Karina

Under discussion:

St. Nick  (2009)

Two kids — a boy of 11, and a girl of 9, brother and sister, apparent runaways — drag a duffel bag into a crumbly, seemingly abandoned house. Now they live there. No one seems to be looking for them, and they offer no explanation as to where they came from or why they ran away. They could as likely be aliens as lost little children. It’s almost as if they’ve drifted off into another realm, some kind of Oz.

The first half of David Lowery’s feature directorial debut St. Nick is devoted to the ways in which this family unit spends their days building a life in their new home. Procuring provisions for cheese sandwiches, salvaging furniture, fixing the toilet. Arguing about the fate of the dog they left behind, and whether or not he misses his under-age owners. Virtually wordless for long stretches of time, St. Nick relies heavily on contemplative imagery to convey meaning –– particularly, the clear-lit landscape or a Texas winter in juxtaposition with the pink-and-white faces of his two young stars, real-life siblings Tucker and Savanna Sears. As both types of images, both equally beautiful and mysterious, become increasingly gray, the film matures from a study of actions infused with a quiet magic, to a study of inaction, of waiting and drifting telegraphing an increasingly palpable sense of fear and dread.

Those who have some film festival familiarity with Lowery’s most recent short film, the largely stop-motion A Catalog of Anticipations, may be surprised by his methods here (including many long, slow, fixed, often wide shots), and how long he takes to establish their patterns. In some ways, the title of the short is applicable to the feature: Lowery literally catalogs his character’s movements, showing in painstaking detail how the kids take on some perversion of traditional male and female roles (without anything doing perverted): the boy playing fix-it, building a home by any means necessary and available to him; the girl playing mother to their new “pet” (the decayed skeleton of what used to be a dog). You wait for something to happen, and then you realize that it’s happening — St. Nick reveals itself as a string of vignettes about two lost souls old enough to get themselves lost and enjoy it, but too young to be able to fully grasp the length and obstacles of the road ahead to the point where they, like we, know to wait for the other shoe to drop. They don’t try to get a TV, or comics, or toys. They seem happy to do nothing but what they need to do to maintain their lives. We become comfortable with being with the brother and sister in each heightened moment, whether she’s crafting the world largest, messiest dessert sandwich, or he’s stumbling on a woman playing guitar on her porch and subsequently falling into some kind of love. And then suddenly Lowery gives his characters steeper stakes.

St. Nick would make for an intriguing triple feature with two other recent lyrical kids-on-their-own indies, Children of Invention and Treeless Mountain. In those films, the circumstances that lead to the siblings’ separation from parents leaves an imprint — a resentment, a frustration, a determination to get along with or without adults. In St. Nick, our unnamed brother and sister share only that determination, and increasingly, the sister seems like she’d be just as happy at home playing with the dog, with dinner guaranteed. In Children and Treeless, we meet sibling pairs in which the eldest takes on the de facto role of the little adult out of particularly dire necessity. In St. Nick, we meet a sibling pair where the eldest has created a condition of dire necessity in order to prove himself as an adult. The tragic irony is that, as a self-destructive hero in a Western of his own making, he’s mired in necessarily childish make-believe.

This review originally appeared during the 2009 SXSW Film Festival. St. Nick screens tonight in New York at Rooftop Films. See also David Lowery’s recent blog post about sitting in a waiting room with Steven Soderbergh.

The LA Times’ Culture Monster blog is reporting that, thanks to donations totaling $150,000 from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Time Warner Cable/Ovation TV, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has reversed their decision to end their film program in October, and will now keep the program alive “at least through the end of the fiscal year in June 2010.” The Culture Monster post doesn’t indicate whether or not the LACMA’s Michael Govan and the film fan activist group Save Film at LACMA will go through with the much-hyped “popcorn summit”, scheduled to take place on September 1, to discuss LACMA’s film future, but apparently the Museum is newly committed to “thinking about the history and future of film as art as well as film’s increasing importance in the larger narrative of art history.”

Interesting side fact/road to conspiracy theory: David Segal’s recent NY Times profile of The Weinstein Company blamed Harvey’s acquisition of Ovation as one of TWC’s biggest missteps. Is Saving LACMA Film the Brothers’ way of backing up Inglourious Basterds’ big opening weekend with a big “we’re back” gesture? Maybe!

Under discussion:

Quiet City  (2007)

The following review appeared during the 2008 Hamptons Film Festival. Luke and Brie Are On a First Date is now available for rental or purchase via Amazon Video on Demand.

Luke and Brie Are On a First Date, which world premiered in the Hamptons last weekend, is the debut feature by Chad Hartigan, a frequent collaborator of Aaron Katz, and there are definitely some superficial similarities between the two filmmakers’ work. Like Katz’s Quiet City, Luke and Brie follows two attractive young people (George Ducker and Meghan Webster) around a city as they break through awkward uncertainty to forge a tentative romantic connection, and with their dreamy, super-intimate videography, both films have a way of enveloping a viewer in the action (or what passes for action), ultimately serving as delivery vehicles for the kind of heightened realism that marks an unexpectedly life-changing night out. But Luke and Brie plays its drama much closer to the surface, and through a little bit of self-reflexivity, a film that’s virtually wall-to-wall conversation manages to avoid feeling too talky.

Hartigan, who is a Los Angeles-based box office analyst by day, said after the Hamptons screening that Luke and Brie, based structurally on his own first date with his current girlfriend, was shot in 5 days on a budget of $3000. The small scale of the project opens it up to an obvious criticism: surely, all of us could come up with a single night in our romantic lives that seems worthy of dramatization, and many of us could round up some friends and scrape together a few dollars and take a week off work to tell it. So what makes Luke and Brie special? Maybe nothing, and maybe that’s it — maybe it’s not interesting because it’s entering into unchartered territory, but because it takes us through universal, well-worn feelings and makes them feel new. With his camera often seeming to float over faces in extreme close-up, Hartigan’s micro-focus on the nerves, uncertainties, and ambiguities, the posturing and reflex self-medication and unexpected moments of honesty that fuel the night so nails the harrowing aspect of navigating modern romance — in which it’s always easier to do nothing than to do what one really wants — that he’s able to turn the film’s ultimate surrender to traditional romantic closure into something of a surprise.

Twitter hasn’t “verified” her account so it could be a fraud, but here’s hoping that this really is Hollywood legend Lauren Bacall mixing it up on the Twitters. It’s plausible — if you condensed the bitchy, dishy voice of her autobiography into 140 character missives, this Twitterstream is what it would look like. My ten favorite moments of her Twitter stream thus far:

10. When she posted the Twitpic of her walking out of Max’s Kansas City en route to Studio 54 to meet “Mr.Warhol and Mr.Nureyev”.

9. Her response to people complaining about her lit cigarette in said picture, spread out over five tweets, including this commentary on the perks of old age: “The good thing about being 84 is that I can smoke as much as I want, If I was smoking 2 packs a day on the set of To Have and Have Not…..when I was 19 and I am still around 65 years later I can continue smoking as much as i want.”

8.  “in LA to discuss with Mr. Scorsese his Sinatra biopic in the works, I wonder who he is going to cast to play me.Who would you guys cast?”

7. Bacall says she’s been offered a role in Quentin Tarantino’s new film opposite Christina Ricci, Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper, in which she would play “the villainess.” “I have never been offered to play a schitzophrenic Russian heroin addicted Kidnapper’s mother before. haha.” Haha indeed.

6. Her first tweet: “I can’t get this God dam thing to work!”

5. Her bio, in which she plugs her autobiography and astutely namechecks her three best films: “Read my book By Myself and Then Some and watch my movies The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not and Written on the Wind”

4. When she admits that her granddaughter made her watch Twilight. “she said it was the greatest vampire film ever.After the “film” was over I wanted to..smack her accros her head with my shoe, but I do not want a book called Grannie Dearest written on me when I die…”

3. …”So instead I gave her a DVD of Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu and told her, now thats a vampire film! and that goes for all of you! watch Nosferatu instead!”

2. When she calls out her 19 year old, scotch-addled grandson for hitting on a cater waitresses “with Jayne Mansfield size breast and Liz Taylor eyes, men do scumble into the female flesh temptation so fast.”

1. When she then posts a twitpic of said grandson, looking like a complete tool.

When I first saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, I walked out of the theater and felt like something was … off. I rushed to my computer and wrote a dismissive review. “Quentin Tarantino,” I wrote, “has never seemed to strain so hard to just make A Quentin Tarantino Film.” I complained about the film’s pacing, the quality of its dialogue, the excessive exposition. “Basterds plays almost like an assembly edit, defiantly presented as-is,” I concluded.

And then I saw the film again, this week, in New York, in a version said to be different from the one I saw at Cannes. Some scenes are said to be shorter, although I couldn’t tell you specifically which ones; one scene excised before the French premiere has been reinstated. After that screening, I went back and read what I wrote about the film from France, and cringed. The review of Inglourious Basterds I wrote in May simply does not apply to the film I saw with the same title this week.

This happens sometimes. We don’t talk about it much, but it happens. Sometimes movies change — and Tarantino and The Weinstein Company have made no secret of the fact that Basterds has changed sine its Cannes screenings. But critics change, too.

The plot is the same. The titular elite squad of Jewish-American soldiers assigned to hunt and scalp Nazis, led by Brad Pitt’s noose-scarred hillbilly Aldo Raine, is only on screen for about half the film. We spend much more time in the company of Colonel Hans Landa, otherwise known as The Jew Hunter, played as a cartoon of logical evil by  Christoph Waltz, and Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), a beautiful young French Jew whose family’s murder at Landa’s hands caps off the first iteration of Tarantino’s talk-talk, bang-bang structure. Later, Shoshana emerges in Paris as the owner of a small cinema. There she becomes the object of infatuation of a German war hero-turned-star of his own Goebbels-produced biopic, and the next thing she knows, she’s agreed to host a gala, no-Nazi-detractors-allowed premiere for the film at her theater. Knowing that Hitler and Goebbels will be in the audience, Shoshana and her projectionist boyfriend Marcel (Jacky Ido) plot to lock the theater during the film and set it on fire. Meanwhile, the Basterds, in cahoots with a German film star (Diane Kruger) and British film critic-turned-military officer (Michael Fassbender), separately plot to do essentially the exact same thing.

The film’s guiding spirit is encapsulated in an exclamation by Landa in the first scene: “I love rumors! Facts can be so misleading.” Tarantino has made a movie about World War II filtered through rumor — verbally-transmitted urban legends, to be precise. There is no casual conversation in Inglourious Basterds; virtually every scene involves an interrogation and a chance for someone to brag about and/or live up to their reputation. Concsious of the world they live in — ie, not Hitlers, not ours, but Tarantino’s — characters on both sides of the divide take an active role in their own myth-making, to make sure that word gets out as to who they are and why they are to be feared, and everyone takes great pride in knowing that word is getting around. The film’s most oft repeated phrase is “What have you heard?”

This myth-making provides both Basterds’ most fascinating subtext, and its most bloated primary text. Take for instance, our substantive introduction to the Basterds themselves, in which multiple reputations are discussed before three acts of Basterd-on-Nazi violence occur. One Basterd gets his own awkward origin story flashback, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, before we get to the point of the scene, which is defining which rumor will carry the day. The story of what happened that day will be told in three different forms. There’s what the Basterds tell the sole Nazi survivor of their massacre to tell Hitler; there’s what Hitler tells the sole survivor to tell everyone else, and then there’s what really happened.

Stories are propaganda, and propaganda is a weapon. This is not a film about how the war was fought on the ground (or in concentration/death camps, which are never mentioned), but a film about how both sides fought the battle on screen. In the single Basterds scene that I think is nowhere near long enough, Fassbender’s film critic-turned-British spy describes Goebbels as a warrior in the guise of a studio mogul, fighting for the dominance of the German film industry as a strike against both Weimar silent film and the Hollywood, both the provinces of successful Jews. Shoshanna uses celluloid as a weapon in a more literal sense. Her two-part revenge gambit involves film as an expolosive, and an explosive film in which she proclaims to be “the face of Jewish vengeance” (“in English,” Marcel insists when directing the scene — the language of the passive Jewish vengeance coming from Hollywood). Marcel’s goodbye to Shoshanna, delivered to her face on a movie screen after her actual body has already expired, is the closest thing to moment of genuine romance that Tarantino has ever filmed.

Ironically, though the film relies on the audience’s knowledge Nazi atrocities for its effects, it has little interest in actually depicting them. Tarantino reduces the Nazi high command to Hitler, chief propagandist Goebbels, and Martin Bormann (essentially Hitler’s press secretary). The public face and architect of Nazi supremacy and his right-hand men in its promotion are represented, but not Mengele or Höss, none of the real-life figures involved in the nitty gritty of designing and implementing genocide. Inglouirous Basterds not only avoids the depiction of the real figures responsible for the Final Solution, but it only presents the Nazi mass killing techniques as they’re appropriated as punishment onto Nazis by the Basterds.  If you don’t walk in knowing that Nazis branded Jews, shot them en masse, locked them in buildings which they then burnt to the ground, Tarantino isn’t going to tell you, but the Basterds would lose all justification for their brutality if such events hadn’t happened.

What does this all mean? It depends, I think, on how much credit you’re willing to give Quentin Tarantino as a political provocateur. Is he really talking about the world we live in today? If so, what are we to make of a film that plays like apolitical fantasy, but nevertheless devotes its final images to broadcasting the idea that even when we win, Jews will remain an angry people who will neither forgive nor forget the wrongs done to us? If you want to see Inglorious Basterds as a contemporary allegory, you don’t have to strain — in fact, Tarantino makes it easy by presenting American soldiers who treat torture as entertainment (“watching Germans getting beat to death is the closest we ever get to going to the movies,” says Pitt), in a setting 60 years removed from Abu Ghraib, within a fight that, like our current excursions in the Middle East, is in part about the right of Jews to simply exist. And then, by giving us multiple (if ambiguously intentional) Jewish suicide bombers, Tarantino makes sure that the heroes of Basterds not only do onto their 20th century oppressors what has been done to them, but they also give their key 21st century foes a taste of their own medicine. You could make the argument that Inglourious Basterds is a palpably anti-Semitic film as easily as you could argue that it’s a rah-rah work of pro-Imperialism, propaganda for US/Israeli collaborative war against those who threaten either’s global interests.

Either reading, I think, probably gives Tarantino too much credit — when has he ever been a filmmaker who ached to make a statement about contemporary events? Plus, the film’s best source cue tempers either extreme. A key, glorious sequence is set to David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting out Fire)” — borrowed, fittingly, from the soundtrack of the Paul Schrader remake of a Val Lewton horror number that allegorized the struggle of European immigrants in WWII America. It’s one of those musical-montage-as-mission-statement moments: you can’t put out a fire with gasoline without adding to the flames. Every act of war has fallout, and extreme acts burn for decades. Maybe this, too, is giving Tarantino too much credit, to assume that he’d take an active step to undercut his promotion of revenge, particularly when he’s talked at length about wanting to overturn the typical Holocaust film power dynamics to show “Germans that are scared of Jews.” But let’s just say he has a pretty strong track record of speaking through his soundtracks.

I’m still struggling with Basterds, as a statement of ideology (or lack thereof), and as a work of art. There are still things that bother me in terms of the way it flows, and I still think Tarantino sometimes over-exerts himself with the telling at the expense of the showing. But still  — mea culpa. My initial assessment of the film was wrong. Maybe what I saw this week in New York really is a complete revitalization, so completely different from what I saw in Cannes as to excuse me from blame for not fully engaging with it in the couple of hours I had to form a correct opinion before the film was rendered old news by the maw of the festival cycle. But probably not. Probably, it is a couple of things. The film is now unquestionably a little bit tighter than the first version I saw; my complaints about the flow and movement of the action sequences is no longer valid, and as far as my complaint about the lack of “rock n’ roll efficiency”, well, that is idiotic now and probably was then, as well. But I honestly don’t know what has changed more since May: the cut of Inglouirous Basterds, or me.

Maybe this is unfair to you, the reader — maybe film critics shouldn’t change. Maybe we should go out of our way to lead extraordinarily stabile lives, to avoid financial stress and familial trauma, to not get depressed or even date for fear of swinging too far towards any emotional extreme in the hopes of maintaining absolute objectivity. If that’s the case, I didn’t do what I should’ve done — I’ve been sent through the wringer by all the above over the last three months, and come out a different person. But the world changes, whether or not I stay the same, and at the rate this one is changing, it’s unrealistic to expect something as trifling as a movie opinion to stay fixed indefinitely. In May, I was visiting France from a country just barely emerged from the glowing spell of Obama’s first hundred days. Today, I am currently living in an America where — apparently — it’s okay to compare the President to Hitler because he is trying to make it easier for poor people to go to hospitals and for old people to draw up living wills, and the only person doing anything substantial to combat that theory is a gay Jew who uses “dining room table” as an epithet. The question of what it means to act like a Nazi is suddenly relevant to our everyday lives. It’s possible that we need Inglourious Basterds now more than ever.

“It’s like an Antonioni film without the ennui,” I said to a friend after seeing Lucretia Martel’s impeccably opaque The Headless Woman, which opens at Film Forum today. This, he said, was what he liked about it — that Martel one-ups her forebears in the Cinema of Disorientation by refusing to seduce the audience with a mirror to their own emotional dissatisfaction. And that is great, and skillful, and interesting … but I miss the ennui.

It’s likely that this is the point of The Headless Woman – Martel rips Antonioniennui off its foundations by refusing to throw the audience a bone of indentification via the disorienting effects of lust/love. The Headless Woman deals with sex twice, in two separate encounters both coded as inappropriate; the film seemingly has no use for desire beyond its ability to show up depravity and mental disability. ‘

But on further contemplation, I think Martel does, in fact, ask the viewer to find ways to relate to the post-traumatic stress/psychosis of Vero, a middle-aged woman who returns physically but not mentally to her bourgeois life after a car accident. Wandering through social and professional committments in a daze, Vero becomes convinced that she hit and killed a boy with her vehicle. Using swift cuts and temporal ellipses to toss us into Vero’s point of view, allowing us no frame of reference as to how she “normally” behaves or what the natural circumstances of her life even look like, Martel forces the viewer to engage by tapping into their own deeply-rooted anxieties about the nature of consciousness.
But the thing about existential despair is that it has nowhere to go (except for, possibly, Zabriskie Point); only in science fiction can characters go down the rabbit role of consciousness-questioning and come out with an answer. In Antonioni films, romance is a sham escape option — there is no way out, but in the films as in life, sometimes we can turn to another person to make us forget that — and a glimmer of hope, if only temporarily. Martel withholds hope. Antonioni’s films revolve around questions like, “Is my beautiful life sheltering me from the truth, and if so will sex make that better?” Martel’s film asks, “Is my beautiful life sheltering me from the truth, and if so can I live with not being able to do much about that?” Martel’s film does offer the darker, more realistic vision of Our Existential Trap, but for the viewer this cuts both ways. There is no false out, but there is also no pleasure.

“Another depressing movie for the depression,” Abel Ferrara cracked, after a screening of his 1992 film Bad Lieutenant at Anthology Film Archives on Saturday night. The screening was held to raise money for Cinema Nolita, an indie video store on the verge of having to shut down for lack of funds (they’re having another benefit tonight, a concert featuring The Virgins and a DJ set by Animal Collective). Ferrara, who lives in the neighborhood and is a regular patron of the store, turned the the post-movie Q & A into an angry but resigned meditation on the ways in which New York, indie film and the world have changed in nearly two decades, to get us from the point where someone like Ferrara could make a film on the streets of New York, to the point where someone like Ferarra may soon be unable to rent a film on the streets of New York.

“Watching this film, it’s kind of sad,” Ferrara said. “At that time, there was some kind of indie film scene going on, and we could make a film and get it distributed. Why that indie film industry isn’t there [now] is caught up in the changing times.”

Several times during the evening Ferrara grumbled over the compromises involved in getting his upcoming 50 Cent-starring Jekyl & Hyde adaptation off the ground. “We’re just trying to get the movie made, and now every movie’s being made in Grand Rapids, Michigan, even if it’s set in Liberia. I’ve never been to Grand Rapids, but they’re bending over to give movies cash [via tax incentives].”

“I don’t know if we could have made [Bad Lieutenant] in Grand Rapids,” Ferrara said, pausing to laugh to himself. “But in this day and age, if you get money to do a movie, you’re gonna go to Mars.”

For Ferrara, his difficulties financing and distributing films in North America - his last feature, 2007’s wonderful Go Go Tales, remains unreleased here due to legal issues — are tied into the demise of places like Cinema Nolita. Several times, he asked the audience things like, “How do you guys watch movies? Is everyone shaking down the internet?” It quickly became apparent that, in Ferrara’s world, “internet” is a dirty word.
“When I made [Bad Lieutenant], they were trying to sell the internet to me as the best thing to come along,” he said. “At this point, I feel like it’s another knife in the back of the filmmaker’s spirit. Somehow, having direct access to your audience is not turning out to get movies made.”

Tom Jarmusch, brother of Jim, was in the audience. At one point, Abel asked him to talk about how his brother continues to get his films financed and distributed. He didn’t — the obvious answer is “casting BIll Murray” — but he seemed to agree with Ferrara’s stance on the paradox of technological change. “It seems like all these opportunities are opening [doors], but they’re really shutting,” Jarmusch said. Ferrara responded, “It’s open, but it’s a rip off,” and then ranted a bit on piracy via YouTube.

Speaking of YouTube: at one point, Ferrara announced, “We got a special attraction.” He motioned to the projectionist, and soon we were watching the trailer for Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, the project that famously provoked Ferrara to comment that he hoped Herzog and his production team “die in Hell.” Ferrara’s post-trailer comments were still bitter, but more restrained.

“Unfortunately, anyone involved in our film wasn’t invited for that film, but I was told I should be really happy that such great people are ripping off our ideas.” A voice in the crowd called out, “You didn’t see a dime off that?” Ferrara: “Well … I might have saw A DIME.” Another voice asked if Ferrara planned to see the remake when it comes out. He shook his head vigorously and gestured to the screen where the trailer had played. “That’s enough of that.”

Let’s play that game where we compare quotes from two seemingly unrelated stories that happened to come out on the same day and thus seem to say something about the zeitgeist.

First, from an interview with District 9 producer Peter Jackson (via Scott Kirsner):

Peter Jackson: You know, in the old days it was very difficult to make movies ’cause you had to have 35 millimeter cameras, which were phenomenally expensive. Or you had to have rich parents that could send you to film school. Nowadays, anybody, any kid or young person with a desire to make films … (has) access to this equipment. You have great video cameras and the quality’s fantastic. You can make soundtracks and do visual effects. You can do very competent computer effects quite easily.”

Q: What impact do you see this having on Hollywood?

Jackson: “There are no excuses anymore. If people really want to make movies, they can go out and do it. And I think we’re going see in the next 20 or 30 years a real influx of creativity to the world of entertainment because I believe a lot in the young generation coming along … the pop culture generation who now can grab these cameras and go make films with them.

Then, from a story in the NYT by Michael Cieply, titled Independent Filmmakers Distribute on Their Own:

Here is how it used to work: aspiring filmmakers playing the cool auteur in hopes of attracting the eye of a Hollywood power broker.

Here is the new way: filmmakers doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution, marketing films through social networking sites and Twitter blasts, putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges at luxury hotels in film festival cities to get them to whisper into the right ears.

Cieply’s key example of sucessful self-distribution is Anvil!:

“I paid for everything, I took a second mortgage on my house,” said Sacha Gervasi, the film’s director.

Mr. Gervasi, whose studio writing credits include “The Terminal,” directed by Steven Spielberg, nearly three years ago, began filming “Anvil!” with his own money in hopes of attracting a conventional distributor. The movie played well at Sundance in 2008, but offers were low.

So Mr. Gervasi put up more money — his total cost was in “the upper hundred thousands,” he said — to distribute the film…

So! You can make a movie! All by yourself! As long as you’re okay with not ever shooting on film! And then you can release it yourself! Because no one’s going to do it for you! And if they do, they won’t pay for TV advertising, so no one who doesn’t follow you on Facebook will ever hear about it! And so after you’ve put up your own small fortune and invested years of your life making the movie on your own, you can then devote at least another year to Twittering about it! And you can spend eve more money flying yourself to film festivals so you can hang out in luxury hotels talking to anyone who will listen to you ramble on about it! And in short, it’s a good thing you made money writing a screenplay for Steven Spielberg, so that you have ample money and time to devote to this endeavor, because without that, your self-distribution gambit might not have been feasible! It’s so great that we live in this time of opportunities for all humans!!!!!!! Are you inspired yet?!?!

“I don’t know what this is,” said Jem Cohen, in his introduction to last night’s screening of his new work Empires of Tin at the IFC Center. He went on to call it “a documentary musical hallucination,” which really only chips the surface of this astounding, frustrating, one-of-a-kind piece.

Here’s my go at further explaining it: Empires of Tin the movie is an expanded documentation of Empires of Tin the performance, commissioned by the Vienna Film Festival in 2007. Collaborating with musicians like Vic Chesnutt (who Cohen described last night as “a great American”), Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, and T. Griffin, Cohen put together a song cycle of sorts to be performed live under the projection of a feature-length image collage, a loose city symphony musing on Western militarism from World War 1 through post-9/11 New York. In between songs (pre-existing pieces by Chesnutt folded into electric klezmer and ambient noise compositions, all of it heavy with feedback and distorted violin), an older man reads aloud in German from Joseph Roth’s writings on WWI. The edited film shown last night cuts back and forth between footage of the performance and the imagery produced by Cohen for the projection.
Much of the imagery — ranging from somewhat conventional contemporary 16mm film to archival photos and drawings lit with candlelight and shot through a magnifying glass, distorting the images into grainy chiaroscuro — is gorgeous, but also unsettling. Moonscapes, skyscrapers, mass graves, the Gowanus Canal, sarcophagi in an Austrian cemetery all flicker by. Matte black and white footage of anatomical models of humans elegantly depict, as Cohen put it, “what happens to bodies in war.” Chesnutt chanting phrases like “he’s not the devil, he’s just a capitalist” over red-tinted photos of the Bushes and Clintons are … well, uninterested in elegance. Sometimes the Cohen’s political messages seem too pointed and heavy-handed; at other moments, I wished for a more concrete structuring statement. On the whole, Empires of Tin calls to mind a certain kind of avant-garde personalized protest film that we probably haven’t seen enough of since the thaw of the Cold War.
The Q & A after the screening, billed as a conversation between Cohen and Jim Jarmusch, was … unconventional. Jarmusch readily admitted that he would not be ready to speak articulately about Tin without a few days to process it. And really, what could he ask? It almost doesn’t make sense to ask Cohen specific questions about his work — how he made it, where images came from, how he came up with the unifying concepts — because the answer is always the same: “I just stumbled into it.” His process, as he describes it, involves traveling around the world with a Bolex and/or small video camera in tow, intuitively collecting images which then go into a storage for use in future, as-yet-unconceived projects.
But just as the work is the product of intuitive stumbling, while trying to answer a question about craft Cohen stumbled into articulating the film’s thesis statement: “They keep starting the same wars.” (Similarly, it was in apologizing for his lack of insight that Jarmusch spat forth one of the key insights of the night, saying that Cohen’s work reminds him of a line Jack Kerouac wrote about Robert Frank: “he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film.”) Cohen admitted that in editing, he had wondered the film’s section on WWI was too long, but then decided that his audience should be forced to watch many more hours of the material if it’ll get his point across, “just a little bit.” He went on to dedicate the evening to military deserters and draft dodgers — “at least they’re trying to break the cycle.”

Long before I had actually seen Azazel Jacobs’ second feature, The GoodTimesKid, I had heard tell of its final scene, in which the Gang of Four song “Damaged Goods” is played in its entirety. It takes a certain kind of confidence to use a Gang of Four song in a cinematic context. Deceptively simple post-punk loaded with weighty narrative, it’s virtually impossible to match this music with imagery without the filmmaker’s voice getting lost in the noise, without the soundtrack seemingly functioning as a mission statement above and beyond what the rest of the film has to say. Certainly, the thesis of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette seems most articulate in its opening scene, set to a lengthy excerpt of Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It” — the song serves as a key to unlocking that film’s visual indulgence, placing its evocation of angsty teen consumption and self-absorption within the irony of “problems of leisure” and the political context of the “body [as] good business.”

Jacobs makes the viewer wait about 70 minutes for the first use of “Damaged Goods,” but the song’s ethos still felt throughout the film. If there’s anything missed from Benten Films’ long-awaited release of The GoodTimesKid, it’s the full text of the letter, peeking out of the corner of the DVD box, that Jacobs wrote to the band asking for use of the song.

In Gang of Four songs, sex and commerce, personal relationships and socio-economic identity, are always inextricably linked, to the point where an apparent reference to one can be safely assumed to double for the other. It’s articulated best in another song, “Contract”: “Social dreams put in practice in the bedroom.” “Damaged Goods” swings back and forth: it’s a break-up song (“The change’ll do you good, I always knew it would/sometimes I’m thinking that I love you, but I know it’s only lust”) that dips into the language of transaction (“Damaged goods, send them back … open the till, give me the change you said would do me good/ refund the cost.”) It’s a fitting theme song for a film about three people desperate for change, bouncing back and forth between embracing the sentimentality of personal relationships and rejecting it. Never mind that it was shot on damaged short ends stolen from the set of Troy.

Sara Diaz, Jacobs’ longtime girlfriend and collaborator, speaks the film’s first lines: “Happy birthday, baby. C’mon baby, let’s start over.” Jacobs, playing birthday boy Rudolpho, is not amenable to either entreaty. A scruffy punk prone to provoking fist fights, he joins the army to escape Diaz’s domestic attention. His enlistment letter gets sent to another man with the same name (Gerardo Narajo, director of I’m Gonna Explode). The second Rudolpho goes to the enlistment center to sort out the mistake, but ends up following the first Rudolpho home, where Diaz is hoping to win back his affections with a birthday party. This drives the first Rudolpho running to a bar, leaving R2 to witness Diaz getting into her own fistfight, first with a birthday cake and then with a home appliance. The second Rudolpho joins in. She is his kind of girl.

They bond by sitting on the floor, drinking red wine straight from the bottle. She decides he’s even worse off than her, and does a dance — halfway between a jitterbug and the robot, in her in frilly dress and fithy converse — to cheer him up. She christens him “Depresso,” and is soon imploring him to help out around the house. “Depresso! Answer the door!”

The two Rudolphos are “damaged goods” in that their function in the world, in both the public and private economies, is undefined; they’re also literally damaged, each having been at the receiving end of dozens of blows over the course of the film. Though an asskicker in her own right, Diaz is the malleable center between them. Within hours of meeting “Depresso,” she’s dressed herself his clothes, remaking herself as his partner in crime, suggesting they run away together.  She’s more than happy to exchange her domestic partner for a new model, to get her fresh start via a simple transaction. Could it really be that simple?

The film follows 24 hours in the lives of these characters as they stumble around Los Angeles, tracing a breadcrumb trail between pockets of unexpected, often silent sweetness, and spats of impromptu violence. The city’s streets, buses, boats and diners photographed with a shabby romanticism that’s much less obtrusive than the excessively set-designed depictions seen in other recent LA-set quasi-romances. By the time that final scene rolls around, and Jacobs hands over authorial control to Gang of Four, the musical cue feels unusually well-earned. A film like 500 Days of Summer bends over backwards to convince you it takes place in a world where cultural totems of disaffection still mean something. The GoodTimesKid actually creates and takes place in such a world, without strain.

Alejandro Adams‘ Canary screens in Brooklyn at Rooftop Films tonight. Since I interviewed him on this blog way back in February, right before his film premiered at Cinequest, Adams has become something of an uningorable mascot (and sometimes, thorn in the side) of online film culture — or, at least, the microcosm of film culture represented on Twitter. There he is, picking fights about the Dardennes brothers! There he is, challenging this reporter on her choice of avatar! There he is, always, at the center of the conflict, however virtual and/or minor that conflict may be. And now, Canary, a film that virtually no one has seen outside of three specialty festivals and the cineaste Twittersphere, gets a rave in the Village Voice, bumped up in the print edition right next to an assessment of Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania pegged to the umpteenth revival of Jonas Mekas’ signature diary film. The placement in the paper says it all: from zero to avant-garde canon in under six months. But don’t blame Twitter — Adams’ online antics have a tendency to plant expectations that the films themselves subvert. You want to dismiss him as an attention whore, but the films frustrate that impulse. As one filmmaker wrote to me after watching Canary long after knowing of its maker via his Twitter agitations, “Goddammit.”

Seeing the Canary review next to the Mekas write-up on a physical page yesterday reminded me of something Adams had written in the long email exchange we had that led up to that February interview, which hadn’t made it into the published post. I went back into those emails and pulled out that quote, and a few other memorable outtakes, for your persual. The text below the jump may make more sense after a reading (or re-reading) of the initital published interview, but keep in mind that when Adams refers to “you,” he’s generally referring to me. If you’re in New York, you can (and should) buy tickets to tonight’s screening here.

I implore you to mention on the record that you watched Canary during your flight to L.A.–it doesn’t have to be the main point of a question but I’d like a chance to address it.  Your viewing experience embodies my deepest wish for the life of my films.  I want my films to be viewed by solitary individuals in perpetuity.  These are the one-topping personal pan pizzas of cinema.  There is no way this film or any other film I could make will “matter” on a 40-foot screen with an audience of 500 (although they do look pretty good, speaking purely technically).

As I stood in line for a screening at Cinequest Film Festival last year, I heard some people talking about [my first film] Around the Bay: “I expected to get something out of it.  I’m a single dad, estranged daughter, younger son–but I wasn’t up there on screen.”  If you think you’re going to relate to either of these films because of the plot description, you’re the person most likely to despise it.

One of the only written interpretations [ed. note: as of mid-February] of Canary suggests that it’s about silence as meaningful action in a world where human communication has no value.  I should admit I lived in my van and had trouble making social contact during that period, so if you want the film to play as strict autobiography, there it is.

There is no strategy for promoting this film.  It can’t be promoted.  I made a poster because it pleases me aesthetically and because I paid for the rights to the absurd stock art.  But, come on, that poster image has nothing to do with the film.  It doesn’t have cast or crew info on it or screening times.  It’s just “the porn star and Melissa Gilbert,” as one friend put it, with a Canary Industries logo.  People might connect that logo to the title in the program or they might not.

There is a campaign of identification-signal-jamming in my films.  In Canary, not only is there a minefield of challenges to traditional identification, but even–film theory here we come!–reversals of the gaze and laborious efforts to insert the viewer’s gaze into the film, to account for the viewer in the diegetic space–somewhat similar, I guess, to Barthes’ stated interest in fictionalizing the reader.  In that way, the film might have been about “you,” but you seem to have been watching Carla as a conventional film object.  That doesn’t mean I failed, it just means the film isn’t about you, and you got something else out of it.  I won’t detract from your getting or having gotten whatever you get or got.

The Silicon Valley alt-weekly paper ran a “preview” of Canary.  The piece appeared on, let’s say, page 56.  The image at the top of the piece depicted Carla looking coldly at “you.”  On pages 57, 58 and 59 were reviews of Hollywood films, their press stills holding the same position as the one on page 56.  Would it surprise you to learn that each of those subsequent photos depicted a conventionally beautiful woman (in one case, a minor) in an arrested state of distress or trepidation, egregiously sexualized and framed for “your” delectation?  Well, as soon as Carla was added to the beginning of that series, my delectation was routed through her, and I’m not sure it was delectation anymore.  It goes without saying that those other women were completely unaware of “you” as a viewer, so Carla was able to implicate me in something that those other women couldn’t implicate me in.  Canary came to life for me at that moment–the criss-crossing dynamics of “you” to Carla to the other characters in the film and back to “you” again.  It became vital, autonomous, carrying forth its meanings into the world.

And you can probably tell I’d love to lecture a film class about this.  “Forget the film!  I’m not going to show you the film!  Look at this newspaper!”  Yep, the Lenny Bruce of independent film.

Under discussion:

Beeswax  (2009)

Kevin Lee’s vigorous defense of Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax in reaction to its reception at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival included a thematic interpretation of the film’s title. He wrote that Beeswax, a picture which has nothing directly to do with either bees or wax, was titled as such as “a tip to the film’s depiction of life as a hive, where people passive-aggressively fall on each other for support in the face of life’s overwhelming choices, and in doing so both limit and enable choices to be made.” It’s right to shine a light on Beeswax as a film about a community’s interconnectedness — and probable that the nuances of that specific community, Austin, might feel like flat, mundane Americana to an eye hoping for a retread of the classically cool “disaffected rocker in black and white” vibe of Mutual Appreciation. But the title also seems like something of a multi-layered reference to the film’s ambitious leap ahead of Bujalski’s previous filmography. Having built a following based on two finely calibrated odes to linguistic imprecision, Bujalski’s third film moves away from messy, non-committal “mumbling”, in order to cleverly examine the double-speak of slang, simile and idiom that flows through American conversation without interrogation. As a moniker for this crayon-colorful (and beautifully shot by regular DP Matthias Grunsky) comedy steeped in colloquial American English, the title Beeswax feels less like a metaphor for anything bees do in public, than a veiled reference to private lives - as in, “mind your own beeswax.”

Bujalski built the script around actual twin sisters Maggie and Tilly Hatcher, who play twin sisters Lauren and Jeannie; both non-actors, the former appeared in the director’s student thesis film at Harvard, and the latter’s real-life use of a wheelchair makes it into the film. Jeannie’s disability is never specified or commented on in Beeswax, but the fact of it informs much of the incidental action and its ultimate themes. The sisters are exceptionally unwilling to let men dictate the course of their sexual relationships, and though highly characterized, the male presence in this film is essentially reduced to boyfriend roles, all given over to Austin-based filmmakers. David and Nathan Zellner, the masterminds of Goliath and the recent batshit insane web series Fiddlestixx, respectively play Lauren’s ex and his weirdly flirtatious brother, who sets Lauren up with a last-minute job offer in Kenya. Alex Karpovsky, whose oddly fascinating improv comedy concert film Trust Us, This is All Made Up premiered at SXSW this year, plays Jeannie’s ex-boyfriend Merill, a fledgling lawyer who thrives on solving his former love’s every crisis.

Jeannie is having a falling out with the old friend with whom she owns a vintage shop, and worried that her business partner is getting litigious, Jeannie contacts Merrill for advice. An evening spent decoding the language of a business contract resolves, as Jeannie puts it semi-ironically, in “hot sex,” and soon Merrill is back in her life, actively angling for a more substantial relationship while trying to make Jeannie’s business problems disappear. It’s some kind of reconciliation romance, but Beeswax is more complicated than your average comedy of remarriage. It slowly emerges that Jeannie might have called Merrill not just because she was in crisis, but because she knew he’d be attracted to her crisis, and her need is thus, in a way, a gift to him, something to fill up his own need. As the narrative unfolds, Jeannie’s lacks (her inability to decipher a business contract, her inability to walk) are balanced out by her the lacks of those around her: her sister’s fear of commitment, her sometime-boyfriend’s emotional neediness, her business partner’s inability to equally participate in the business. Though literally crippled, Jeannie emerges as the bravest, most capable person on screen.

In vocal cadence if not body language, Karpovsky’s playing a character that one could easily imagine Bujalski, who does not appear in Beeswax, having taken for himself in one of his earlier films. If Beeswax is, as I suspect, above all else a film about language, than Merrill, though deprived of real agency in his relationship with Jeannie, is a crucial player because he sets much of the linguistic action into motion. Not only do he and Jeannie turn the interpretation of documents into a kind of foreplay, but in blurting out something accidentally horrible and then devoting exponentially more words to detailing his remorse, he sets the tone for the film’s second half, in which the precise application of words — particularly, unexpectedly bold statements and idiosyncratic metaphors like “shit sandwich” — has the force of small bombs, perhaps not causing irrevocable damage but definitely altering space, time and perception in the moment.

In creating a uniquely cerebral film in which the bulk of the drama is based on which words will fly out of mouths and what they’ll really mean, Bujalski has made a “talky” film that lovingly critiques the mysteries of speech. At the film’s climax, two of our heroes look at a letter, and one asks the other, “You like that language?” The response: “Beautiful.” It is.

This review appeared in slightly different form during the SXSW Film Festival. Beeswax opens at Film Forum in New York on Friday.

A post this morning at The Awl ruminates on The New York Times‘ apparent love affair with Nora Ephron, writer/director of Julie & Julia. The paper has taken to covering her/the movie about once every other day in the month leading up to the film’s release this week, to the point where Nikki Finke has cried conspiracy. Choire Sicha gives the paper a bit more credit; though he criticizes the Times for having “no idea what lays beyond its own fortress walls,” he sympathises with the media’s attraction to Ephron as a “charming, fun whirlwind” and a “bridge” between New York old money and Hollywood commerce.

This is all very interesting, but it would be easy to read The Awl’s post and make the dangerous inference that since The New York Times is gaga for Julie & Julia, and because The New York Times tends to “exhibit absolutely clearly that they have very little idea anymore what readers are, or even should be, interested in,” ergo, there somehow won’t be much of an appetite for Ephron’s food porn outside “their bubble,” which Sicha accurately assesses Ephron is “deep inside.”  But to make such a leap of inference would both give the film too much credit, and Ephron’s extremely commercial instincts not enough. I saw the film at Traverse City over the weekend, and while I personally wish it was, well, better — imagine a movie split between post-WWII France and New York in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that actually treated its twin protagonists as engaged products of their socio-historical surroundings rather than just borderline-sitophiliac ciphers! –– the 500 elderly Midwesterners I saw it with seemed completely satisfied. It may be true that Ephron represents, as Sicha suggests, a link between New York and Hollywood that this city’s newspaper can’t resist, but The Great New York Times Ephron Splooge is probably not as much about either coast as it is about much of the country in between.

I spent the weekend at the Traverse City Film Festival, the fifth annual event presided over by Michael Moore in the waterfront town where the filmmaker lives and works in Northern Michigan. Though he and his staff were editing Capitalism: A Love Story across the street from the festival’s main venue around the clock all week, Moore himself introduced nearly every event I attended, including one where he unveiled both a trailer for the almost finished latest film and the entirety of the rarely seen film that gave Moore his first experience in front of a film camera (more on that later). At most of these events, he’d take the stage and talk at length to an entirely adoring crowd, casually making reference to his new film, his reputation and past career, and his future plans. A scoop from the later category: Moore said he’s planning to star in a one-man show on Broadway, presumably along the lines of his 2002 shows at the Roundabout Theater in London, “sometime in the next 24 months.”  He promised to give the show a tryout first at the film festival  — “because if you kill ‘em in Traverse City, you’ll kill ‘em anywhere.”

Outside of Moore’s shadow, Traverse City’s vibe as a festival is along the lines of Telluride and True/False — small town, secret screenings, celebrity/legendary filmmaker guests who blend in with the locals and lesser known attendees while giving each installment of the invent a specific character — but with a dedicated emphasis on comedy. In addition to the panel which I already reported on, in the three days I was in town TCFF hosted an afternoon course on the art of comedy, a preview of the long-anticipated upcoming season of Curb Your Enthusiasm hosted by festival board member Jeff Garlin, and Moore and the festival co-founders handed special prizes to the Funniest Fiction Film and Best Comedy Documentary (to In The Loop and Winnebago Man, respectively), and gave the “Stanley Kubrick Award for Bold and Innovative Filmmaking” to Bob Byington, who was the first director to have two films in the festival — both of them no-frills comedies. I’m not complaining, but one does wonder how Moore’s just-announced comedy festival will actually differ from the film festival in practice.

The full list of TCFF 2009 winners is after the jump.

Founders Prize for Funniest Fiction Film: In the Loop

Founders Prize for Best Foreign Fiction Film: Eden is West

Founders Prize for a First Time Filmmaker: Salt of This Sea

Founders Prize for Best Overall Documentary: Rachel

Founders Prize for Best Comedy Documentary: Winnebago Man

Stanley Kubrick Award for Bold and Innovative Filmmaking, Fiction Film: Bob Byington for Harmony and Me and Registered Sex Offender

Stanley Kubrick Award for Bold and Innovative Filmmaking, Documentary: Defamation

Best Fiction Film, Audience Award: Departures

Best Fiction Film US, Jury Award: The Greatest

Best Fiction Film Foreign, Jury Award: Mary & Max

Special Jury Prize, First Narrative Feature Film: Gloria La Morte and Paola Mendoza for Entre nos

Special Jury Prize, Human Spirit: Everlasting Moments

Special Jury Prize for Original Storytelling: O’Horten

Best Documentary, Audience Award: Food, Inc.

Best Documentary, Jury Award: The Cove

Best Foreign Documentary, Jury Award: The End of the Line

Special Jury Prize for Human Rights: Which Way Home

Special Jury Prize for Environmental Documentary: Crude

Special Jury Prize for a New Film Maker: Emily & Sarah Kunstler for William Kunstler: Disturbing The Universe

Firefighter’s Award for Best Comedy Film: A Matter of Size

Michigan Prize: Learning Gravity

45365, Bill and Turner Ross‘ SXSW-winning nonfiction film about their hometown of Sydney, Ohio, debuts today on SnagFilms, where it will be streaming for free for one week as part of Snag’s Summerfest, which brings festival films online for a limited time before their theatrical/TV/DVD runs.

As a big fan of this film’s dedicated formalism,  I concur with AJ Schnack who, in an interview the Ross brothers, recalls his experience watching the film at SXSW “where the total immersion forced me to adapt to the film’s rhythms and language” and thus concludes that 45365 is the kind of film best “seen in theaters or at festivals.”  Knowing this before attempting to watch the movie on my computer, I decided to try to approximate a bigger screen experience at home with the Snag stream by connecting my computer to my TV, but unfortunately Snag’s full screen option shuts down for every ad break. So it’s not the right format for “total immersion,” but hopefully it will expose the film to a wider audience, who might be moved to catch up with 45365 when Seventh Art releases it theatrically further down the line.

Also, 45365 on Snag would make for an interesting double online VOD bill with another film enjoying a similarly non-traditional release pattern, Loren Cass.

Though going into its second week at New York’s Cinema Village, Loren Cass has been available on Amazon VOD and for rental and purchase on iTunes for awhile. Like 45365, it’s an impressionistic study of a life in a single American town that privileges imagery, mood and tone over narrative.  But where one of 45365’s strengths is its emphasis on the multitudes that the town contains (from 4H princesses to ex-cons), Cass views its city — St. Petersberg, Florida, circa 1996, then reeling from racially-motivated unrest — through the narrow, nihilistic gaze of aimless young adults united in wordless loneliness and the instinct to ameliorate their frustration through fistfights, parking lot sex, and all manner of self-destruction. Both apply a kind of Cubist deconstruction and reformation of their prevailingly influential DNA. In the case of 45365, it’s Americana. In the case of Cass, with its strict “no future” worldview, narration from members of The Circle Jerks and The Dwarves and soundtrack full of bands like Stiff Little Fingers, Husker Du, it’s punk rock, and particularly the surviving echoes of the punk impulse in a world that’s no longer scared of it.

Cass‘ message and tone is much, much darker than 45365’s; as director/co=star Chris Fuller put it in an interview for FILMMAKER, “There are things about life that are ugly and unpleasant. The whole point of Loren Cass, in a nutshell, is to embrace that, celebrate the ugly things.” 45365 essentially goes for the opposite — it’s essentially about celebrating the beauty of the mundane rather than the potential horror. But both films are puzzles, asking the viewer to impose their own method of making sense of what’s on screen.  I suspect that if seen together, the darkness of one might lead to a deeper reading of the other.

Under discussion:

Repo Man  (1984)

Today’s Venice Film Festival announcement included mention of a film called Repo Chick, directed by Alex Cox. The film is not listed on IMDb, but it would seem reasonable to assume that it’s a sequel to Cox’s 1984 cult classic Repo Man, no? As Cox writes on his blog, “It isn’t really; it’s a story of different characters in a different world” — but that hadn’t stopped Universal, the studio that owns the 1984 film, from issuing a cease and desist, claiming that Cox has made “an illegal sequel” to their property.

Cox had decided to ignore the filing and continue work on the movie — there is apparently significant effects work to finish up in the month left before its Venice premiere — until receiving news that Universal had their own Repo action up their sleeves. They’ve apparently taken a Jude Law film called The Repossession Mambo off their shelf, finished two years ago and left mysteriously in their vault ever since, and have announced plans to rush it into release under the title Repo Men (according to this story, it’s actually Repo Men!, jaunty exclamation point required). Cox is convinced this is an attempt to confuse audiences, distracting them from his non-sequel to Repo Man with a non-sequel of their own. He writes:

I still have a contract with these guys and - if they ever want to make a film based on my original work - they have to ask me to direct it. What fun that would be! … I’m sure [The Repossession Mambo] is an excellent film, which Universal accidentally forgot to distribute, and now are passing off, in their innocence, as the new Repo Man. Only a cynical person might see any attempt to catch the upward draft of Repo Chick, and give loft to a turkey.

What do we think: dasterdly intellectual property violation or unfortunate coincidence?

Three videos of note on the Facebook page (you may have to sign in and become a fan to see it) for Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax: two intros for Bujalski’s work made for Canadian TV, one starring Shawn Sides as Elvira and the other featuring Alex Karpovsky as Dracula. In both, bats flutter by on strings, as Bujalski himself looks on, silent but bemused. “Tonight I have a thirst,” Elvira drawls. “A thirst for a spine-tinglingly cold taste of American independent cinema!”

This is doing it right.

And then there’s this, also embedded above. I saw this on YouTube and thought it was a joke, like that thing with Kent Osborne in the garage, but apparently it’s an actual ad for a film series on Channel 4 in the UK. The ad features young attractive people standing in front of graffitied walls (very first season Real World), earnestly informing us that there’s a type of movie in which “there are no buldings blown to hell in slow motion, and you know what? That’s okay, because these films are about people!” The kicker: “There’s something going on here.” Cut to slow-talking redhead girl: “And that something, is a little something called mumblecore.” She then looks at the camera with one of those “this is just between you and me” smiles that are most often seen on television in the promotion of feminine hygeine products.

This is doing it wrong.

Beeswax opens at Film Forum on August 7 and expands to several other cities shortly after that. I like it.

Now as much as ever, Hollywood comedy is heavily preoccupied with pandering to the median. Something like Bruno is clearly designed to make the viewer feel good about their own brain power and education — each laugh is equivalent to an “I’m smart enough to behave better than that” statement, whether it’s “I’m smart enough to not hate gay people” or “I’m smart enough to not get suckered by Sacha Baron Cohen in the first place.” And nobody in the audience of a Judd Apatow film has to work very hard to get the jokes in it, although inevitably it’s suggested that most or all of the protagonists on screen weren’t gifted with the same innate intelligence. So the first thing that marks In The Loop as a break from the norm is its refusal to flatter the viewer’s intelligence; the second, is the way the film forces them to use it.

Written and directed by Armando Iannucci, a British TV comedy veteran whose credits include Steve Coogan’s faux chat show breakout Knowing Me Knowing You and Loop forerunner The Thick of It, Loop is a satire of modern politics by way of a procedural critique of the rhetoric that animates it. The action starts in London, where Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), a small-time cabinet minister with a Palin-esque way with a soundbite, gives one interview vaguely opposing an impending US/British co-invasion of an unnamed Middle Eastern territory before making another statement vaguely supporting it. The never-seen Prime Minister’s aggressively profane Director of Communications Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, reprising his role from Thick) tries at first to contain Foster’s self-possessed bumbling, but when liberal American cabinet secretary Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy) folds Foster’s first statement into her case for peace, Tucker sets a plan in motion using the unwitting Foster as a crowbar to get inside the US war room. The web is tangled considerably by the arrival of Foster’s new aide Toby (Chris Addison). Initially out of his element under Tucker’s Rahm-reminiscent tyranny (he comes from the Department of Agriculture, where “people tend to not get so sweary about wheat”), Toby’s ambitious plundering of his connections (including Clarke’s bright young assistant, played by Anna Chlumsky) creates a couple of lucky breaks that turn into a number of nightmares.
Loop unfolds in the author-less mock-verite style most often asociated with The Office, but the film’s lack of talking head confessionals and camera-conscious smirking is not the only thing that muddies up the comparison. The Office and its cultural cousins can be naturally aligned with several strains of this decade’s fine art cinema, thanks to the common use of the awkward pause as a fundamental building block. There are no pauses in In the Loop, awkward or otherwise. The film comes out of the gate at a breakneck pace and never lets up, packing jokes within jokes within cultural references (my favorite: Love Actually used as a derogatory nickname), forcing the viewer to fall into its accelerated meter quickly or never catch up. Even the few moments that find characters in honestly muted contemplation are spiked with off-hand punchlines, such as when the dovish general played by James Gandolfini plaintively explains his opposition to war: ”Once you’ve been there, once you’ve seen it, you never want to go back unless you have to. It’s like France.” (I’m also partial to the way Clarke greets a prickish young aide wandering aimlessly around the office: “Hanging, Chad?”)
In the Loop assumes the viewer will have a general familiarity with the circumstances of the run up to the war in Iraq (the opposing personalities within the US State department, the role of questionable British intelligence in a United Nations presentation with all the ethical integrity of a press release), but it’s careful to avoid resembling reality so closely as to demand engagement on an ideological level. This is not a film about the rights and wrongs of actual US/UK war policy; it’s not really a film about policy specifics at all, except for where it needs to solidify details in order to better wring comedy out of the concept of strong people using weaker ones to puff up their own agendas. Its ultimate satirical statement is not about ethics, evidence or arguments, but the manner in which the modern political machine works to obliterate all of the above to make way for the manipulation of reality. It is not the first film to suggest that Washington’s process of manufacturing narratives has something in common with Hollywood.
“Hollywood” is something which In The Loop itself emphatically is not, although for a great portion of its running time, until late in the game when the accumulated pieces of Iannucci’s project click into place, the viewing experience is, surprisingly, incredibly light. A scene depicting a crucial war comittee meeting is given maybe a quarter of the screen time as a number of scenes of various British people running around DC, trying to find the meeting without actually having to admit to any Americans that they don’t know where it is. This kind of thing is where Iannucci’s television roots unavoidably show. Certainly, the visual presentation of In the Loop is almost defiantly non-cinematic; certainly, Iannucci seems to be having the most fun when he’s stretching away from his story, drawing his characters through the way they speak. Consequently, it’s hard to see how this material, seemingly begging for the long-form possibilities of an English-length series, benefits from being constrained to the length of a feature film. Call it a backhanded compliment: In The Loop is a very funny film that plays like great TV.