as far as academia goes. Karina: But, people want to learn from you because you’ve made these films. Kelly: Yeah. It’s complicated, because it’s hard to talk about it and not sound like… Because I do feel like I’ve been really lucky. The time in between when I wasn’t making films, it’s not like I never had any bitter moment about it. But, that was really a time where I learned how to make films. No one was watching and I went back to Super8 and I could just really figure things out. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:01:13 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog12/9/2008 2:01:13 PM Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to the much-acclaimed Old Joy, stars Michelle Williams as Wendy, a young woman traveling across the continent in search of a canning job in Alaska. Wendy has little to her name but a car, some pocket money and Lucy, her dog. When problems arise with one pole on that trinity, the others follow, as Reichardt takes us through an intimate procedural examination of how quickly a life can unravel when balanced on a precipice. With Wendy and Lucy opening in New York tomorrow, I sat down with Riechardt to discuss Michelle Williams’ desire for invisibility, smashing the indie film glass cieling, and the “ever-evolving American Dream.” Karina: I saw the movie in Cannes, and obviously every month it seems like a movie about economic despair is becoming more and more relevant. Kelly: Give it a week. Karina: [laughs] When you think about some of these economic problems, so many of them seem to stem from people being in denial, and just sort of a general unwillingness to talk about the how the way that we live has consequences. Kelly: Yeah. The consequences are like the guy who got trampled at the Wal-Mart. Karina: Yeah. So when you think about getting the film out there, what audience are you hoping it will speak to? Kelly: I don’t really have a plan for the audience, just questions. Like, are we related and do we owe each other anything? Are we supposed to take care of each other to any degree? And we know we’re connected. Because I didn’t run up my credit card, and now my 401K is disappearing. So, we’re clearly connected. I guess, it’s just that question of are strangers… Are we supposed to do anything for each other, or is it each man for himself? What is the American Dream? Karina: Do you think that the American Dream is something that even exists anymore? This idea of being able to go West, and if you work hard enough you’ll be fine? Kelly: I think it’s an ever-evolving thing. I once heard a show about this guy who coined the phrase “The American Dream.” Do you know who he is? Karina: No. I’ll look him up. [Ed: it's this guy] Kelly: Yeah. I need to look him up. Because I believe that what it was all about was that it was like a frontier kind of idea. And the American Dream at that time was, let’s say it was a really harsh winter, but my crop survived. Your crop died, but my crop is enough to feed both of us. That was the American Dream. But, that guy never foresaw class. Like he didn’t imagine that there would be class divides in this country. He didn’t anticipate that there would be such a vast divide. I guess that the idea of the American Dream is an evolving thing, or devolving thing. Has it really just come to my TV is bigger than your TV? What is it? What do we want this country to be - the great experiment? What’s it supposed to be? We just lived through such incredibly dark days. And even though the economy’s crashing now, there is like at least there’s hope. We’re living in the days of hope. [laughs] Karina: Just because of Obama? Kelly: I think, he is redefining - he talks about us being connected. He doesn’t talk about poverty a lot, I’ll admit that. But, just to change the conversation from something other than, “Go out and shop.” Or to give the impression that opportunity is just at everybody’s feet and all you have to do is bend down and lift it up. You know, it’s not the same for someone who grows up with an education to someone who doesn’t. At least he’s more aware of that. To not have a total elitist asshole running the country, I think will be somewhat better. Karina: It should be interesting. Kelly: Yeah. It’s already so interesting. Karina: To make a really smooth segue here, talking about class…you’ve got a movie star in your movie, which is unusual for a film that was made with so little money, on such a small scale. How did Michelle get involved, and were you thinking of her when you started planning this idea? Kelly: Not when I was first planning it. We were always talking about her as an example, but I didn’t think we would get her in the movie. Karina: What was interesting about her? Kelly: I would like to say that I was somehow out ahead of the curve, but I don’t think I was. I saw “Brokeback Mountain” like everyone else and I thought, “Who the fuck is she? She’s really great.” She blew my mind. And then, I went back and looked at all her films. I remember I went and met Todd Haynes right after I saw Brokeback Mountain. We were both like, “Ooh…” I said, “Every filmmaker is at a table right now talking about that.” And then, he worked with her in “I’m Not There,” and became friends with Heath. And he was just like, “You shouldn’t count her out. Let me give her the script. I think, she’d be great for it, and I think she’s up for something like this.” And we had other mutual friends. We had Kim Gordon in common, and anther one of my producers, Phil Morrison. We had people in each others’ worlds. And she saw Old Joy and liked the space the actors had to work. And really, she was just looking to do something outside of L.A. or New York. She said she was really drawn to the idea of playing a character who feels really invisible, which was really different from how she was feeling, so watched. No one recognized Michelle when we were shooting. She looked really different and she was just really on the low down. Karina: I had a conversation with a friend the other day actually about the way she looks in the movie. His theory is that she’s basically gender neutral. That was really different from the way I read the movie. There’s obviously the scene where it seems like there’s a threat to her, but I wonder if watching it, I imposed what I would feel, as a woman in those situations, on the character. Is it relevant to you that she’s a woman, and so she’s in a different kind of danger? Kelly: She is in a different kind of danger, I mean, like just going out and conquering the West and going up to work in the canneries. All those gutter punk kids who are in the beginning of the film…the girls, I don’t know that they travel alone too much, but there are like some really petite, beautiful girls, and they seem way more vulnerable to me than the guys. They all seem vulnerable just because of the way those kids live. They’re all over the country and they live really off the grid and just travel around on the trains. It seems crazy. But, when you see a woman doing it you just say, “Wow, she is more vulnerable.” Karina: Talking about this film in short hand people have called it a story about a girl and her dog. Kelly: Yeah, and I think the dog gives her some kind of false sense of security. Which, I travel around the country all the time with her and it does. Like I’ll stay places I wouldn’t stay alone because I have Lucy. But Lucy, she wouldn’t really help out. [laughs] She’d be like no help at all. But yeah… Plus, people in their 20s do a lot of crazy shit, you know? They just do. Did, I did. People do. Karina: So, are any of the situations autobiographical? Kelly: No, no. Only that I travel with her a lot. No, I mean, I’ve lived in New York for five years without an apartment, couch hopping. But, I was never in her situation. I’ve been really broke, but I’ve always had more of a social net than she did. And she just doesn’t really have the social skills, so she doesn’t have a community of friends. I mean, even the gutter punk kids have a community of friends and that she doesn’t have. Karina: Right. It seems some of her interactions are so tentative. And obviously, in her situation, it wouldn’t be safe for her to trust everyone, but there’s a question with everybody that she meets of what is this relationship going to be like. Kelly: Yeah. Michelle and I were designing her to be just someone who’s really narrowly focused on the task in front of her. So, she’s not taking in a lot of what’s happening around her. She’s just like her whole life is just a to do list. She’s trying to manage something. And she just has a narrow scope because a broader scope would just sort of be overwhelming, to look at her situation in a bigger sense. Karina: I want to talk a little bit about the indie film world in general right now. You went to Sundance with a feature in the mid-90s, and then came back again with Old Joy in 2006. Do you see any major differences, with the way something like Sundance has changed? Kelly: I don’t feel like I have a handle on the independent film scene. You know, I’m in my forties and I teach for a living. I get interviewed all the time and it’s always like, “Is this film going to help you make it?” I’m not 20. I’m interested in making small films with people that I know in sort of private ways, and I really like teaching. Like Old Joy, we didn’t even know if there was going to be a feature, it was just an art project to go off and do a film. And that’s sort of what my film making had become was very small and private and it’s just that that one was shot on Super 16. I’ve been going to festivals during all that time with my shorter films. It’s just that they were more avant-garde and there isn’t all those pressures and there’s no work to do because no one’s interviewing you. So, you just go travel and see places and you’re sort of so off the grid that you just have the pleasure of going and hanging out and seeing movies. Like now, I’m going to festivals and I don’t see the films. So, it’s much more work. But I mean, I just don’t approach it like somehow I’m going to like…I just don’t buy into the whole myth. One of my best film making experiences and life experiences was making a 50-minute, Super8 film, Ode. I made that, I shot with a friend and we made it with two actors. I couldn’t even get any more out of filmmaking than I got out of that experience. Old Joy is probably the next closest thing to that. So, it’s about, for me the goal is like, how can I set up the next experience so that it’s one that’s interesting and challenging? And make a good film and get better as a film maker. But I don’t think that these films are supposed to be getting me somewhere.You know? I find life interesting and I like my life. So, I guess, I don’t go to the festivals with those expectations. I’m certainly here talking to you and doing the work I can do to help Oscilloscope get my film out because it’s great that the Film Forum wants to show it and it’s nice for it to be seen. Karina: My impression of your filmmaking is that you don’t see one film as a stepping stone to something bigger. Kelly: No. Karina: Which makes you very different from many other filmmakers at a place like Sundance or Cannes. Kelly: It’s all just life experience, you know? And trying to become a better filmmaker to become a better filmmaker to become a better teacher. And be a better teacher and learn in teaching how to become a better filmmaker so that the films are good. But, I think, they’re for small audiences. You know, I can look at some men and say, “Well, that looks like a good career.” Karina: Like who? Kelly: You know, Jim Jarmusch gets to live up in the woods and make a film every X amount of years. I don’t know any of the details of his life, this is all superficial. Or, I mean, Todd Haynes still kills himself to make films but you know, he has a beautiful life in Portland and he makes his films with people he likes. Or Gus Van Sant. There aren’t female examples of that. There aren’t women that have the life of where they’re making the films that they want to make that are personal films, and that’s their life and they can also buy a house. Karina: Why do you think that is? Kelly: I think, for the next generation of women behind me that that will be the case, but…It’s certainly better now than when I made “River of Grass.” The door didn’t seem open at all for all those years. Karina: Was it easier to get money and everything for Wendy than it was for Old Joy? Kelly:  Old Joy I made with my own money and it was shot for almost nothing. Then, after I had a cut of it and got into Sundance, I got the finishing funds. Then that same investor gave me money for this movie. I feel for me personally that I’ve found a way. You know, I want to be able to keep making films and the budget should just be whatever it has to be to get it done. The payoff of not having money is that nobody touches your film. Nobody reads my scripts. Nobody that I don’t want to. Nobody looks at cuts of my movies or tells me, “Time’s up, we have to be ready for a festival.” It’s all just integrated into my life. It’s just that I think that it’s OK to be connected to that big black hole of work and that it gives you information for what you’re making films about. But, I do think, at a point, there will be women that have the careers that men have. Karina: Would you give any advice to girls who are maybe in film school right now who look at your work and wonder, “How is she able to do this so independently?” Kelly: Have a day job. Karina: Really? Kelly: Yeah. So that you don’t have all your eggs in having to make a career off films - because these films don’t really make anybody any money. But, I also don’t have this expectation that I should be able to live off it. I don’t necessarily think everyone gets to live off their art and that that is a given. And at the same time, there is the story going on that women don’t have the same opportunities as men and that’s true. But, it is certainly better than when I made River of Grass. But then, I tell any film students to study other things so that you can be an informed maker. And you know, I think what happens to a lot of women in film school is they end up becoming producers because there’s so many fewer of them in the classes that they get herded into just working on guys projects and being the organizers. I mean, that was certainly how it was when I taught at NYU. But, at Bard, it’s an environment that’s all very nurturing I’d say to women, so it’s quite nice. Karina: But, in a way, you’re able to teach because you make art. So, you are in a way making a living off your art. Kelly: Yes. Completely true. I had my eye on Bard for a long time and I didn’t get to Bard until I made Old Joy. I’m completely undereducated to be teaching - as far as academia goes. Karina: But, people want to learn from you because you’ve made these films. Kelly: Yeah. It’s complicated, because it’s hard to talk about it and not sound like… Because I do feel like I’ve been really lucky. The time in between when I wasn’t making films, it’s not like I never had any bitter moment about it. But, that was really a time where I learned how to make films. No one was watching and I went back to Super8 and I could just really figure things out. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/12/9/38134.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 12/9/2008 2:00:57 PM
Body: Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to the much-acclaimed Old Joy, stars Michelle Williams as Wendy, a young woman traveling across the continent in search of a canning job in Alaska. Wendy has little to her name but a car, some pocket money and Lucy, her dog. When problems arise with one pole on that trinity, the others follow, as Reichardt takes us through an intimate procedural examination of how quickly a life can unravel when balanced on a precipice. With Wendy and Lucy opening in New York tomorrow, I sat down with Riechardt to discuss Michelle Williams’ desire for invisibility, smashing the indie film glass cieling, and the “ever-evolving American Dream.” Karina: I saw the movie in Cannes, and obviously every month it seems like a movie about economic despair is becoming more and more relevant. Kelly: Give it a week. Karina: [laughs] When you think about some of these economic problems, so many of them seem to stem from people being in denial, and just sort of a general unwillingness to talk about the how the way that we live has consequences. Kelly: Yeah. The consequences are like the guy who got trampled at the Wal-Mart. Karina: Yeah. So when you think about getting the film out there, what audience are you hoping it will speak to? Kelly: I don’t really have a plan for the audience, just questions. Like, are we related and do we owe each other anything? Are we supposed to take care of each other to any degree? And we know we’re connected. Because I didn’t run up my credit card, and now my 401K is disappearing. So, we’re clearly connected. I guess, it’s just that question of are strangers… Are we supposed to do anything for each other, or is it each man for himself? What is the American Dream? Karina: Do you think that the American Dream is something that even exists anymore? This idea of being able to go West, and if you work hard enough you’ll be fine? Kelly: I think it’s an ever-evolving thing. I once heard a show about this guy who coined the phrase “The American Dream.” Do you know who he is? Karina: No. I’ll look him up. [Ed: it's this guy] Kelly: Yeah. I need to look him up. Because I believe that what it was all about was that it was like a frontier kind of idea. And the American Dream at that time was, let’s say it was a really harsh winter, but my crop survived. Your crop died, but my crop is enough to feed both of us. That was the American Dream. But, that guy never foresaw class. Like he didn’t imagine that there would be class divides in this country. He didn’t anticipate that there would be such a vast divide. I guess that the idea of the American Dream is an evolving thing, or devolving thing. Has it really just come to my TV is bigger than your TV? What is it? What do we want this country to be - the great experiment? What’s it supposed to be? We just lived through such incredibly dark days. And even though the economy’s crashing now, there is like at least there’s hope. We’re living in the days of hope. [laughs] Karina: Just because of Obama? Kelly: I think, he is redefining - he talks about us being connected. He doesn’t talk about poverty a lot, I’ll admit that. But, just to change the conversation from something other than, “Go out and shop.” Or to give the impression that opportunity is just at everybody’s feet and all you have to do is bend down and lift it up. You know, it’s not the same for someone who grows up with an education to someone who doesn’t. At least he’s more aware of that. To not have a total elitist asshole running the country, I think will be somewhat better. Karina: It should be interesting. Kelly: Yeah. It’s already so interesting. Karina: To make a really smooth segue here, talking about class…you’ve got a movie star in your movie, which is unusual for a film that was made with so little money, on such a small scale. How did Michelle get involved, and were you thinking of her when you started planning this idea? Kelly: Not when I was first planning it. We were always talking about her as an example, but I didn’t think we would get her in the movie. Karina: What was interesting about her? Kelly: I would like to say that I was somehow out ahead of the curve, but I don’t think I was. I saw “Brokeback Mountain” like everyone else and I thought, “Who the fuck is she? She’s really great.” She blew my mind. And then, I went back and looked at all her films. I remember I went and met Todd Haynes right after I saw Brokeback Mountain. We were both like, “Ooh…” I said, “Every filmmaker is at a table right now talking about that.” And then, he worked with her in “I’m Not There,” and became friends with Heath. And he was just like, “You shouldn’t count her out. Let me give her the script. I think, she’d be great for it, and I think she’s up for something like this.” And we had other mutual friends. We had Kim Gordon in common, and anther one of my producers, Phil Morrison. We had people in each others’ worlds. And she saw Old Joy and liked the space the actors had to work. And really, she was just looking to do something outside of L.A. or New York. She said she was really drawn to the idea of playing a character who feels really invisible, which was really different from how she was feeling, so watched. No one recognized Michelle when we were shooting. She looked really different and she was just really on the low down. Karina: I had a conversation with a friend the other day actually about the way she looks in the movie. His theory is that she’s basically gender neutral. That was really different from the way I read the movie. There’s obviously the scene where it seems like there’s a threat to her, but I wonder if watching it, I imposed what I would feel, as a woman in those situations, on the character. Is it relevant to you that she’s a woman, and so she’s in a different kind of danger? Kelly: She is in a different kind of danger, I mean, like just going out and conquering the West and going up to work in the canneries. All those gutter punk kids who are in the beginning of the film…the girls, I don’t know that they travel alone too much, but there are like some really petite, beautiful girls, and they seem way more vulnerable to me than the guys. They all seem vulnerable just because of the way those kids live. They’re all over the country and they live really off the grid and just travel around on the trains. It seems crazy. But, when you see a woman doing it you just say, “Wow, she is more vulnerable.” Karina: Talking about this film in short hand people have called it a story about a girl and her dog. Kelly: Yeah, and I think the dog gives her some kind of false sense of security. Which, I travel around the country all the time with her and it does. Like I’ll stay places I wouldn’t stay alone because I have Lucy. But Lucy, she wouldn’t really help out. [laughs] She’d be like no help at all. But yeah… Plus, people in their 20s do a lot of crazy shit, you know? They just do. Did, I did. People do. Karina: So, are any of the situations autobiographical? Kelly: No, no. Only that I travel with her a lot. No, I mean, I’ve lived in New York for five years without an apartment, couch hopping. But, I was never in her situation. I’ve been really broke, but I’ve always had more of a social net than she did. And she just doesn’t really have the social skills, so she doesn’t have a community of friends. I mean, even the gutter punk kids have a community of friends and that she doesn’t have. Karina: Right. It seems some of her interactions are so tentative. And obviously, in her situation, it wouldn’t be safe for her to trust everyone, but there’s a question with everybody that she meets of what is this relationship going to be like. Kelly: Yeah. Michelle and I were designing her to be just someone who’s really narrowly focused on the task in front of her. So, she’s not taking in a lot of what’s happening around her. She’s just like her whole life is just a to do list. She’s trying to manage something. And she just has a narrow scope because a broader scope would just sort of be overwhelming, to look at her situation in a bigger sense. Karina: I want to talk a little bit about the indie film world in general right now. You went to Sundance with a feature in the mid-90s, and then came back again with Old Joy in 2006. Do you see any major differences, with the way something like Sundance has changed? Kelly: I don’t feel like I have a handle on the independent film scene. You know, I’m in my forties and I teach for a living. I get interviewed all the time and it’s always like, “Is this film going to help you make it?” I’m not 20. I’m interested in making small films with people that I know in sort of private ways, and I really like teaching. Like Old Joy, we didn’t even know if there was going to be a feature, it was just an art project to go off and do a film. And that’s sort of what my film making had become was very small and private and it’s just that that one was shot on Super 16. I’ve been going to festivals during all that time with my shorter films. It’s just that they were more avant-garde and there isn’t all those pressures and there’s no work to do because no one’s interviewing you. So, you just go travel and see places and you’re sort of so off the grid that you just have the pleasure of going and hanging out and seeing movies. Like now, I’m going to festivals and I don’t see the films. So, it’s much more work. But I mean, I just don’t approach it like somehow I’m going to like…I just don’t buy into the whole myth. One of my best film making experiences and life experiences was making a 50-minute, Super8 film, Ode. I made that, I shot with a friend and we made it with two actors. I couldn’t even get any more out of filmmaking than I got out of that experience. Old Joy is probably the next closest thing to that. So, it’s about, for me the goal is like, how can I set up the next experience so that it’s one that’s interesting and challenging? And make a good film and get better as a film maker. But I don’t think that these films are supposed to be getting me somewhere.You know? I find life interesting and I like my life. So, I guess, I don’t go to the festivals with those expectations. I’m certainly here talking to you and doing the work I can do to help Oscilloscope get my film out because it’s great that the Film Forum wants to show it and it’s nice for it to be seen. Karina: My impression of your filmmaking is that you don’t see one film as a stepping stone to something bigger. Kelly: No. Karina: Which makes you very different from many other filmmakers at a place like Sundance or Cannes. Kelly: It’s all just life experience, you know? And trying to become a better filmmaker to become a better filmmaker to become a better teacher. And be a better teacher and learn in teaching how to become a better filmmaker so that the films are good. But, I think, they’re for small audiences. You know, I can look at some men and say, “Well, that looks like a good career.” Karina: Like who? Kelly: You know, Jim Jarmusch gets to live up in the woods and make a film every X amount of years. I don’t know any of the details of his life, this is all superficial. Or, I mean, Todd Haynes still kills himself to make films but you know, he has a beautiful life in Portland and he makes his films with people he likes. Or Gus Van Sant. There aren’t female examples of that. There aren’t women that have the life of where they’re making the films that they want to make that are personal films, and that’s their life and they can also buy a house. Karina: Why do you think that is? Kelly: I think, for the next generation of women behind me that that will be the case, but…It’s certainly better now than when I made “River of Grass.” The door didn’t seem open at all for all those years. Karina: Was it easier to get money and everything for Wendy than it was for Old Joy? Kelly:  Old Joy I made with my own money and it was shot for almost nothing. Then, after I had a cut of it and got into Sundance, I got the finishing funds. Then that same investor gave me money for this movie. I feel for me personally that I’ve found a way. You know, I want to be able to keep making films and the budget should just be whatever it has to be to get it done. The payoff of not having money is that nobody touches your film. Nobody reads my scripts. Nobody that I don’t want to. Nobody looks at cuts of my movies or tells me, “Time’s up, we have to be ready for a festival.” It’s all just integrated into my life. It’s just that I think that it’s OK to be connected to that big black hole of work and that it gives you information for what you’re making films about. But, I do think, at a point, there will be women that have the careers that men have. Karina: Would you give any advice to girls who are maybe in film school right now who look at your work and wonder, “How is she able to do this so independently?” Kelly: Have a day job. Karina: Really? Kelly: Yeah. So that you don’t have all your eggs in having to make a career off films - because these films don’t really make anybody any money. But, I also don’t have this expectation that I should be able to live off it. I don’t necessarily think everyone gets to live off their art and that that is a given. And at the same time, there is the story going on that women don’t have the same opportunities as men and that’s true. But, it is certainly better than when I made River of Grass. But then, I tell any film students to study other things so that you can be an informed maker. And you know, I think what happens to a lot of women in film school is they end up becoming producers because there’s so many fewer of them in the classes that they get herded into just working on guys projects and being the organizers. I mean, that was certainly how it was when I taught at NYU. But, at Bard, it’s an environment that’s all very nurturing I’d say to women, so it’s quite nice. Karina: But, in a way, you’re able to teach because you make art. So, you are in a way making a living off your art. Kelly: Yes. Completely true. I had my eye on Bard for a long time and I didn’t get to Bard until I made Old Joy. I’m completely undereducated to be teaching - as far as academia goes. Karina: But, people want to learn from you because you’ve made these films. Kelly: Yeah. It’s complicated, because it’s hard to talk about it and not sound like… Because I do feel like I’ve been really lucky. The time in between when I wasn’t making films, it’s not like I never had any bitter moment about it. But, that was really a time where I learned how to make films. No one was watching and I went back to Super8 and I could just really figure things out. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:00:57 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com12/9/2008 2:00:57 PM Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to the much-acclaimed Old Joy, stars Michelle Williams as Wendy, a young woman traveling across the continent in search of a canning job in Alaska. Wendy has little to her name but a car, some pocket money and Lucy, her dog. When problems arise with one pole on that trinity, the others follow, as Reichardt takes us through an intimate procedural examination of how quickly a life can unravel when balanced on a precipice. With Wendy and Lucy opening in New York tomorrow, I sat down with Riechardt to discuss Michelle Williams’ desire for invisibility, smashing the indie film glass cieling, and the “ever-evolving American Dream.” Karina: I saw the movie in Cannes, and obviously every month it seems like a movie about economic despair is becoming more and more relevant. Kelly: Give it a week. Karina: [laughs] When you think about some of these economic problems, so many of them seem to stem from people being in denial, and just sort of a general unwillingness to talk about the how the way that we live has consequences. Kelly: Yeah. The consequences are like the guy who got trampled at the Wal-Mart. Karina: Yeah. So when you think about getting the film out there, what audience are you hoping it will speak to? Kelly: I don’t really have a plan for the audience, just questions. Like, are we related and do we owe each other anything? Are we supposed to take care of each other to any degree? And we know we’re connected. Because I didn’t run up my credit card, and now my 401K is disappearing. So, we’re clearly connected. I guess, it’s just that question of are strangers… Are we supposed to do anything for each other, or is it each man for himself? What is the American Dream? Karina: Do you think that the American Dream is something that even exists anymore? This idea of being able to go West, and if you work hard enough you’ll be fine? Kelly: I think it’s an ever-evolving thing. I once heard a show about this guy who coined the phrase “The American Dream.” Do you know who he is? Karina: No. I’ll look him up. [Ed: it's this guy] Kelly: Yeah. I need to look him up. Because I believe that what it was all about was that it was like a frontier kind of idea. And the American Dream at that time was, let’s say it was a really harsh winter, but my crop survived. Your crop died, but my crop is enough to feed both of us. That was the American Dream. But, that guy never foresaw class. Like he didn’t imagine that there would be class divides in this country. He didn’t anticipate that there would be such a vast divide. I guess that the idea of the American Dream is an evolving thing, or devolving thing. Has it really just come to my TV is bigger than your TV? What is it? What do we want this country to be - the great experiment? What’s it supposed to be? We just lived through such incredibly dark days. And even though the economy’s crashing now, there is like at least there’s hope. We’re living in the days of hope. [laughs] Karina: Just because of Obama? Kelly: I think, he is redefining - he talks about us being connected. He doesn’t talk about poverty a lot, I’ll admit that. But, just to change the conversation from something other than, “Go out and shop.” Or to give the impression that opportunity is just at everybody’s feet and all you have to do is bend down and lift it up. You know, it’s not the same for someone who grows up with an education to someone who doesn’t. At least he’s more aware of that. To not have a total elitist asshole running the country, I think will be somewhat better. Karina: It should be interesting. Kelly: Yeah. It’s already so interesting. Karina: To make a really smooth segue here, talking about class…you’ve got a movie star in your movie, which is unusual for a film that was made with so little money, on such a small scale. How did Michelle get involved, and were you thinking of her when you started planning this idea? Kelly: Not when I was first planning it. We were always talking about her as an example, but I didn’t think we would get her in the movie. Karina: What was interesting about her? Kelly: I would like to say that I was somehow out ahead of the curve, but I don’t think I was. I saw “Brokeback Mountain” like everyone else and I thought, “Who the fuck is she? She’s really great.” She blew my mind. And then, I went back and looked at all her films. I remember I went and met Todd Haynes right after I saw Brokeback Mountain. We were both like, “Ooh…” I said, “Every filmmaker is at a table right now talking about that.” And then, he worked with her in “I’m Not There,” and became friends with Heath. And he was just like, “You shouldn’t count her out. Let me give her the script. I think, she’d be great for it, and I think she’s up for something like this.” And we had other mutual friends. We had Kim Gordon in common, and anther one of my producers, Phil Morrison. We had people in each others’ worlds. And she saw Old Joy and liked the space the actors had to work. And really, she was just looking to do something outside of L.A. or New York. She said she was really drawn to the idea of playing a character who feels really invisible, which was really different from how she was feeling, so watched. No one recognized Michelle when we were shooting. She looked really different and she was just really on the low down. Karina: I had a conversation with a friend the other day actually about the way she looks in the movie. His theory is that she’s basically gender neutral. That was really different from the way I read the movie. There’s obviously the scene where it seems like there’s a threat to her, but I wonder if watching it, I imposed what I would feel, as a woman in those situations, on the character. Is it relevant to you that she’s a woman, and so she’s in a different kind of danger? Kelly: She is in a different kind of danger, I mean, like just going out and conquering the West and going up to work in the canneries. All those gutter punk kids who are in the beginning of the film…the girls, I don’t know that they travel alone too much, but there are like some really petite, beautiful girls, and they seem way more vulnerable to me than the guys. They all seem vulnerable just because of the way those kids live. They’re all over the country and they live really off the grid and just travel around on the trains. It seems crazy. But, when you see a woman doing it you just say, “Wow, she is more vulnerable.” Karina: Talking about this film in short hand people have called it a story about a girl and her dog. Kelly: Yeah, and I think the dog gives her some kind of false sense of security. Which, I travel around the country all the time with her and it does. Like I’ll stay places I wouldn’t stay alone because I have Lucy. But Lucy, she wouldn’t really help out. [laughs] She’d be like no help at all. But yeah… Plus, people in their 20s do a lot of crazy shit, you know? They just do. Did, I did. People do. Karina: So, are any of the situations autobiographical? Kelly: No, no. Only that I travel with her a lot. No, I mean, I’ve lived in New York for five years without an apartment, couch hopping. But, I was never in her situation. I’ve been really broke, but I’ve always had more of a social net than she did. And she just doesn’t really have the social skills, so she doesn’t have a community of friends. I mean, even the gutter punk kids have a community of friends and that she doesn’t have. Karina: Right. It seems some of her interactions are so tentative. And obviously, in her situation, it wouldn’t be safe for her to trust everyone, but there’s a question with everybody that she meets of what is this relationship going to be like. Kelly: Yeah. Michelle and I were designing her to be just someone who’s really narrowly focused on the task in front of her. So, she’s not taking in a lot of what’s happening around her. She’s just like her whole life is just a to do list. She’s trying to manage something. And she just has a narrow scope because a broader scope would just sort of be overwhelming, to look at her situation in a bigger sense. Karina: I want to talk a little bit about the indie film world in general right now. You went to Sundance with a feature in the mid-90s, and then came back again with Old Joy in 2006. Do you see any major differences, with the way something like Sundance has changed? Kelly: I don’t feel like I have a handle on the independent film scene. You know, I’m in my forties and I teach for a living. I get interviewed all the time and it’s always like, “Is this film going to help you make it?” I’m not 20. I’m interested in making small films with people that I know in sort of private ways, and I really like teaching. Like Old Joy, we didn’t even know if there was going to be a feature, it was just an art project to go off and do a film. And that’s sort of what my film making had become was very small and private and it’s just that that one was shot on Super 16. I’ve been going to festivals during all that time with my shorter films. It’s just that they were more avant-garde and there isn’t all those pressures and there’s no work to do because no one’s interviewing you. So, you just go travel and see places and you’re sort of so off the grid that you just have the pleasure of going and hanging out and seeing movies. Like now, I’m going to festivals and I don’t see the films. So, it’s much more work. But I mean, I just don’t approach it like somehow I’m going to like…I just don’t buy into the whole myth. One of my best film making experiences and life experiences was making a 50-minute, Super8 film, Ode. I made that, I shot with a friend and we made it with two actors. I couldn’t even get any more out of filmmaking than I got out of that experience. Old Joy is probably the next closest thing to that. So, it’s about, for me the goal is like, how can I set up the next experience so that it’s one that’s interesting and challenging? And make a good film and get better as a film maker. But I don’t think that these films are supposed to be getting me somewhere.You know? I find life interesting and I like my life. So, I guess, I don’t go to the festivals with those expectations. I’m certainly here talking to you and doing the work I can do to help Oscilloscope get my film out because it’s great that the Film Forum wants to show it and it’s nice for it to be seen. Karina: My impression of your filmmaking is that you don’t see one film as a stepping stone to something bigger. Kelly: No. Karina: Which makes you very different from many other filmmakers at a place like Sundance or Cannes. Kelly: It’s all just life experience, you know? And trying to become a better filmmaker to become a better filmmaker to become a better teacher. And be a better teacher and learn in teaching how to become a better filmmaker so that the films are good. But, I think, they’re for small audiences. You know, I can look at some men and say, “Well, that looks like a good career.” Karina: Like who? Kelly: You know, Jim Jarmusch gets to live up in the woods and make a film every X amount of years. I don’t know any of the details of his life, this is all superficial. Or, I mean, Todd Haynes still kills himself to make films but you know, he has a beautiful life in Portland and he makes his films with people he likes. Or Gus Van Sant. There aren’t female examples of that. There aren’t women that have the life of where they’re making the films that they want to make that are personal films, and that’s their life and they can also buy a house. Karina: Why do you think that is? Kelly: I think, for the next generation of women behind me that that will be the case, but…It’s certainly better now than when I made “River of Grass.” The door didn’t seem open at all for all those years. Karina: Was it easier to get money and everything for Wendy than it was for Old Joy? Kelly:  Old Joy I made with my own money and it was shot for almost nothing. Then, after I had a cut of it and got into Sundance, I got the finishing funds. Then that same investor gave me money for this movie. I feel for me personally that I’ve found a way. You know, I want to be able to keep making films and the budget should just be whatever it has to be to get it done. The payoff of not having money is that nobody touches your film. Nobody reads my scripts. Nobody that I don’t want to. Nobody looks at cuts of my movies or tells me, “Time’s up, we have to be ready for a festival.” It’s all just integrated into my life. It’s just that I think that it’s OK to be connected to that big black hole of work and that it gives you information for what you’re making films about. But, I do think, at a point, there will be women that have the careers that men have. Karina: Would you give any advice to girls who are maybe in film school right now who look at your work and wonder, “How is she able to do this so independently?” Kelly: Have a day job. Karina: Really? Kelly: Yeah. So that you don’t have all your eggs in having to make a career off films - because these films don’t really make anybody any money. But, I also don’t have this expectation that I should be able to live off it. I don’t necessarily think everyone gets to live off their art and that that is a given. And at the same time, there is the story going on that women don’t have the same opportunities as men and that’s true. But, it is certainly better than when I made River of Grass. But then, I tell any film students to study other things so that you can be an informed maker. And you know, I think what happens to a lot of women in film school is they end up becoming producers because there’s so many fewer of them in the classes that they get herded into just working on guys projects and being the organizers. I mean, that was certainly how it was when I taught at NYU. But, at Bard, it’s an environment that’s all very nurturing I’d say to women, so it’s quite nice. Karina: But, in a way, you’re able to teach because you make art. So, you are in a way making a living off your art. Kelly: Yes. Completely true. I had my eye on Bard for a long time and I didn’t get to Bard until I made Old Joy. I’m completely undereducated to be teaching - as far as academia goes. Karina: But, people want to learn from you because you’ve made these films. Kelly: Yeah. It’s complicated, because it’s hard to talk about it and not sound like… Because I do feel like I’ve been really lucky. The time in between when I wasn’t making films, it’s not like I never had any bitter moment about it. But, that was really a time where I learned how to make films. No one was watching and I went back to Super8 and I could just really figure things out. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/joem18b/archive/2008/11/19/37428.aspx Post By: joem18b
Post To: joem18b Blog
Post Date: 11/19/2008 1:54:00 AM
Body: First paragraph of a review that I posted last year:"If I'm in the mood for a Western, I want horses. If I'm in the mood for explosions, I go to a Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay movie. In either case, I don't want, say, Max Von Sydow playing chess with Death in some black-and-white hovel on the rocky shores of Sturnnveggloven. In the same way, if I'm in the mood to watch echo-boomer twenty-somethings filming their friends hanging out with each other in small apartments and on the urban stoop and in the homes and basements of their parents and grandparents, none of whom will ever appear onscreen, then for those of you who haven't seen one such film before, this would be mumblecore."My assigned movie, "Funny Ha Ha," would be perhaps the first film in the mumblecore genre. Did I read something somewhere about how frequently, for some mysterious reason, the first in a genre is also the best? Homer, Milton, and Cervantes were mentioned. Could this be true of FHH? Is it the purest, as well as the first, mumblecore expression of newly-adult American modern life on the hoof, before the mumblecore melodrama of Mutual Appreciation or the variations on a theme in "LOL" or the psychological depth of The Puffy Chair? A question to keep in mind as I watch.Haven't heard much from the mumblecore community lately. What's the buzz? What's the buzz around saying what's the buzz? Stephen Holden called Baghead a mumblecore movie - comedy/horror mumblecore? Are movies like In Search of a Midnight Kiss moving mumblecore into some new merged genre? Was Old Joy really mumblecore, as it's often listed; some genre morphing might have already taken place in that one. Andrew Bujalski, who wrote, directed, and starred in FHH, hasn't made a feature film in years; he's done some acting but not made any movies. Kate Dollenmayer, who plays Marnie, the lead in FHH, appeared in Bujalski's next film and then disappeared behind the camera. There's an album with her name on it; otherwise, she's light on the google.FHH caught me in one of my watching-the-last-half-of-the-movie-first phases. I've recently finished Rules of the Game and War, Inc. that way. Watching those two films backwards helped them, in my estimation. I'm guessing in advance that watching "Funny Ha Ha," starting at the 45-minute mark, will not harm my enjoyment of the film and may help it. But we'll see.Fooey! Now I've slipped up and taken a peek at the first few paragraphs of A.O. Scott's FHH review in the NYT, wherein he tells us that the film is about a young woman's fruitless search for a little love and meaning in her life. Why did I read that? So now why should I bother dropping into the middle of the movie, already knowing that? The adventure and mystery are ruined. Feh. But I'll do it anyway. So. There Marnie is, passed out in a car. Now she stays with a girlfriend and her girlfriend goes on a job interview. Oops, Marnie is the girlfriend, not the drunk in the car. Confusion. Good. That's how I like it to be. No harm done reading a little A.O. Scott. Meanwhile, the theme of the movie is made clear in minutes, middle start or not, once I've got Marnie in my sights. Perhaps my initial excitement was a little attenuated, but now I'm involved, so onward!Marnie is wearing a T-shirt from a Newton grammar school. Newton is an upscale community in the Boston suburbs. Always made me think of fig newtons, not Isaac. I seem to remember a mall there, back in the 60s, out on Commonwealth Avenue. Bujalski was born in Boston. A good place to locate a movie about the just-graduated and I speak as one who swam in that social sea after college for a couple of years. Youth, out of school at last. FHH is the pure unvarnished article. The essence of mumblecore. Absolute minimum script, or so it appears onscreen. The meta experience identical to the dramatic experience; that is, there are two layers working here, carrying the same message: (a) level one, the young woman moving along through her first adult life structure while (b) level two, the actors live their lives for us by acting onscreen, so that, for this viewer at least, the element in FHH most profoundly moving is the sight of these twentysomethings struggling with their craft, new adult members of society, now with the responsibility of paying rent and negotiating car insurance (no small task in Massachusetts!), with the need to discover meaning in the challenges that they face and in their responses to those challenges. Not the characters, you understand, but the actors themselves. A reviewer comments "The semi-improvised performances seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters," but the point is that these performances highlight the actors not as the characters they portray but as individuals working - that is, acting. Or am I just being fooled into thinking that I'm seeing the actors, not the characters, because of Bujalski's style? But no. I know nothing about the actors; perhaps they have something in common with their characters, perhaps not. There is a signature cadence in untrained improvisation, with its small pauses not heard in everyday conversation, neither conversation between those who know each other nor that between strangers, tiny pauses born of the actor's interior monolog, pauses which replace the verbal overlaps and gaps found in everyday talk. So that as we watch, the actors think about their lines, or the direction just provided offscreen, or the act of acting, anything but the less conscious social drivers propelling the rest of us day-to-day in casual conversation. Each actor steps into the frame with an ineffable sense of innocence, usually with an embarrassed grin, and speaks, and we understand that here onscreen are living reminders of already-came-of-age, struggling with dialog as an instantiated metaphor for the whole all-of-it struggle involved in becoming an adult. I find this evocative in the extreme, a spiritual supermagnet pulling me back to that same time in my own life, with all the memories, nostalgia, speculations, and regrets attendant to it - a time in my own life when I'm more than ripe for that to happen. Could I, would I, do better a second time around? That question forms the emotional core of the movie for my demographic; the same thing happens when we watch our own children in their twenties. Where else can you get that in cinema? Not in The Incredible Hulk, that's for sure.The Boojer, by the way, saves the juiciest scenes in the movie for himself - an excruciating dinner and a later sort-of-extended-date with Marni. Cultural extra credit: compare and contrast the boy/girl dinners in FHH and I Think I Love My Wife.At the end of the second half, I return to reviewland and find:A.O. Scott: "What gives this film its quiet pathos is not so much the relative bleakness of Marnie's circumstances but the modesty of her expectations. At one point, she makes a to-do list, and its lack of ambition - spend more time outdoors, make friends with Jackie, learn to play chess - is both funny and sad."Carina Chocano: "Mainly, Marnie is staying afloat and trying to connect with others who are equally lost."Seems like I've seen a lot of this kind of hangdog vibe around the FHH reviews - negatives about mood and lifestyle - and I am not down with that (although I otherwise agree with the NYT and LA Times FHH review content). Perhaps having reached the top of the mountain makes it hard for Scott and Chocano to see those younger who are still way back down in the foothills. Marnie and her friends in FHH are newly-minted adults living life in that broad, spacious, undefined socioeconomicsphere found in first-world countries, a landscape where middle-class children find themselves free to roam, after emerging from college, if they happen to be situated in the middle of the startingout spectrum: neither at one end on the turf of the cinematically-ever-popular male slackers so often seen onscreen, nor the other end on that of the striving medical-school, law-school, and computer-geek proto-professionals; that is, Marnie and her friends are living the unfocused life that many of us lived in our twenties. I speak as one who stumbled off the college campus for the last time to find myself, at the age of 23, living alone in Boston, working at a job I wasn't interested in, and looking for love after refusing to commit to marriage and being dropped by my intended, who switched to her Plan B awfully quickly, it seemed to me. The quiet pathos for my demographic didn't happen then, it's happening to us now, in our dotage, on the viewer's side of the screen. Where is the pathos in Marnie's freshness and energy and in the potential of youth, for Marnie and her friends with an open and unknowable and limitless future stretching ahead of them, or in the knowledge that Kate Dollenmayer herself has moved on into that future, or in Bujalski's vision? Marnie's to-do list in no way lacks ambition; is in no way funny or sad. The act of making that list metaphorizes the ambition of the young; the contents of the list highlight the innocence of youth; it's a list drawn up by someone with all the time in the world and, interestingly, it is a list quite similar to such a one as made up by someone at the other end of life, without much time remaining.So I asked my daughter about this quiet-pathos thing, her being 23 and a recent graduate and living in Boston, all the same as Marnie; her reply: "As far as waitressing goes, I feel embarrassed about it at times, but I've actually made some valuable connections and now have places to stay and help finding employment if I want to go to South Carolina, Maui, Australia, or Columbia (have business cards/notes/emails from all of these people). Plus I make ok money, work with nice people, take home free food (ok, thats not completely kosher but its not like I get a salary or even hourly pay that amounts to anything after taxes). Plus, Im learning to speak Haitian Creole while simultaneously turning enemies into friends (the cooks didnt like me at first bc they assumed I was racist and told me so, but when I asked to learn their language they are suddenly happy to see me each day). So from my lowly job Im gaining: communication skills, agility training, extreme multi-tasking experience, networking opportunities, and employee benefits (that's the free food). Sounds almost ambitious when phrased correctly. This isnt to say I dont doubt what Im doing because I do, every day, multiple times a day. I get asked time and again by my bosses, co-workers and customers "why are you here if you have a degree from an Ivy League school??" One person even went so far as to say I was being selfish because letting my parents spend all that money to send me to a good school only to "disregard" my qualifications by working in a chain restaurant was just like throwing all that tuition money in the trash. Obviously obtaining "street smarts" and trying to experience different ways of life before choosing the "purpose-driven" one is something only misfits and failures do... So what am I trying to say here? Maybe im just trying to rationalize my own current existence when in reality it is just as ambitionless and lost as Marnie's. But maybe if the reviewers got off their NY Times and La Times high horses and really thought about what it means to EXPERIENCE and LIVE life, they might see things a wee bit differently. Or maybe not. Am I giggly all the time? as my friend Lynnea would say: "HELLS no!" But I dont think Ill look back on this period of my life and see it as a time of just "staying afloat" (my high school years on the other hand...)."One more take on the pathos meme, quickly, before getting on with the movie: Marnie celebrates her birthday quietly. Proactive note to lugubrious reviewers: this also is not pathos. What the heck did I do on my birthdays back in Boston? Who knows? I do remember being in a laundromat at North Station on Christmas Eve one year. It was snowing. Neither the Bruins nor the Celtics were in town, so The Garden was deserted except for me and an old woman. I went back to my room and drank. I still remember that, so I guess it means something to me, but I didn't feel pathetic at the time. I felt lonely but pretty good.Ginormous. I've had that word in my head. I'm thinking that if I write it down here, maybe it will go away.And so on to the first half of FHH.Oh my God. Bujalski saddles Marnie with an unrequited-love jones, up front. Booge, how could you? What were you thinking? This is something a novice twenty-something filmmaker would do. Oh, right. But this is why watching War, Inc. backwards helped the movie so much; the process cut out loads of unnecessary plot points till it was too late to matter. In the same way, I was able to watch the downslope of FHH without these moulting feathers of love annoying me. Hmm. Now Marnie liplocks some dude at the twenty-eight minute mark. I would never have predicted that. Oh, no, and then she osculates again three minutes later with her married-dude friend. I'm so glad I'm coming to this at the end and not at the beginning. Why? Because in the second half she's staring into the future without seeing beyond the walls of her room, locked in her head while her anger percolates unfelt somewhere down there lower in her body - after the drinking and smooching fail her - but I understood that, in the second half of the movie, without the presumptive romance-o-motivation of the first.No. I'm overreacting. Belay that last paragraph. I've been Hollywoodpavlovianized. This is not Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the last minute of Sleepless in Seattle or You've Got Mail. This is random lowkey young adult semijoyless evolutionary smootching, pebbles in a pond that cause no ripples. Marnie pretends that it didn't happen, isn't happening, and I'll do the same. Romance is a big deal for these kids, perhaps the biggest deal. My twenties were mostly a history of bad dates. Easy to put off career issues to the next decade while getting the living part right. So Booge perforce makes use of that, but not so much that we can't shrug when the lips meet, and then move on. But still, this series of fraught encounters with men, I don't know; quit beating the drum, Booge. This does remind me, though, that I watched the original Forsythe Saga backward. As with Marnie and Alex in the second half of FHH, something heavy had obviously gone on between Irene and Soames, and Fleur's life was constantly perturbed by it, but it seemed more romantic to me to not know what that something was, not to know what had happened - seemed more romantic than watching the first half and seeing whatever it was that happened actually happen. Thesis: nostalgia coupled with imagination is always stronger than dramatic invention, probably because lived experience, including the actual act of imagination, is more visceral than skoptophilia and its milder brethren.New-Age side note: Coincidence #1: Earlier in this screed I wrote a sentence using the word "evolutionary" and then I started FHH up again and watched the last ten minutes of the movie, which I hadn't seen yet (minutes 35 to 45) and Marnie says to Alex or Alex says to Marnie, "You're the most evolved person I know." Coincidence #2: Later that day, I went to Blockbuster to return Get Smart (I'm rating it "j" on a scale of 1 to q) and while there I picked up The Last Request, which somebody somewhere liked a little bit, and while I was checking out, the clerk asked me how I liked Get Smart and I said, Anne Hathaway is no Barbara Feldon, and when I got home and started The Last Request, there Barbara was, in a starring role. The odds of plucking up a Barbara Feldon movie at random? Antiginormous. Coincidence #3: Marnie's shirt has the number 18 on its back. I'm 18b. My daughter, I learned THE SAME DAY, is living in apartment #18 in her building on Concord St. Consult your Jung! These coincidental whorls in the universal fabric happened ON THE SAME DAY as Obama's election and mean that FHH is connected to the core zeitgeist of the planet. You read it here first.Propositions: (1) The first half of a movie is usually better than the second half when the movie is watched in normal order. (2) Watching the second half of a movie first often improves the movie. Sometimes, watching the second half is sufficient in itself. (3) Thus, perhaps whichever half you watch first is the best.I had to ask Wilson, who assigned this movie to me, what the last two spoken lines of the last scene were. They seemed crucial in defining the mood of the movie, but mumblecore being named mumblecore for a reason, I couldn't make out what Alex and Marnie said to each other. Fortunately, Wilson could. And those two lines bear out my contention, or so I think, that Bujalski is a deeply optimistic guy and FHH is, in the end, a celebration, not a paean. In that final scene, Marnie shows some anger, a desire to move out into the world, and a rejection of the feckless Alex. Good for her and good for a society and economy (knock on wood) where youth is able to rattle around a little. I watched a mumblecore movie made by Joe Swanberg a while back, in which the protagonists grow stronger in the face of Swanberg's efforts to render them helpless; Bujalski throws down some marbles in Marnie's path, but his affection for her never lets her fall hard enough to break anything.This film that launched a genre reminds us that being young and being old are two entirely different things. (Bujalski turned 30 this year.)
]]>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:54:00 GMTjoem18bjoem18b Blog11/19/2008 1:54:00 AMFirst paragraph of a review that I posted last year:"If I'm in the mood for a Western, I want horses. If I'm in the mood for explosions, I go to a Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay movie. In either case, I don't want, say, Max Von Sydow playing chess with Death in some black-and-white hovel on the rocky shores of Sturnnveggloven. In the same way, if I'm in the mood to watch echo-boomer twenty-somethings filming their friends hanging out with each other in small apartments and on the urban stoop and in the homes and basements of their parents and grandparents, none of whom will ever appear onscreen, then for those of you who haven't seen one such film before, this would be mumblecore."My assigned movie, "Funny Ha Ha," would be perhaps the first film in the mumblecore genre. Did I read something somewhere about how frequently, for some mysterious reason, the first in a genre is also the best? Homer, Milton, and Cervantes were mentioned. Could this be true of FHH? Is it the purest, as well as the first, mumblecore expression of newly-adult American modern life on the hoof, before the mumblecore melodrama of Mutual Appreciation or the variations on a theme in "LOL" or the psychological depth of The Puffy Chair? A question to keep in mind as I watch.Haven't heard much from the mumblecore community lately. What's the buzz? What's the buzz around saying what's the buzz? Stephen Holden called Baghead a mumblecore movie - comedy/horror mumblecore? Are movies like In Search of a Midnight Kiss moving mumblecore into some new merged genre? Was Old Joy really mumblecore, as it's often listed; some genre morphing might have already taken place in that one. Andrew Bujalski, who wrote, directed, and starred in FHH, hasn't made a feature film in years; he's done some acting but not made any movies. Kate Dollenmayer, who plays Marnie, the lead in FHH, appeared in Bujalski's next film and then disappeared behind the camera. There's an album with her name on it; otherwise, she's light on the google.FHH caught me in one of my watching-the-last-half-of-the-movie-first phases. I've recently finished Rules of the Game and War, Inc. that way. Watching those two films backwards helped them, in my estimation. I'm guessing in advance that watching "Funny Ha Ha," starting at the 45-minute mark, will not harm my enjoyment of the film and may help it. But we'll see.Fooey! Now I've slipped up and taken a peek at the first few paragraphs of A.O. Scott's FHH review in the NYT, wherein he tells us that the film is about a young woman's fruitless search for a little love and meaning in her life. Why did I read that? So now why should I bother dropping into the middle of the movie, already knowing that? The adventure and mystery are ruined. Feh. But I'll do it anyway. So. There Marnie is, passed out in a car. Now she stays with a girlfriend and her girlfriend goes on a job interview. Oops, Marnie is the girlfriend, not the drunk in the car. Confusion. Good. That's how I like it to be. No harm done reading a little A.O. Scott. Meanwhile, the theme of the movie is made clear in minutes, middle start or not, once I've got Marnie in my sights. Perhaps my initial excitement was a little attenuated, but now I'm involved, so onward!Marnie is wearing a T-shirt from a Newton grammar school. Newton is an upscale community in the Boston suburbs. Always made me think of fig newtons, not Isaac. I seem to remember a mall there, back in the 60s, out on Commonwealth Avenue. Bujalski was born in Boston. A good place to locate a movie about the just-graduated and I speak as one who swam in that social sea after college for a couple of years. Youth, out of school at last. FHH is the pure unvarnished article. The essence of mumblecore. Absolute minimum script, or so it appears onscreen. The meta experience identical to the dramatic experience; that is, there are two layers working here, carrying the same message: (a) level one, the young woman moving along through her first adult life structure while (b) level two, the actors live their lives for us by acting onscreen, so that, for this viewer at least, the element in FHH most profoundly moving is the sight of these twentysomethings struggling with their craft, new adult members of society, now with the responsibility of paying rent and negotiating car insurance (no small task in Massachusetts!), with the need to discover meaning in the challenges that they face and in their responses to those challenges. Not the characters, you understand, but the actors themselves. A reviewer comments "The semi-improvised performances seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters," but the point is that these performances highlight the actors not as the characters they portray but as individuals working - that is, acting. Or am I just being fooled into thinking that I'm seeing the actors, not the characters, because of Bujalski's style? But no. I know nothing about the actors; perhaps they have something in common with their characters, perhaps not. There is a signature cadence in untrained improvisation, with its small pauses not heard in everyday conversation, neither conversation between those who know each other nor that between strangers, tiny pauses born of the actor's interior monolog, pauses which replace the verbal overlaps and gaps found in everyday talk. So that as we watch, the actors think about their lines, or the direction just provided offscreen, or the act of acting, anything but the less conscious social drivers propelling the rest of us day-to-day in casual conversation. Each actor steps into the frame with an ineffable sense of innocence, usually with an embarrassed grin, and speaks, and we understand that here onscreen are living reminders of already-came-of-age, struggling with dialog as an instantiated metaphor for the whole all-of-it struggle involved in becoming an adult. I find this evocative in the extreme, a spiritual supermagnet pulling me back to that same time in my own life, with all the memories, nostalgia, speculations, and regrets attendant to it - a time in my own life when I'm more than ripe for that to happen. Could I, would I, do better a second time around? That question forms the emotional core of the movie for my demographic; the same thing happens when we watch our own children in their twenties. Where else can you get that in cinema? Not in The Incredible Hulk, that's for sure.The Boojer, by the way, saves the juiciest scenes in the movie for himself - an excruciating dinner and a later sort-of-extended-date with Marni. Cultural extra credit: compare and contrast the boy/girl dinners in FHH and I Think I Love My Wife.At the end of the second half, I return to reviewland and find:A.O. Scott: "What gives this film its quiet pathos is not so much the relative bleakness of Marnie's circumstances but the modesty of her expectations. At one point, she makes a to-do list, and its lack of ambition - spend more time outdoors, make friends with Jackie, learn to play chess - is both funny and sad."Carina Chocano: "Mainly, Marnie is staying afloat and trying to connect with others who are equally lost."Seems like I've seen a lot of this kind of hangdog vibe around the FHH reviews - negatives about mood and lifestyle - and I am not down with that (although I otherwise agree with the NYT and LA Times FHH review content). Perhaps having reached the top of the mountain makes it hard for Scott and Chocano to see those younger who are still way back down in the foothills. Marnie and her friends in FHH are newly-minted adults living life in that broad, spacious, undefined socioeconomicsphere found in first-world countries, a landscape where middle-class children find themselves free to roam, after emerging from college, if they happen to be situated in the middle of the startingout spectrum: neither at one end on the turf of the cinematically-ever-popular male slackers so often seen onscreen, nor the other end on that of the striving medical-school, law-school, and computer-geek proto-professionals; that is, Marnie and her friends are living the unfocused life that many of us lived in our twenties. I speak as one who stumbled off the college campus for the last time to find myself, at the age of 23, living alone in Boston, working at a job I wasn't interested in, and looking for love after refusing to commit to marriage and being dropped by my intended, who switched to her Plan B awfully quickly, it seemed to me. The quiet pathos for my demographic didn't happen then, it's happening to us now, in our dotage, on the viewer's side of the screen. Where is the pathos in Marnie's freshness and energy and in the potential of youth, for Marnie and her friends with an open and unknowable and limitless future stretching ahead of them, or in the knowledge that Kate Dollenmayer herself has moved on into that future, or in Bujalski's vision? Marnie's to-do list in no way lacks ambition; is in no way funny or sad. The act of making that list metaphorizes the ambition of the young; the contents of the list highlight the innocence of youth; it's a list drawn up by someone with all the time in the world and, interestingly, it is a list quite similar to such a one as made up by someone at the other end of life, without much time remaining.So I asked my daughter about this quiet-pathos thing, her being 23 and a recent graduate and living in Boston, all the same as Marnie; her reply: "As far as waitressing goes, I feel embarrassed about it at times, but I've actually made some valuable connections and now have places to stay and help finding employment if I want to go to South Carolina, Maui, Australia, or Columbia (have business cards/notes/emails from all of these people). Plus I make ok money, work with nice people, take home free food (ok, thats not completely kosher but its not like I get a salary or even hourly pay that amounts to anything after taxes). Plus, Im learning to speak Haitian Creole while simultaneously turning enemies into friends (the cooks didnt like me at first bc they assumed I was racist and told me so, but when I asked to learn their language they are suddenly happy to see me each day). So from my lowly job Im gaining: communication skills, agility training, extreme multi-tasking experience, networking opportunities, and employee benefits (that's the free food). Sounds almost ambitious when phrased correctly. This isnt to say I dont doubt what Im doing because I do, every day, multiple times a day. I get asked time and again by my bosses, co-workers and customers "why are you here if you have a degree from an Ivy League school??" One person even went so far as to say I was being selfish because letting my parents spend all that money to send me to a good school only to "disregard" my qualifications by working in a chain restaurant was just like throwing all that tuition money in the trash. Obviously obtaining "street smarts" and trying to experience different ways of life before choosing the "purpose-driven" one is something only misfits and failures do... So what am I trying to say here? Maybe im just trying to rationalize my own current existence when in reality it is just as ambitionless and lost as Marnie's. But maybe if the reviewers got off their NY Times and La Times high horses and really thought about what it means to EXPERIENCE and LIVE life, they might see things a wee bit differently. Or maybe not. Am I giggly all the time? as my friend Lynnea would say: "HELLS no!" But I dont think Ill look back on this period of my life and see it as a time of just "staying afloat" (my high school years on the other hand...)."One more take on the pathos meme, quickly, before getting on with the movie: Marnie celebrates her birthday quietly. Proactive note to lugubrious reviewers: this also is not pathos. What the heck did I do on my birthdays back in Boston? Who knows? I do remember being in a laundromat at North Station on Christmas Eve one year. It was snowing. Neither the Bruins nor the Celtics were in town, so The Garden was deserted except for me and an old woman. I went back to my room and drank. I still remember that, so I guess it means something to me, but I didn't feel pathetic at the time. I felt lonely but pretty good.Ginormous. I've had that word in my head. I'm thinking that if I write it down here, maybe it will go away.And so on to the first half of FHH.Oh my God. Bujalski saddles Marnie with an unrequited-love jones, up front. Booge, how could you? What were you thinking? This is something a novice twenty-something filmmaker would do. Oh, right. But this is why watching War, Inc. backwards helped the movie so much; the process cut out loads of unnecessary plot points till it was too late to matter. In the same way, I was able to watch the downslope of FHH without these moulting feathers of love annoying me. Hmm. Now Marnie liplocks some dude at the twenty-eight minute mark. I would never have predicted that. Oh, no, and then she osculates again three minutes later with her married-dude friend. I'm so glad I'm coming to this at the end and not at the beginning. Why? Because in the second half she's staring into the future without seeing beyond the walls of her room, locked in her head while her anger percolates unfelt somewhere down there lower in her body - after the drinking and smooching fail her - but I understood that, in the second half of the movie, without the presumptive romance-o-motivation of the first.No. I'm overreacting. Belay that last paragraph. I've been Hollywoodpavlovianized. This is not Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the last minute of Sleepless in Seattle or You've Got Mail. This is random lowkey young adult semijoyless evolutionary smootching, pebbles in a pond that cause no ripples. Marnie pretends that it didn't happen, isn't happening, and I'll do the same. Romance is a big deal for these kids, perhaps the biggest deal. My twenties were mostly a history of bad dates. Easy to put off career issues to the next decade while getting the living part right. So Booge perforce makes use of that, but not so much that we can't shrug when the lips meet, and then move on. But still, this series of fraught encounters with men, I don't know; quit beating the drum, Booge. This does remind me, though, that I watched the original Forsythe Saga backward. As with Marnie and Alex in the second half of FHH, something heavy had obviously gone on between Irene and Soames, and Fleur's life was constantly perturbed by it, but it seemed more romantic to me to not know what that something was, not to know what had happened - seemed more romantic than watching the first half and seeing whatever it was that happened actually happen. Thesis: nostalgia coupled with imagination is always stronger than dramatic invention, probably because lived experience, including the actual act of imagination, is more visceral than skoptophilia and its milder brethren.New-Age side note: Coincidence #1: Earlier in this screed I wrote a sentence using the word "evolutionary" and then I started FHH up again and watched the last ten minutes of the movie, which I hadn't seen yet (minutes 35 to 45) and Marnie says to Alex or Alex says to Marnie, "You're the most evolved person I know." Coincidence #2: Later that day, I went to Blockbuster to return Get Smart (I'm rating it "j" on a scale of 1 to q) and while there I picked up The Last Request, which somebody somewhere liked a little bit, and while I was checking out, the clerk asked me how I liked Get Smart and I said, Anne Hathaway is no Barbara Feldon, and when I got home and started The Last Request, there Barbara was, in a starring role. The odds of plucking up a Barbara Feldon movie at random? Antiginormous. Coincidence #3: Marnie's shirt has the number 18 on its back. I'm 18b. My daughter, I learned THE SAME DAY, is living in apartment #18 in her building on Concord St. Consult your Jung! These coincidental whorls in the universal fabric happened ON THE SAME DAY as Obama's election and mean that FHH is connected to the core zeitgeist of the planet. You read it here first.Propositions: (1) The first half of a movie is usually better than the second half when the movie is watched in normal order. (2) Watching the second half of a movie first often improves the movie. Sometimes, watching the second half is sufficient in itself. (3) Thus, perhaps whichever half you watch first is the best.I had to ask Wilson, who assigned this movie to me, what the last two spoken lines of the last scene were. They seemed crucial in defining the mood of the movie, but mumblecore being named mumblecore for a reason, I couldn't make out what Alex and Marnie said to each other. Fortunately, Wilson could. And those two lines bear out my contention, or so I think, that Bujalski is a deeply optimistic guy and FHH is, in the end, a celebration, not a paean. In that final scene, Marnie shows some anger, a desire to move out into the world, and a rejection of the feckless Alex. Good for her and good for a society and economy (knock on wood) where youth is able to rattle around a little. I watched a mumblecore movie made by Joe Swanberg a while back, in which the protagonists grow stronger in the face of Swanberg's efforts to render them helpless; Bujalski throws down some marbles in Marnie's path, but his affection for her never lets her fall hard enough to break anything.This film that launched a genre reminds us that being young and being old are two entirely different things. (Bujalski turned 30 this year.) http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/8/20/34167.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 8/20/2008 9:01:48 AM
Body: Mike Jones points to the above teaser for Tripping with Caveh, which he describes as “a nifty series in the making from I‘m a Sex Addict director Caveh Zahedi.” As the teaser explains, Tripping with Caveh did start out conceptually as the first in a series, allegedly inspired by John Lurie’s Fishing With John, but it ultimately became a single 30-minute short film, in which the filmmaker ate chocolate-coverage magic mushrooms with Will Oldham. The film was released in 2004––two years before the similarly-vibed Oldham vehicle Old Joy hit the festival circuit––and is now available for rental via GreenCine. In addition to the above trailer of sorts, there’s a clip from the film, of Caveh egging Oldham on to eat the mushrooms, on Zahedi’s web site. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:01:48 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog8/20/2008 9:01:48 AM Mike Jones points to the above teaser for Tripping with Caveh, which he describes as “a nifty series in the making from I‘m a Sex Addict director Caveh Zahedi.” As the teaser explains, Tripping with Caveh did start out conceptually as the first in a series, allegedly inspired by John Lurie’s Fishing With John, but it ultimately became a single 30-minute short film, in which the filmmaker ate chocolate-coverage magic mushrooms with Will Oldham. The film was released in 2004––two years before the similarly-vibed Oldham vehicle Old Joy hit the festival circuit––and is now available for rental via GreenCine. In addition to the above trailer of sorts, there’s a clip from the film, of Caveh egging Oldham on to eat the mushrooms, on Zahedi’s web site. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/8/20/34153.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 8/20/2008 9:01:12 AM
Body: Mike Jones points to the above teaser for Tripping with Caveh, which he describes as “a nifty series in the making from I‘m a Sex Addict director Caveh Zahedi.” As the teaser explains, Tripping with Caveh did start out conceptually as the first in a series, allegedly inspired by John Lurie’s Fishing With John, but it ultimately became a single 30-minute short film, in which the filmmaker ate chocolate-coverage magic mushrooms with Will Oldham. The film was released in 2004––two years before the similarly-vibed Oldham vehicle Old Joy hit the festival circuit––and is now available for rental via GreenCine. In addition to the above trailer of sorts, there’s a clip from the film, of Caveh egging Oldham on to eat the mushrooms, on Zahedi’s web site. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:01:12 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com8/20/2008 9:01:12 AM Mike Jones points to the above teaser for Tripping with Caveh, which he describes as “a nifty series in the making from I‘m a Sex Addict director Caveh Zahedi.” As the teaser explains, Tripping with Caveh did start out conceptually as the first in a series, allegedly inspired by John Lurie’s Fishing With John, but it ultimately became a single 30-minute short film, in which the filmmaker ate chocolate-coverage magic mushrooms with Will Oldham. The film was released in 2004––two years before the similarly-vibed Oldham vehicle Old Joy hit the festival circuit––and is now available for rental via GreenCine. In addition to the above trailer of sorts, there’s a clip from the film, of Caveh egging Oldham on to eat the mushrooms, on Zahedi’s web site. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/5/23/29847.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 5/23/2008 3:01:20 PM
Body: Who would have thought, in 2006, when Old Joy spent a year slowly gathering critical steam after having been all but ignored at Sundance, that Kelly Reichardt’s next film would occasion an item in PEOPLE Magazine? “Michelle Williams Dazzles at Cannes Film Festival,” goes the headline of the story by Brenda Rodriguez. Last night’s Wendy & Lucy red carpet was the first that the actress walked since the death of former partner Heath Ledger, and for the tabloids that’s a major hook. Looking down from the balcony last night at the Debussy, it was a trip to watch the Chanel-clad former Dawson’s Creek star stand on the stage at one end of a line that included Reichardt, Old Joy/Wendy & Lucy producer Anish Savjani, and filmmaker/Wendy & Lucy producer and co-star Larry Fessenden. When a film this small gets thrust under a spotlight this bright, you worry about that the movie itself will be overwhelmed. I do hope this unlikely attention helps Wendy & Lucy get seen, but coming in with high expectations(Old Joy was one of my favorite films of its year), I was a bit underwhelmed. Here, as in Old Joy, Reichardt is concerned with a “normal” person’s collision with life on the margins of society. Williams plays Wendy, a young woman driving with her dog Lucy to Alaska to try to find work at a canning factory. When the film begins, she’s low on cash but at least she has a plan, and her run-in around a bonfire with an apparent bunch of hippie vagrants (including Joy star Will Oldham) suggests that permanent rootlessness is not part of it. But Wendy’s car breaks down before she can get out of town, and over a series of days one thing goes wrong after another, ultimately forcing Wendy to abandon all plans in order to survive. Anti-costumed as an unassuming hipster (short brown hair, sneakers, hoodie), Williams slips seamlessly into the Reichardt’s familiar naturalism, to the point where even when the story requires hysterics, they seem real. And the bleakness of the film’s suburban Pacific Northwest locations effectively heightens Wendy’s increasing anxiety and hopelessness. But there was a hypnotic quality to Old Joy that’s missing here, sparked by the central relationship’s constantly complex combination of tension, melancholy, frustration, set in a climate of transcendent beauty. Wendy & Lucy has the bleak, but it never explores the light. It hits its single tone perfectly, but it’s still a single tone. Philippe Garrel’s La Frontière de l’aube may be falling to the same fate. This is the first Garrel film to make it to Cannes since 1983, and his presence here was apparently not welcome. As you know, I think the movie is great; many, many people do not, The premiere crowd gave the virtually de rigueur standing ovation, but the press screening ended with boos. Variety trashed it, with Leslie Felperin’s brashly dismissive review teaching us that using the word “bitch” to describe a female protagonist is apparently compatible with the publication’s patented Slanguage. It’s that old double-edged sword: if all goes well, a festival like Cannes can be the platform of an independent filmmaker’s dreams, but a single press screening-gone-bad can make for a crippling comedown. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Fri, 23 May 2008 19:01:20 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog5/23/2008 3:01:20 PM Who would have thought, in 2006, when Old Joy spent a year slowly gathering critical steam after having been all but ignored at Sundance, that Kelly Reichardt’s next film would occasion an item in PEOPLE Magazine? “Michelle Williams Dazzles at Cannes Film Festival,” goes the headline of the story by Brenda Rodriguez. Last night’s Wendy & Lucy red carpet was the first that the actress walked since the death of former partner Heath Ledger, and for the tabloids that’s a major hook. Looking down from the balcony last night at the Debussy, it was a trip to watch the Chanel-clad former Dawson’s Creek star stand on the stage at one end of a line that included Reichardt, Old Joy/Wendy & Lucy producer Anish Savjani, and filmmaker/Wendy & Lucy producer and co-star Larry Fessenden. When a film this small gets thrust under a spotlight this bright, you worry about that the movie itself will be overwhelmed. I do hope this unlikely attention helps Wendy & Lucy get seen, but coming in with high expectations(Old Joy was one of my favorite films of its year), I was a bit underwhelmed. Here, as in Old Joy, Reichardt is concerned with a “normal” person’s collision with life on the margins of society. Williams plays Wendy, a young woman driving with her dog Lucy to Alaska to try to find work at a canning factory. When the film begins, she’s low on cash but at least she has a plan, and her run-in around a bonfire with an apparent bunch of hippie vagrants (including Joy star Will Oldham) suggests that permanent rootlessness is not part of it. But Wendy’s car breaks down before she can get out of town, and over a series of days one thing goes wrong after another, ultimately forcing Wendy to abandon all plans in order to survive. Anti-costumed as an unassuming hipster (short brown hair, sneakers, hoodie), Williams slips seamlessly into the Reichardt’s familiar naturalism, to the point where even when the story requires hysterics, they seem real. And the bleakness of the film’s suburban Pacific Northwest locations effectively heightens Wendy’s increasing anxiety and hopelessness. But there was a hypnotic quality to Old Joy that’s missing here, sparked by the central relationship’s constantly complex combination of tension, melancholy, frustration, set in a climate of transcendent beauty. Wendy & Lucy has the bleak, but it never explores the light. It hits its single tone perfectly, but it’s still a single tone. Philippe Garrel’s La Frontière de l’aube may be falling to the same fate. This is the first Garrel film to make it to Cannes since 1983, and his presence here was apparently not welcome. As you know, I think the movie is great; many, many people do not, The premiere crowd gave the virtually de rigueur standing ovation, but the press screening ended with boos. Variety trashed it, with Leslie Felperin’s brashly dismissive review teaching us that using the word “bitch” to describe a female protagonist is apparently compatible with the publication’s patented Slanguage. It’s that old double-edged sword: if all goes well, a festival like Cannes can be the platform of an independent filmmaker’s dreams, but a single press screening-gone-bad can make for a crippling comedown. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/5/23/29846.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 5/23/2008 3:01:12 PM
Body: Who would have thought, in 2006, when Old Joy spent a year slowly gathering critical steam after having been all but ignored at Sundance, that Kelly Reichardt’s next film would occasion an item in PEOPLE Magazine? “Michelle Williams Dazzles at Cannes Film Festival,” goes the headline of the story by Brenda Rodriguez. Last night’s Wendy & Lucy red carpet was the first that the actress walked since the death of former partner Heath Ledger, and for the tabloids that’s a major hook. Looking down from the balcony last night at the Debussy, it was a trip to watch the Chanel-clad former Dawson’s Creek star stand on the stage at one end of a line that included Reichardt, Old Joy/Wendy & Lucy producer Anish Savjani, and filmmaker/Wendy & Lucy producer and co-star Larry Fessenden. When a film this small gets thrust under a spotlight this bright, you worry about that the movie itself will be overwhelmed. I do hope this unlikely attention helps Wendy & Lucy get seen, but coming in with high expectations(Old Joy was one of my favorite films of its year), I was a bit underwhelmed. Here, as in Old Joy, Reichardt is concerned with a “normal” person’s collision with life on the margins of society. Williams plays Wendy, a young woman driving with her dog Lucy to Alaska to try to find work at a canning factory. When the film begins, she’s low on cash but at least she has a plan, and her run-in around a bonfire with an apparent bunch of hippie vagrants (including Joy star Will Oldham) suggests that permanent rootlessness is not part of it. But Wendy’s car breaks down before she can get out of town, and over a series of days one thing goes wrong after another, ultimately forcing Wendy to abandon all plans in order to survive. Anti-costumed as an unassuming hipster (short brown hair, sneakers, hoodie), Williams slips seamlessly into the Reichardt’s familiar naturalism, to the point where even when the story requires hysterics, they seem real. And the bleakness of the film’s suburban Pacific Northwest locations effectively heightens Wendy’s increasing anxiety and hopelessness. But there was a hypnotic quality to Old Joy that’s missing here, sparked by the central relationship’s constantly complex combination of tension, melancholy, frustration, set in a climate of transcendent beauty. Wendy & Lucy has the bleak, but it never explores the light. It hits its single tone perfectly, but it’s still a single tone. Philippe Garrel’s La Frontière de l’aube may be falling to the same fate. This is the first Garrel film to make it to Cannes since 1983, and his presence here was apparently not welcome. As you know, I think the movie is great; many, many people do not, The premiere crowd gave the virtually de rigueur standing ovation, but the press screening ended with boos. Variety trashed it, with Leslie Felperin’s brashly dismissive review teaching us that using the word “bitch” to describe a female protagonist is apparently compatible with the publication’s patented Slanguage. It’s that old double-edged sword: if all goes well, a festival like Cannes can be the platform of an independent filmmaker’s dreams, but a single press screening-gone-bad can make for a crippling comedown. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Fri, 23 May 2008 19:01:12 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com5/23/2008 3:01:12 PM Who would have thought, in 2006, when Old Joy spent a year slowly gathering critical steam after having been all but ignored at Sundance, that Kelly Reichardt’s next film would occasion an item in PEOPLE Magazine? “Michelle Williams Dazzles at Cannes Film Festival,” goes the headline of the story by Brenda Rodriguez. Last night’s Wendy & Lucy red carpet was the first that the actress walked since the death of former partner Heath Ledger, and for the tabloids that’s a major hook. Looking down from the balcony last night at the Debussy, it was a trip to watch the Chanel-clad former Dawson’s Creek star stand on the stage at one end of a line that included Reichardt, Old Joy/Wendy & Lucy producer Anish Savjani, and filmmaker/Wendy & Lucy producer and co-star Larry Fessenden. When a film this small gets thrust under a spotlight this bright, you worry about that the movie itself will be overwhelmed. I do hope this unlikely attention helps Wendy & Lucy get seen, but coming in with high expectations(Old Joy was one of my favorite films of its year), I was a bit underwhelmed. Here, as in Old Joy, Reichardt is concerned with a “normal” person’s collision with life on the margins of society. Williams plays Wendy, a young woman driving with her dog Lucy to Alaska to try to find work at a canning factory. When the film begins, she’s low on cash but at least she has a plan, and her run-in around a bonfire with an apparent bunch of hippie vagrants (including Joy star Will Oldham) suggests that permanent rootlessness is not part of it. But Wendy’s car breaks down before she can get out of town, and over a series of days one thing goes wrong after another, ultimately forcing Wendy to abandon all plans in order to survive. Anti-costumed as an unassuming hipster (short brown hair, sneakers, hoodie), Williams slips seamlessly into the Reichardt’s familiar naturalism, to the point where even when the story requires hysterics, they seem real. And the bleakness of the film’s suburban Pacific Northwest locations effectively heightens Wendy’s increasing anxiety and hopelessness. But there was a hypnotic quality to Old Joy that’s missing here, sparked by the central relationship’s constantly complex combination of tension, melancholy, frustration, set in a climate of transcendent beauty. Wendy & Lucy has the bleak, but it never explores the light. It hits its single tone perfectly, but it’s still a single tone. Philippe Garrel’s La Frontière de l’aube may be falling to the same fate. This is the first Garrel film to make it to Cannes since 1983, and his presence here was apparently not welcome. As you know, I think the movie is great; many, many people do not, The premiere crowd gave the virtually de rigueur standing ovation, but the press screening ended with boos. Variety trashed it, with Leslie Felperin’s brashly dismissive review teaching us that using the word “bitch” to describe a female protagonist is apparently compatible with the publication’s patented Slanguage. It’s that old double-edged sword: if all goes well, a festival like Cannes can be the platform of an independent filmmaker’s dreams, but a single press screening-gone-bad can make for a crippling comedown. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/lopezdash/archive/2008/4/24/27747.aspx Post By: lopezdash
Post To: The Movie Blog
Post Date: 4/24/2008 11:35:06 AM
Body: I was surprised to see this reported over at Women & Hollywood: "[at Cannes] only 1.5 films out of 19 are directed by women." They include: La Mujer Sin Cabeza directed by Argentine Lucrecia Martel and Linha de Passe which is co-directed by Daniela Thomas and Walter Salles.Un Certain Regard is a bit better with 2.5 out of 19. Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir's film debut Milh Hadha Al-Bahr (Salt of the Sea) is in the lineup along with and Kelly Reichardt, (Old Joy) with Wendy and Lucy starring Michelle Williams. Joana Hadjithomas co-directed Jeveux Voir with Khali Joreige.Other women directed films include: Jennifer Lynch's Surveillance; Marina Zenovich's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and Alison Thompson's The Third Wave.
]]>Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:35:06 GMTlopezdashThe Movie Blog4/24/2008 11:35:06 AMI was surprised to see this reported over at Women &amp; Hollywood: "[at Cannes] only 1.5 films out of 19 are directed by women." They include: La Mujer Sin Cabeza directed by Argentine Lucrecia Martel and Linha de Passe which is co-directed by Daniela Thomas and Walter Salles.Un Certain Regard is a bit better with 2.5 out of 19. Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir's film debut Milh Hadha Al-Bahr (Salt of the Sea) is in the lineup along with and Kelly Reichardt, (Old Joy) with Wendy and Lucy starring Michelle Williams. Joana Hadjithomas co-directed Jeveux Voir with Khali Joreige.Other women directed films include: Jennifer Lynch's Surveillance; Marina Zenovich's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and Alison Thompson's The Third Wave. http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/4/16/27376.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 4/16/2008 7:00:57 PM
Body: Over our five days at the Institute, we kept returning to serious of binary oppositions: print versus online; doing it for the passion versus doing it for the pay; criticism as consumer reporting versus advocacy for artists. With such circular questions, it’s hard to get anywhere, making it easy to lapse into what filmmaker Kelly Reichardt jokingly referred to at one point as “glass half full of shit” thinking. But out of the morass of questions and unresolvable clashes came an emphasis on compromise and balance: nearly every guest speaker made some mention of making trade offs, of covering for noble failures with less-noble successes. This seemed most prevalent on Saturday, with Reichardt and Tom Kalin’s independent filmmaker panel; Ryan Werner of IFC and Don Krim from KINO representing indie distribution; and, particularly, the online film criticism panel, featuring Eugene Hernandez (indieWIRE), Michael Koresky (Reverse Shot), Matt Zoller Seitz (The House Next Door and The New York Times) and Stu Van Airsdale (The Reeler and Defamer). The issue of blogs as an alternative/corrective to the mainstream media came up early in the day, with Seitz’s explanation for how The House Next Door got started. “I was really irritated by the negative reviews of Terrence Malick’s The New World,” he said, “And I just wanted to write about how great it was like every day.” Though Matt experimented with Google and Amazon’s ad programs, both “were just a pain in the ass to maintain,” and The House Next Door evolved into a not-for-profit clearinghouse for mostly-serious material that an interested community of professional and amateur writers wouldn’t be able to publish elsewhere. It’s an employed film critic’s outlet for non-commercial writing, but it’s also an effort to create a greater balance in the types of voices that get to weigh in on film culture. But to established print critics who whisper to him in confidence that they’d love to have an outlet to write the kind of stuff that appears daily, for no compensation, on The House Next Door, Seitz has no sympathy. “Where do you get off with your sense of superiority, Print, if you constrain your writers in a way that [blogs] don’t?” Seitz says what’s happening online is not in opposition to journalism––it’s returning journalism to what it should be. “Blogs have returned human communication to its natural state,” he said. “Journalism has been a white collar profession for about 20 years now, and it didn’t used to be…a lot of the defense that critics feel has to do with impoliteness.” Of course, in a session just the day before, the lead critic of the New York Times had all but loosened his tie in discomfort at the very mention of the blogosphere, with the stated problem being comment section vitriol. Seitz referred to this factor as “Assholism,” in regards to which he shrugged, “There are certain people who only exist to show up on websites in order to tell you what an idiot you are.” He compared the blog space to high school debate: even though arguments get vicious, “there are rules, and you don’t take it personally.” Newly-minted Defamer Stu VanAirsdale, who usually keeps at least part of a foot in the mainstream print world, concurred. “Blogs are famously kind of a caustic environment. I’m honest, maybe to a fault, but if something’s bullshit, I’m going to say it’s bullshit. That doesn’t mean I’m right, it just means I have an opinion. The print loyalty is absolutely afraid of that dialogue, and they can’t conceive of a world where they’d have to defend themselves.” Stu noted that he had been hired to inject a sense of film culture into Defamer, a site maybe best known for posting images of Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch, captured by former editor Mark Lisanti with cellphone cam pointed at his TV. Such successes for the site have apparently been few and far between of late, and with Defamer traffic down over the past twelve months, Stu noted that his talents were seen as desirable because they could potentially attract a new audience. One of my fellow Institute fellows, New York Magazine blogger Dan Kois, expressed surprise that famously lowest common denominator-mad Defamer publisher Nick Denton would consider deeper content as a viable traffic raising solution. But as Stu pointed out, the site already has the celeb sex tape beat covered by other writers. With that steady stream of traffic taken care of, Defamer can afford to take a risk on someone like Stu, presumably in the hopes of attracting a wider audience. Over and over again, these discussions came back to compromise. Tom Kalin needed to cast an actress of Julianne Moore’s caliber in order to get funding for his incest-infused true crime movie Savage Grace; Julianne Moore can only make Savage Grace because she pays both her own mortgage and rent on her stardom/bankability by making movies like Next. Filmmakers care primarily about their movies seeing theatrical release, but as Ryan Werner pointed out, VOD is a new revenue stream that can not only support the cost of a theatrical release, but it supports long-term word of mouth for all ancillaries. Seitz even talked about bargaining with an editor at the Newark Star-Ledger: he’d get to do an interview he really wanted to do, if he interviewed Jerry Springer as well. In my first post about attending the Institute, I mentioned something about how I was heading to Queens to confront an existential void. I can’t say that the future looks appreciably less murky just yet, although maybe it will when it dust settles a bit. At least I know I have one thing to look forward to: a never-ending series of deals with devils. Maybe it’s not “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”; maybe it’s more like “if you let me scratch your eyes out, I’ll make it worth your while.” Does it matter, as long as the rent gets paid? Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:00:57 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog4/16/2008 7:00:57 PMOver our five days at the Institute, we kept returning to serious of binary oppositions: print versus online; doing it for the passion versus doing it for the pay; criticism as consumer reporting versus advocacy for artists. With such circular questions, it’s hard to get anywhere, making it easy to lapse into what filmmaker Kelly Reichardt jokingly referred to at one point as “glass half full of shit” thinking. But out of the morass of questions and unresolvable clashes came an emphasis on compromise and balance: nearly every guest speaker made some mention of making trade offs, of covering for noble failures with less-noble successes. This seemed most prevalent on Saturday, with Reichardt and Tom Kalin’s independent filmmaker panel; Ryan Werner of IFC and Don Krim from KINO representing indie distribution; and, particularly, the online film criticism panel, featuring Eugene Hernandez (indieWIRE), Michael Koresky (Reverse Shot), Matt Zoller Seitz (The House Next Door and The New York Times) and Stu Van Airsdale (The Reeler and Defamer). The issue of blogs as an alternative/corrective to the mainstream media came up early in the day, with Seitz’s explanation for how The House Next Door got started. “I was really irritated by the negative reviews of Terrence Malick’s The New World,” he said, “And I just wanted to write about how great it was like every day.” Though Matt experimented with Google and Amazon’s ad programs, both “were just a pain in the ass to maintain,” and The House Next Door evolved into a not-for-profit clearinghouse for mostly-serious material that an interested community of professional and amateur writers wouldn’t be able to publish elsewhere. It’s an employed film critic’s outlet for non-commercial writing, but it’s also an effort to create a greater balance in the types of voices that get to weigh in on film culture. But to established print critics who whisper to him in confidence that they’d love to have an outlet to write the kind of stuff that appears daily, for no compensation, on The House Next Door, Seitz has no sympathy. “Where do you get off with your sense of superiority, Print, if you constrain your writers in a way that [blogs] don’t?” Seitz says what’s happening online is not in opposition to journalism––it’s returning journalism to what it should be. “Blogs have returned human communication to its natural state,” he said. “Journalism has been a white collar profession for about 20 years now, and it didn’t used to be…a lot of the defense that critics feel has to do with impoliteness.” Of course, in a session just the day before, the lead critic of the New York Times had all but loosened his tie in discomfort at the very mention of the blogosphere, with the stated problem being comment section vitriol. Seitz referred to this factor as “Assholism,” in regards to which he shrugged, “There are certain people who only exist to show up on websites in order to tell you what an idiot you are.” He compared the blog space to high school debate: even though arguments get vicious, “there are rules, and you don’t take it personally.” Newly-minted Defamer Stu VanAirsdale, who usually keeps at least part of a foot in the mainstream print world, concurred. “Blogs are famously kind of a caustic environment. I’m honest, maybe to a fault, but if something’s bullshit, I’m going to say it’s bullshit. That doesn’t mean I’m right, it just means I have an opinion. The print loyalty is absolutely afraid of that dialogue, and they can’t conceive of a world where they’d have to defend themselves.” Stu noted that he had been hired to inject a sense of film culture into Defamer, a site maybe best known for posting images of Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch, captured by former editor Mark Lisanti with cellphone cam pointed at his TV. Such successes for the site have apparently been few and far between of late, and with Defamer traffic down over the past twelve months, Stu noted that his talents were seen as desirable because they could potentially attract a new audience. One of my fellow Institute fellows, New York Magazine blogger Dan Kois, expressed surprise that famously lowest common denominator-mad Defamer publisher Nick Denton would consider deeper content as a viable traffic raising solution. But as Stu pointed out, the site already has the celeb sex tape beat covered by other writers. With that steady stream of traffic taken care of, Defamer can afford to take a risk on someone like Stu, presumably in the hopes of attracting a wider audience. Over and over again, these discussions came back to compromise. Tom Kalin needed to cast an actress of Julianne Moore’s caliber in order to get funding for his incest-infused true crime movie Savage Grace; Julianne Moore can only make Savage Grace because she pays both her own mortgage and rent on her stardom/bankability by making movies like Next. Filmmakers care primarily about their movies seeing theatrical release, but as Ryan Werner pointed out, VOD is a new revenue stream that can not only support the cost of a theatrical release, but it supports long-term word of mouth for all ancillaries. Seitz even talked about bargaining with an editor at the Newark Star-Ledger: he’d get to do an interview he really wanted to do, if he interviewed Jerry Springer as well. In my first post about attending the Institute, I mentioned something about how I was heading to Queens to confront an existential void. I can’t say that the future looks appreciably less murky just yet, although maybe it will when it dust settles a bit. At least I know I have one thing to look forward to: a never-ending series of deals with devils. Maybe it’s not “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”; maybe it’s more like “if you let me scratch your eyes out, I’ll make it worth your while.” Does it matter, as long as the rent gets paid? Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/friendship/MemberTagFilms.aspxfriendship
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