SpoutBlog on spout.com

July 4th weekend is typically reserved for huge blockbuster releases, particularly those starring Will Smith and/or showcasing America as a force not to be messed with (against aliens or the British). Very, very rarely does an independent release even bother trying to go up against the studios during the big holiday. For example, the only option for an American indie we have this weekend is IFC’s wrong-holidayed I Hate Valentine’s Day, which is uneventfully the second Nia Vardalos movie in a month. And this year we don’t even have the usual sort of event movie debuting on July 4th weekend. There’s just Public Enemies and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Boring.

Isn’t it ironic that independent films can’t open on Independence Day? It would make sense for there to be a number of good U.S.-produced indies opening this week, going up against the big guys with their American spirit (including their disregard for broad, worldwide marketability) and evidence of the American Dream come true. Wondering if there have ever been great independents released at this time of year, we took at look at the last 30 years of cinema and found only a few significant titles.

See what little (American) films bucked the 4th of July weekend release system after the jump:

The Decline of Western Civilization

Distributor: Nu Image Films
Release date: July 1, 1981
Studio offerings: Stripes; For Your Eyes Only; The Great Muppet Caper; Dragonslayer; S.O.B.

Leave it to the punks to infiltrate America’s birthday tradition. This first installment in Penelope Spheeris’ music documentary trilogy focuses on the L.A. punk scene and features live performances by X, Fear, The Germs, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, The Bags and Catholic Discipline. It actually didn’t have much simultaneous studio competition, as Blade Edwards’ Hollywood satire S.O.B. appears to have been the only other new film debuting for the holiday weekend. This is likely because a lot of blockbusters opened the weekend before. Interestingly enough those releases include a subversive comedy lampooning the U.S. military (Stripes) and two films that are a bit too catered to Anglophiles (the 007 installment For Your Eyes Only and the London-set Great Muppet Caper) considering what we celebrate this time of year. No wonder the great American hero Superman held onto the box office crown (with Superman II) for his third weekend in a row that Independence Day.

Surf Nazis Must Die

Distributor: Troma Entertainment
Release date: July 3, 1987
Studio offerings: Innerspace; Adventures in Babysitting

It was somewhat appropriate for Troma to open this low-budget genre flick over the holiday weekend because it features a hero named Washington who battles a bunch of Neo-Nazis led by a guy named Adolph. And obviously the surfing stuff makes it ripe for summertime. The problem is, we’re not 100% positive that Surf Nazis Must Die actually hit theaters on this date (as the IMDb lists it), because Janet Maslin’s New York Times review points out that it opened in NYC in October of that year. And Box Office Mojo has no record of the film. Troma didn’t reply to our email request, either, so we’re just going to believe that it debuted so perfectly this weekend 12 years ago. If you were one of the few moviegoers not keeping Dragnet and Spaceballs in their lead spots over that holiday weekend and remember the truth, please do let us know.

Slacker

Distributor: Orion Classics
Release date: July 5, 1991
Studio offerings: Terminator 2: Judgment Day; Problem Child 2

This seminal indie opened a day after the holiday, but its time of release was certainly intentional. Richard Linklater’s debut is a piece of Americana and displays a side of this country that Hollywood never could. Filled with bohemian characters, many talking about anarchy, conspiracy theories and other subversive topics, the plotless film fits in with the initial theme of Independence Day: revolution. And in a way it also started a revolution for independence in the film industry due to how influential it was on American filmmaking over the next decade. Slacker may not have reached the amount of people T2 did, but it reached the right people at the right time. Linklater must have remembered how successful he was at releasing an indie for Independence Day, because 13 years later his Before Sunset debuted in theaters on July 2 up against Spider-Man 2.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

Distributor: Sony Classics
Release date: June 28, 2006
Studio offerings: Superman Returns; The Devil Wears Prada

Another film subversively focused strictly on an American issue, the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? takes on the U.S. auto industry (specifically General Motors) and the U.S. government as its sort-of enemies while depicting the short history of GM’s EV1 electric car and mourning the vehicle’s demise. The film is primarily a protest of Washington and Detroit’s lack of concern for global warming and energy efficiency and seeks a revolution in both the Capitol and American car manufacturing. Again Superman won the 4th of July weekend box office, even though this time he didn’t specifically represent the American way.

The Wackness

Distributor: Sony Classics
Release date: July 3, 2008
Studio offerings: Hancock

Last year, Sony’s specialty division went for another 4th of July opening with an indie alternative to bloated blockbuster superhero fare. This time it wasn’t a documentary, though. It was, however, another interesting look at a specific part of America (and Americana) at another interesting time. Set in NYC in the summer of 1994, The Wackness is not a protest but a celebration of a certain freedom we still don’t actually have in the U.S.: the freedom to smoke marijuana. And being pro-pot, the movie has a connection with the annual Smoke-In that occurs in Washington, D.C., every 4th of July. Also released the same weekend was the documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, about the very American, very subversive, very revolutionary writer.

Other Independence Day indies include Day of the Dead (1985), The Clearing, Twist of Faith (2005), Strangers With Candy (2006), Joshua (2007), Diminished Capacity (2008) and the already mentioned Before Sunset (2004) and Gonzo (2008).

Under discussion:

Two Lovers  (2009)

T

his review was originally published in February. Two Lovers is out on DVD this week.

Rarely has movie love been handled with both the dreamy indulgence and the cynicism that James Grey pulls off in Two Lovers. It’s a pity that the film, which premiered nine months ago at Cannes and is now rolling out on VOD and in theaters via Magnolia, has been pegged in time as the allegedly final film of star Joaquin Phoenix. In this meditation on class passing and infinite adolescence, set mainly in Brighton Beach with a few giddy sojourns to Manhattan, Grey creates a mood pocket, as it were, that’s distinctly out of time. Working off a series of contrasts that’s very true to its New York setting, Two Lovers is implicitly concerned with the way romantic relationships give us an opportunity to slide back and forth across class lines; if that motion temporarily offers the potential for an erasal of personal history, our ultimate stations in life can’t be escaped.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Phoenix both play adults who allow older men to pay their rent. For Paltrow, it’s a stock slimeball married guy who keeps her Michelle, an aging if well-bred bad girl, stashed in an apartment in The Old Neighborhood –– part easy alibi (his mama lives nearby), part obvious fetishistic class regression/emotional slumming (his mama lives near by). In Phoenix’s case, the older man is his father, an Israeli-born dry cleaner who wants to ensure his own comfortable retirement by making sure his wannabe photographer son Leonard hooks up with Sandra Cohen (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of a business partner. Too bad Leonard is constantly running off to answer text messages from Michelle, whose bought-and-paid-for pad is visible from his childhood window. He can gaze lovingly, creepily at his shiksa goddess’ blonde head floating behind a barred window across a courtyard while his too-close mom (Isabella Rossellini) spies on her son from just outside his bedroom door.

Leonard begins relationships with both women simultaneously, and much of the film is devoted to the ways in which he immerses himself in the pleasures offered by one to ameliorate the disappointments of the other. The dry cleaner’s daughter says she wants to “take care” of Phoenix, but she probably shouldn’t––at worst unstable and immature and at best just something of a bore, he’s a 30 year-old boy who has moved back in with the ‘rents after a failed engagement and multiple suicide attempts. In turn, Paltrow (more impressive than she has been in years cast against type as a cannily manipulative roiling ball of need) exploits Leonard’s proximity (emotional, physical) as a salve for the constant pain wrought by her married boyfriend’s distance and seeming indifference.

A film about emotional extremes, Two Lovers plays out in visual extremes. Grey very consciously color codes his spaces to correspond to his narrative’s alternating moods. All grey and green and drained of light during the narrative’s darkest points, Two Lovers shifts into chromatic overdrive when its bi-polar protagonist is closest to manic oblivion. A crucial clutch scene that might under other circumstances seem like a romantic high is marked as anything but by Grey’s choice of palette: there’s almost no color on the screen beyond the white-gold wisps of Paltrow’s windblown hair dusting the frame. Since this scene comes after a pair of less-ambiguous low moments (a suicide attempt, a miscarriage), all rendered in the same lightless matte, we know to read what the characters see as a moment of unexpected ecstasy, as in all actuality a third flirtation with death. It’s horribly bleak. It’s also beautiful.

The film’s tone can be somewhat contradictory, and it’s hard to say whether Grey is saying that his obviously troubled protagonist’s ability to seduce two gorgeous women (and, most problematically, that he stuns both ladies into a state of something like love via swift administration of his dick) makes for comedy or tragedy. Maybe both: Phoenix himself, starting at the moment of seduction and carrying through to the end of each such scene, seems like he’s playing a completely different person. It’s a dramatization of the transformative nature of sexual attraction.

In the film’s second to last shot, Phoenix locks a single, tortured eye on the camera from behind the embrace of the woman who he’s just, by default, given a diamond ring. It’s a single shot that undercuts any possibility that this apparent traditional romantic happy ending is in fact what it seems. It would be difficult to look at that image and still believe that anyone in this movie has actually been in “real” love since they stepped on screen, to not feel a cynical, momentary jolt that romantic love itself is never really more than a collision of circumstance and impulse, a way of taking care of a need via the most readily available means. It’s a testament to the childish madness of infatuation, and maybe even true love’s impossibility. Happy Valentines!

This review is a rethink of some thoughts I posted after seeing Two Lovers for the first time at Cannes; a second viewing this week outside of the pressure and exhaustion of the film festival cleared up some of my questions about the film. Sometimes that happens!