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Under discussion:

Michael Clayton  (2007)

There Will Be Blood  (2007)

No Country for Old Men  (2007)

No Oscars host has done better Best Picture parodies than Billy Crystal. And no awards show has had better parodies than the MTV Movie Awards (specifically the Max Fischer Players reenactments from the 1999 show). So it is interesting that MTV’s movies editor Josh Horowitz has made a video in which he’s aping Crystal’s opening shtick. And comparatively, he’s not very good. Some of it is kind of funny, including the whole No Country for Old Men phone call, especially the line about Juno being Abigail Breslin with the mouth of Dennis Miller, and the bit about how in There Will Be Blood Kevin J. O’Connor’s mustache seemed to be trying to compete with Daniel Day Lewis’. But I was completely bored by the Michael Clayton bit.

It is at least funnier than that Vanity Fair “In Memoriam” thing. And that There Will Be Blood thing with David Spade. But it’s not quite as funny as the Diablo Cody video from earlier today.

The video is worth watching for one reason, though: Kurt Loder, scarier than ever. The next time I see him in person, I might actually run away screaming. He’s definitely more frightening than The Ruins looks. I have to say, though, as creepy as he is, I can’t wait to see him in Big Trouble in Little China 2.

Anyway, good luck to Jon Stewart this Sunday. And remember, if you’re in NYC, you can watch his monologue and the rest of the ceremony with your friends at Spout and our friends at The Reeler. See here for details.

Under discussion:

The Ruins  (2008)

Cloverfield  (2008)

I don’t normally pay notice to movies like The Ruins. What can I say? I just don’t care about generic horror. But for some reason (accidental? good marketing?) its trailer was shown twice, almost back to back, when I went to see Cloverfield, and it stuck in my head. However, merely having the thing in my memory doesn’t mean I’m interested. I didn’t think it looked good the first time around, and the second time it was met with much heckling and laughter from the rest of the audience. Much of this was obviously due to the awkwardness of the reappearance alone, but also the movie’s apparent faults, much of them simply based on conventional cheesiness, were certainly heightened by their repetition.

Now, with this new Red Band trailer (age-checked here, if the YouTube fails), I feel like I’m seeing the trailer again for a third time. Actually, I think the original cut made the movie look scarier. Typically, the reason to have a Red Band trailer is to pull out the stops and show things you can’t have in a regular version, such as nastier gore, some swear words and, if you really want to go all out, some naked flesh. But this has none of that. For a minute I thought this was one of those illogical Red Band trailers made for PG-13-rated horror movies. But The Ruins is in fact Rated R, and is such for “strong violence and gruesome images, language, some sexuality and nudity.” Thank goodness the MPAA has let us know what’s in the movie, since DreamWorks’ marketing team fails to share any of the goods.

So, I’m confused. Why did I have to prove my age to see this trailer (before finding it on YouTube, that is)? This is the tamest (and lamest) Red Band trailer ever.

We’re not going to start posting reviews of SXSW films until the week of the festival, but having already seen several via screeners, I can promise you that when the time comes I’ll have much, much more to say about Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy. A beautifully shot examination of 24 hours in the lives of a boy and girl who hook up at a party in San Francisco, Jenkins’ film has already been compared to certain other handmade movies about the personal dramas of lost urban youth. But Melancholy is politically engaged and formally ambitious in ways that films of this budget level often are not. More than a relationship drama, it’s a portrait of the city in which its set, a grafting of tentative romance onto the city’s very real, very rocky terrain of race, class and cultural conflict.

Above, you’ll find the Medicine for Melancholy trailer; below, Barry Jenkins answers the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody. The film premieres at 2:30pm on Sunday, March 9, at the SXSW Film Festival.

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

“It’s like Before Sunset meets Do The Right Thing???with a dash of the French New Wave to sweeten the pot.” And yes???I know that makes no sense.

I’ve never considered doing the “It’s like this meets that” game with this film, but looking at the descriptor above I must admit, that pretty much sums it up. Two strangers meet and spend the day together following a random romantic liaison (Before Sunset) while pondering the shifting dynamics of place and identity as it directly relates to their locale (Do The Right Thing). The New Wave references are a bit more obtuse, but???they’re there

It had been quite some time since I’d made my last film???my undergraduate thesis short for film school???and I’d just been through a crushing breakup when I sat down to write the film. I needed direction and an outlet, and making a film seemed the best way to satisfy both. You go four years without doing something and you begin to doubt your abilities. For me, this film is as much a gut check as an artistic endeavor.

The entire crew, all seven of us including the editor and save the sound guy, are graduates of the film school at Florida State. We made this fast and I mean FAST: production ended November 15th and we were sending screeners to festivals by December 27th. Making a movie that quickly is like dancing to a kick ass song: sound coalesces to a hum, vision blurs, the slipping of time, and then???it’s done.

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