SpoutBlog on spout.com

Under discussion:

Iron Man  (2008)

Thor  (2009)

In case you were like me and didn’t stick around after the credits of Iron Man this weekend, you may be in luck. If one of a number of YouTube clips is still up by the time you read this post, then you can kind of see (in a bad quality video capture) Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. approaching Tony “Iron Man” Stark about something called “The Avengers Initiative.” (If the clip above is down, try this one, or try Movieweb’s video, or else find one I’ve missed … or, of course, go see the movie again).

Some non-comic fans who may have stuck around may have wondered who this guy is and what he’s talking about. So, just in time to coincide with the box office news this morning, Marvel Studios officially announced its lineup of adaptations through the next few years. And The Avengers is among the titles, coming to theaters in July 2011.

Prior to that superhero team movie, though, we’ll be getting Thor (directed by Stardust’s Matthew Vaughn) and Iron Man 2, both in 2010, and The First Avenger: Captain America in 2011. For those who don’t know, Thor, Iron Man and Captain America are part of the Avengers. As is Ant Man, who is also set up for his own film (written by Edgar Wright), though a release date for that one hasn’t yet been decided.

Under discussion:

Sex and the City  (2008)

“Smell is very nostalgic.”

Sarah Jessica Parker is talking about her latest perfume. She’s also, indirectly, talking about her appeal, her brand, what she does for a living, the reason why an audience in the low triple digits (mostly female, mostly younger than the actress by a decade) has rushed to the Times Center on a Friday evening exactly four weeks before the premiere of the Sex and the City movie, to see her interviewed on stage by journalist William J. Castle. I was invited to the event as a member of the press; I accepted the invitation in the spirit of making an honest effort to learn something about why adult women find Parker and the Sex and the City phenomena appealing.

The two women sitting next to me, who breathlessly climbed over my legs a few minutes after the program began, left behind their own fragrance trail: hair products, manicures, menthol cigarettes and pink drinks. A surface-only snap-judgement says these women were a representative sample of those in attendance: young(ish), upper-middle-class, not particularly cosmopolitan but enthusiastic about both cosmopolitans and Cosmopolitan.

I assume most of these gals were not members of the press, which means that most of them spent $25 on the privilege of spending an hour in the same room as Sarah Jessica Parker, which probably indicates that some or most of them are die hard Sex and the City fans. Sex and the City fandom is a curious, powerful thing: there are women for whom the show was not just a show, but an articulation of a kind of post-post feminism in which conspicuous consumption and low-level self-destruction become a kind of political statement, where concerns about independence and empowerment have become so moot that something as seemingly provincial and outdated as “marrying well” has come back around as a reasonable goal for working women. In other words, it allows well-heeled, probably intelligent but politically unconscious women to do what they would have done anyway, and feel really, really good about it.

The women who became attached to Sex and the City as an avenue towards feeling good have spent the past four years deprived, able only to replay the DVDs or watch sanitized reruns on TBS in an attempt to recycle old highs by tapping into overused veins. With the series no longer generating new fantasy images, the fans can only essentially masturbate to their memories of the old fantasy. The arrival of the Sex and the City movie and its attended media storm represents these junkies’ best chance for a last hit.

If moderator Carter’s interest in the matter can be seen as reflective of his audience’s desires, these hungry junkies have apparently supplemented their consumption over the years by supporting Sarah Jessica Parker: The Brand. About a third of the hour-long Times Center conversation is devoted to what the actress has been doing in the four years since her most famous gig came to a close, and for Carter this means conspicuously avoiding mention of films like Failure to Launch (which, it should be noted, made real money––it’s the 27th highest grossing romantic comedy of all time, right behind When Harry Met Sally… at 26 but ahead of The Wedding Singer and Moonstruck) in order to discuss Parker’s fashion line, her fragrances, her shoe closet. Carter also fails to inquire about Parker’s gig shilling Clairol at-home hair dye; I wonder if this job could be seen to devalue Parker’s status as individual brand––and a brand based on some interpretation of individualism––demoting the actress into just another in a long line of gals paid to purr, “I’m worth it.”

About half-way through the show, the lights go down so we can watch the Sex and the City trailer. I’ve seen this before, of course, but the reaction of the audience suggest that most people in the room haven’t. I suddenly become aware that there’s not much of an overlap in demographics between the type of person who consumes media like Sex and the City, and the type of person who reads about movies on the internet. Perhaps this is why just being in this room makes me uncomfortable. Maybe there are some girls who are not a Carrie, a Samantha, a Miranda or a Charlotte––maybe there are some girls who are just nerdy.

In any case, the pubic hair jokes in the trailer get the biggest laughs, and this gets me thinking about the split between what we might as well call Sex and the City fangirls, and the kind of person we usually refer to as a fanboy. I imagine a 22 year-old boy who’s really into comic books, who, as I was sitting next to the pink martini ladies, was maybe lining up to see Iron Man, maybe for the second time. When I think of that boy, I imagine that he understands that a billionaire industrialist is not really going to build his own indestructible suit and rescue the innocent people of Afghanistan.

But Sex and the City exists on just as deep of a fantasy plane as any comic book world, and when I think of a Sex and the City fan, I imagine a 22 year-old girl who really believes that she’ll someday be rescued by a billionaire (industrialist or no). Am I just being unfair? I don’t know. I do know that during the brief Q & A session, the majority of questions asked by members of the audience had to do with the overlap between the real-life Sarah Jessica and the character of Carrie Bradshaw, with whom the actress has become synonymous, as if there’s something crucial about sorting out where fantasy ends and reality begins. It played as a managing of expectations and aspirations, as if each woman was really asking, “Best case scenario––how much of this fantasy is attainable?”

At one point during the evening, I wondered if there would be any celebrity for whom Carrie Bradshaw might give up her Friday night dinner date. I conclude that Carrie Bradshaw would not be one to assign aspirational value to a celebrity. I conclude that Carrie Bradshaw would rather be drinking. In this moment, I feel closer to Carrie Bradshaw than I ever have in my life.

Of the 14 films that I saw during Tribeca Film Festival, only three were so under-accomplished that they begged the question of why they were programmed in the first place. This is an improvement over past years. Meanwhile, I saw four films that qualify as serious discoveries. With the exception of Shane Meadows’ Somers Town, over which I’ve already raved, these films are imperfect but thrillingly risky, and fascinating in their flaws. It’s maybe worth noting that only one of these titles arrived in Tribeca as a World Premiere, and that film, The Guest of Cindy Sherman, is set and was made just blocks away from the festival’s theoretical (but no longer physical) home. It’s shocking that there isn’t currently a festival in New York City that’s seriously focused on celebrating locally-produced work. Tribeca, so in need of a refined identity, might want to take note that the niche is up for grabs.

My notes on each of the 14 films, in order of preference, follow after the jump.

1) Somers Town – see full review here.

2) The Guest of Cindy Sherman – The company responsible for helping this Sundance Channel-funded personal doc find theatrical ditribution has been circulating a statement from photographer Cindy Sherman, disavowing the movie, which tells the story of her five year relationship with co-director Paul H-O from the ex-boyfriend’s (generally smart and self-deprecating) point of view. “Against my better judgment, it was clearly unwise to cooperate with the project at its inception,” Sherman’s statement concludes. Several people I’ve spoken with think the statement must be a publicity stunt, because the actual film shows Sherman in nothing but a positive light. It’s not really even about her, as much as it’s about Paul, and his experience of going from punky-but-affectionate art-world outsider, to entering the upper echelon of the industry on Sherman’s arm, and ultimately becoming “downsized” both personally and professionally. In telling his own story, Paul also manages to encapsulate the massive changes in New York’s art scene over the past 20 years. Yes, it can be cringe-inducingly intimate, especially in the footage of the couple’s early flirtations, but for the most part, Sherman remains an enigma to both the audience and her boyfriend, and Paul H-O’s desire to tell all ultimately seems less opportunistic than bittersweet.

3) Sita Sings the Blues – see full review here.

4) Milky Way Liberation Front (pictured above)–– A messy little mind-**** from South Korea. This exercise in comedic meta-autobiography follows a young director to a film festival, where he struggles to put together a feature while his girlfriend is breaking up with him. Milky Way constantly slips back and forth between dream space, a film within-a-film, and more-or-less real time; it’s sometimes exhausting but always engagingly weird.

5) Lost Indulgence –– A haunting and beautifully shot drama about a woman left crippled in a taxi accident, who goes to live with the widowed wife and son of the taxi’s driver. I’m sure I would have rated this film higher, and would have had more to say about it, but I slept through most of the second half. Such are the casualties of film festivals, unfortunately. I hope to be able to catch it again elsewhere

6) Milosevic on Trial –– A fully competent and occasionally chilling account of the Serbian leader’s war crimes trial, based on actual court tapes and evidentiary video, this TV-style doc effectively transmits the drama and tension of the prosecution’s effort to convict a compulsive liar who had apparently frightened all potential witnesses into denial. It’s not much of a formal triumph, but the film does wrangle recent history into a nail-biter, and that’s an achievement.

7) The Objective –– Daniel Myrick’s Afghanistan-set follow-up to The Blair Witch Project isn’t a disaster…it’s just a boring, and unnecessarily obtuse, waste of an excitingly insane premise. See our preview here.

2001 –– 2001 is 2001––it looked breathtakingly great on Pace University’s big screen, and the experience of watching it with an audience is always a fun one (I can never predict where people are going to laugh). But the after screening discussion, involving a disparate cast of characters including Buzz Aldrin and Matthew Modine, was an unfocused disappointment.

9) Standard Operating Procedure –– see full review here.

10) My Marlon and Brando — Another sterling premise shot in the foot by shoddy execution. The storytelling is simply incompetent––I only understand what became of a major character because I read the press notes––so the fact that this film won an award at the festival for Best New Narrative Filmmaking is a bit baffling.

11) Fauberg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans –– A miscalculation on the part of Tribeca’s programmers, a deliberately pedestrian history lesson that would seem more appropriate screening in an elementary school library than in a wannabe-world class film festival.

12) The Chicken, The Fish, The King Crab –– A really artsy episode of Iron Chef, with suspense swapped out for subtitles. It’s fine, but again, it doesn’t really belong at a film festival.

13) The Wackness – See review, and know that it could be worse…

14) War, Inc — See review, and know that it doesn’t get any worse.