IFFBoston Here I Come

Look out Davis Square, I’ll be back April 25-30 to cover the Independent Film Festival of Boston. The lineup is looking good, and seems very doc-heavy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Here are a few of the narrative features I’m looking forward to:

Hanna Takes the Stairs. I really liked Joe Swanberg’s LOL, which I saw at last year’s IFFBoston, and I also very much liked his Young American Bodies series for Nerve.com. So I’m looking forward to his new film, though am wondering if he’s going to break any new ground with this one…the other two projects are good, but mostly cut from the same cloth, and this one looks to be as well, so making something fresh out of that cloth is the challenge he’s facing. Although perhaps it’s a vast enough cloth that there’s still material to be mined. At the very least the film has plenty of cameos by indie film darlings to check out–Andrew Bujalski, Mark Duplass, and Todd Rohal. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Congorama. A Belgian finds out he was born in Canada and travels there to find his biological parents, but “all he finds in the Canadian countryside is bad fries and bad beer.” I look forward to someone making a movie that slams Canada for a change. Move over America, there’s a new asshole on the map!
(Full disclosure: I stole that line from The Kids In the Hall. And I have a grudge against Canadians.)

Day Night Day Night. The description of this film sounds very Jeanne Dielman: “A 19-year-old girl prepares and waits. Though what she is waiting for is not immediately clear, we are caught up in the minutiae of her preparation. When hooded handlers arrive, what follows is the suspenseful and emotional outcome of someone who has not only chosen when and how she will die, but also why.” But if that film description just totally ruined the film I’m going to be pissed.

Year of the Fish. And indie film fest usually specializes in films that are trying hard to be ‘quirky’. It can get to be annoying because all the films start to seem the same. But this one just sounds loopy enough to be interesting: “A modern-day Cinderella travels to New York’s Chinatown to earn to money help her father. Before she knows it, she’s working as a servant for an evil massage parlor madam. Her only companion is a fish that acts as narrator to our trip through this painted fairy tale.”

And this festival is no exception from the quirky-as-genre rule–there are several which seem to fit the profile, but could be good: Eagle vs. Shark, GoodTimesKid, Gretchen, Quiet City, Low and Behold, Monkey Warfare, The Sensation of Flight. There are also several films in the fest which are, as usual, questionably “indie”–there’s Brooklyn Rules, a gangster film starring Alec Baldwin and Freddy Prinze Jr., Away from Her, an alzheimer’s drama starring Julie Christie, and On Broadway, a Boston Irish funeral drama starring former NKOTB Joey McIntyre and Eliza Dushku. But hey, every festival needs a little starpower, no?
As for docs, there are so many I’m looking forward to but I’ll name just a few–A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar, about lawyers and lawsuits and America’s fascination with both, The Paper, about modern journalism and its problems, including declining circulation, and Strange Culture, about an artist who was interrogated post 9/11 but who can’t speak about the case, so actors such as Tilda Swinton tell the story.

Sometimes The Bible Has Cool Quotes

“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”  –Philippians 2:12

I only heard it in a recent movie, one which, like Pulse/Kairo, freaked me out so much I’m sleeping with the lights on again. It’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose. I wish I hadn’t watched it. Devil/demon movies don’t usually scare me, I’m usually disappointed to find out that Satan is the culprit. “Oh it’s just the devil,” I say to myself, and get bored. But not this one. It’s another mindfuck.

Meanwhile I was not so freaked out by The Descent–it’s what I’d call a “safe” horror film, in that it takes place in a very specific locale that I’m quite sure I’ll never visit (undiscovered caves in the backwaters of North Carolina) and that there’s nothing supernatural going on, just monsters and gore. And an all-female cast of ass-kicking spelunkers who fight to the death with these weird beasts. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Good Line In A Fairly Dull Movie

“You failed the polygraph test.”

“All Russians fail the test. Your polygraph does not understand the Russian soul.”

–Matt Damon interrogating a defecting Soviet spy in The Good Shepherd.

Depression In The Movies

Great article in the Guardian about the representation of mental illness (and mostly depression).

“…genuinely accurate depictions of mental illness are still rare in all the art forms. Why? For the very good reason that real mental illness is boring. Depressives are toxic and dull. Manic depressives are irritating. People with schizophrenia or autism are largely indecipherable. Most of them are best treated not by charismatic psychoanalysts who carefully excavate the early, repressed trauma that has “led” to their illness, but by doctors who administer psychotropic drugs of one kind of another. Thus, dramatic narrative and the reality of mental illness rarely go hand in hand.” 

I have a personal stake in the issue, as I hope to shoot a film that will be a bit more true to life on these matters. The article mentions a Terence Davies film called Trilogy, which I’ve never even heard of, has anyone seen it? I want to get my hands on a copy.

I must also state that his description of the mentally ill character of Anne in Little Britain is off–yes we are laughing at her but it’s also questionable whether she really is mentally ill. That’s part of the joke, which this person seems to be missing.

What a Stressful Movie

My heart could barely take it. I didn’t think Scorcese had it in him any more but it seems an adaptation of a Hong Kong action flick was a very good choice to give him some juice again. 

I Forgot to Mention…

…that I’m now writing film reviews for Gothamist sister site DCist.

More Marie Antoinette

After an email exchange with a friend in which I stated the following:

> i saw the queen and marie antoinette as well–enjoyed the queen, and i admired sofia’s intentions in antoinette but didn’t think it really came to fruition–i understand that she wanted to show her to be completely isolated and oblivious but the way she did it i felt it amounted to little more than a statement that it’s great fun to be rich and why do the dirty plebes have to ruin our fun? i thought the queen did a much better job of showing an equally oblivious character because we also got to see what all the fuss was about among the commoners. just because a character is oblivious doesn’t mean the film should be, in my opinion, and sofia’s is. i honestly don’t think she has it in her to criticize the rich, at least not yet.

he then forwarded to me a review of the film by David Mendelsohn, saying that he seemed to share my opinion. And indeed, I loved it so much I must quote and link it. He says much more elegantly and forgivingly what I said so angrily. Sorry for the length of the quotes but it’s just so good I couldn’t cut it.

First, on her slapdash inclusion of historical events:

One of the two great problems of the film is the sense you often get that she’d done her homework rather too faithfully: the languid freshness and visual originality of many scenes that seem evocative of Marie Antoinette’s inner life stand in vivid contrast to the impression often given, as in so many film biographies, that the narrative is ticking off the big moments in the well-known life.

Here Coppola’s film falls apart, because her special gift is for conveying emotional and psychological states suggestively, allusively, and impressionistically, by means of collocations of images; she has less talent for telling a straightforward tale. The movie suffers when you feel, as you often do, that she’s read Fraser’s biography thoroughly and is dutifully reproducing incidents of her subject’s life. Do we really need the story, which Fraser tells in great detail and which Coppola obligingly includes here, of how the dying Louis XV was forced to send away his mistress, Mme du Barry, in order to receive communion on his deathbed? The episode, hastily sketched in and, I suspect, incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the sorry story of the awful death of the Bien-aimé, adds absolutely nothing to our understanding of the film’s subject, and ends by being a confusing distraction.

So too many of the episodes taken from the latter parts of Antoinette’s life—which is to say, the part of her life that took place after the crisis that is of real interest to Coppola, which is the crisis of a young girl torn from her natural setting and forced to stay afloat, willy-nilly, in a strange and foreign place. Coppola’s apparent lack of interest in anything outside of the cocooned and photogenic private world of the doomed Queen is evident in the desultory quality of the many stilted moments designed to convey what’s going on in the world beyond Versailles—the kind of clanking scene in which someone says to the King at a meeting of his council, “The Americans are asking for help with their revolution,” or, worse, when we see someone rush up to the King and announce, “The Bastille has been stormed!”

The director tries to cover over her slapdash approach to history with some familiar technical tricks (there’s a little montage in which we see some portraits of the Queen bearing scribbled labels that say things like “Madame Deficit,” and so forth), but it seems an afterthought. Such moments are mere chron- ological signposts, and the film loses its appeal whenever we are forced to rush by them. Marie Antoinette would have succeeded better purely on formal terms if it had never attempted to include this material—if it had been what I suspect Coppola always wanted it to be, a reverie on what it might have been like to be the very young Marie Antoinette, rather than a straight account of her life. In the end, it’s too little of either.

And on Sofia’s own Marie Antoinette-ish obliviousness:

But then—and this is the second and fatal problem with Coppola’s movie— could you, should you really make a film about Marie Antoinette the victimized young woman as if she were the private person she apparently wished, at times, she’d been? There is something Marie Antoinette-ish about the director’s impatient disdain for the outside world, for the history that was going on all around her sensitive and troubled heroine. (And not just around her, but right in front of her: when the Estates General finally met in May 1789, it was at Versailles—the first great intrusion of the coming Revolution into that enclave—although you’d never guess as much from this movie.)

There’s nothing wrong with being interested in the inner life of a queen who was, in the end quite tragically, nothing more than the “average woman” to which the subtitle of Stefan Zweig’s 1932 biography alludes,^[2] placed by fate in extraordinary circumstances. But this particular life, the rather ordinary personality whose contours Coppola is interested in delineating here—and which she does delineate so effectively at times—had an enormous impact on history, on real events and persons. That this was already clear to the Queen’s contemporaries is evident from the concerns about the young queen’s behavior expressed by Joseph—no slouch himself when it came to hectoring letters—which are, in hindsight, particularly significant. “In very truth I tremble for your happiness,” he wrote his sister, “seeing that in the long run things cannot go on like this…the revolution will be a cruel one, and perhaps of your own making.”

The provocative relationship between personality and history in the case of Marie Antoinette has indeed been clear to subsequent generations. Writing thirty years after the Revolution, the comtesse de La Tour du Pin, by then a fifty-year-old émigrée, who had been presented at court as a young woman and whose glamorous mother had been a lady-in-waiting to the Queen (“the queen liked my mother, she was always captivated by glitter and my mother was very much the rage”), ruminated on the inevitable lessons to be gleaned from the Queen’s life:

My earliest visit to Versailles was in 1781, when the first Dauphin was born. In later years, when listening to tales of Queen Marie-Antoinette’s sufferings and shame, my mind often went back to those days of her triumph. I was taken to watch the ball given for her by the Gardes du Corps in the Grande Salle de Spectacle at Versailles. She opened the ball with a young guardsman, wearing a blue dress strewn with sapphires and diamonds. She was young, beautiful and adored by all; she had just given France a Dauphin and it would have seemed to her inconceivable that the brilliant career on which she was launched could ever suffer a reverse. Yet she was already close to the abyss. The contrast provides much cause for reflection!^[3]

But the contrast has apparently provoked no such reflection in Coppola, who in her new film gives you, as it were, the dress but not the abyss. To be so unreflective, to want to make a film about Marie Antoinette that ignores who she was in history, seems shockingly naive, intellectually. It’s like wanting to make a film about what it’s like to be a starving artist and deciding to have your hero be the young Adolf Hitler.

And so Coppola’s movie, which works so hard and with such imagination to include in its portrait much that has been ignored, ends up leaving out much that cannot be ignored. Most egregiously, it fails completely to convey in any way why it was that this particular queen aroused the loathing of many in her country. You get absolutely no sense from this film of the immense hatred that was felt for the Queen as the years went by, as she was languishing in her unstructured muslin lévites among the soft pillows of the Petit Trianon, to which Coppola’s swooning camera gives an almost erotic allure. The irony is that this willed ignorance of the larger world disserves Coppola’s artistic and emotional purpose. If the director had gone into all this, she’d have only underscored some of her subject’s sympathetic qualities; for there’s little question that while she could make gross mistakes of judgment, nearly all of the calumnies heaped on Marie Antoinette, including the notorious Affair of the Diamond Necklace, were absurd and vicious misrepresentations, when not downright inventions.

The result of all this is a film that is ultimately, like its subject, horribly, fatally truncated. Stefan Zweig, a far more tart and critical biographer than Antonia Fraser, wrote of the Queen that “though but little inclined to reflection, she was quick of perception, her tendency being to judge all that happened in accordance with her immediate personal impressions—for she saw only the surface of things.” It would be unfair to say that Sofia Coppola sees only the surface of things— she sees a great deal more, sees what surfaces can be the reflections of, and renders what she sees with artful ingenuity—but in this film, at least, it’s as if she’s been so bewitched by the fabulous beauties of the world she has chosen to depict, the silks and satins and shoes and frosting on the bonbons everyone always seems to be eating, that she’s lost track of crucial events and the inescapable larger meaning of her subject’s life. It seemed significant to me that this movie ends on the day the royal family leaves Versailles for the last time, prisoners of the Revolution—as if Coppola couldn’t bring herself to imagine where it was that all of the indulgence, all of the escapism, that she’s so artfully presented led to in the end.

The final silent image in this movie, so filled as it is with striking and suggestive images, tells you more about Coppola, and perhaps our own historical moment, than it could possibly tell you about Marie Antoinette. It’s a mournful shot of the Queen’s state bedchamber at Versailles, ransacked by the revolutionary mob the night before the Queen and her family were forced to leave, its glittering chandeliers askew, its exquisite boiseries cracked and mangled. You’d never guess from this that men’s lives—those of the Queen’s guards—were also destroyed in that violence; their severed heads, stuck on pikes, were gleefully paraded before the procession bearing the royal family to Paris. But Coppola forlornly catalogs only the ruined bric-a-brac. As with the teenaged girls for whom she has such sympathy, her worst imagination of disaster, it would seem, is a messy bedroom.

What He Said

The Bond franchise bores me but this one I will definitely see. Tonight. Meow.

UPDATE: Saw it. Tedious. Interminable. I left before the end. Even Daniel Craig’s hotness could not wake me up. My opinion remains that Bond movies are boring as shit.

Another Poor Little Rich Girl

I checked out The Queen the other night after hearing that it does much better than Marie Antoinette at depicting an isolated, oblivious monarch upon whom the real world intrudes. And it’s true, it gets right what Sofia got wrong. It intersperses scenes of her isolated existence in London and on the breathtakingly gorgeous grounds of Balmoral Castle with crowd scenes of the people voicing their growing displeasure. We get to see what all the fuss is about, and at the same time we see how isolated and out of touch the queen is. This is where Sofia fails. We never get to see the crowd or have any idea of what they are so angry about. And I completely understand that that is her intent, to show how isolated she was, but just because the character is isolated and oblivious does not mean the film should be. That is a mistake. To show none of it whatsoever, and to stop the film before we see any of her hardship, means the film sides fully with the Queen and makes the starving peasants’ anger out to be much ado about nothing. You end up with a film that says nothing more than “It’s great fun to be a rich, beautiful teenager!”

The Queen, however, is much more satisfying because we get plenty of evidence that what she is doing is wrong. And we watch her eventually realize this. And the film still remains a compassionate portrayal of an oblivious character who in some ways remains oblivious to the end. She ultimately gives in and acknowledges the real world, but also says in the end “I don’t think I will ever understand what happened this week.” And that’s fine. We don’t hate her for that, we understand.

But while I thoroughly enjoyed The Queen, it’s no work of art. It does not aspire to art. It’s just a very good story, a well-written and wonderfully acted drama. Sofia’s film, I must admit, aspires to art. And for that reason I can’t completely dismiss her. She hasn’t got it quite right in this film, but I do expect that with age and experience she may produce something brilliant one day. Once she acknowledges the real world.

(Note that the links above for each film show approval ratings–98% for The Queen, clearly a crowd- (plebe-?) pleaser, and 52% for the highly polarizing Marie Antoinette. An acquired taste, obviously, like caviar.)

Marie Antoinette

While doing a google search for “sofia coppola racist” I came across the following description at Racialicious of the theory behind all of Sofia’s films:

Life should come easy and it does only until you’re forced to live it (which is so mean and so the fault of patriarchy/foreigners or meanies/POCs/peasants) and when you are it isn’t because a world exists outside of you but simply because the world is intruding on you as you (special white women) are the center of the universe.

That about sums it up. I saw Marie Antoinette and was irritated by her presentation of Madame du Barry, King Louis XV’s mistress, who came from the poorest of the poor and is portrayed as a crude, obnoxious, social-climbing bitch. She burps. She makes out with the king at the dinner table. She wears darkly- and brightly-colored clothing, that period’s version of “trampy.” And, though the real du Barry was blonde and blue-eyed, Coppola has cast the dark and very Italian-looking Asia Argento as the beast. All others at court are fair and light-haired (well, most wear those ridiculous gray wigs so sometimes it’s hard to tell, but no one is in the least ethnic-looking save du Barry). So once again in Coppola’s world, anyone not born rich and anyone who looks different is ridiculed, made a cheap stereotype. I’m not so much offended any more by her obliviousness to her own classism as I am disappointed by the lack of imagination. She so often falls back on cheap over-used jokes and stereotypes that you’d think a Yale graduate could come up with something more subtle and textured than that.

Of course, the real du Barry may not have been the most pleasant person to be around, I don’t know. But in a film that portrays Marie Antoinette sympathetically, and basically as a rich American teenager, Marie’s disgust with du Barry is disturbing because the film then wants us to support this exclusion of the only outsider in the entire film. Her court becomes her own gang of mean girls supporting her and excluding the dark and crude du Barry. Marie is shown to be amazingly accepting of all the ridiculousness of court life–she good-naturedly rolls her eyes but accepts that there are 30 court ladies standing at her bed every morning waiting for her to wake so they can watch her be dressed, she good-naturedly accepts that her husband won’t/can’t have sex with her for 7 years after they are married despite the vicious rumors about the reasons they are still childless, she good-naturedly accepts his weird obsessions and quirks…but du Barry, this she cannot accept. A low-class burping beast in her court? Never. Anything done by the upper-class is amusingly quirky; nothing of the lower class is tolerated (except for well-behaved servants who clean up after your lavish parties). Plus, it’s precisely these peasants/outsiders who later want to lop off poor Marie’s head.

It’s the same issue I had with the portrayal of the lounge singer in Lost in Translation. She is utterly ridiculous, and it’s fine to have characters who are ridiculous, but if Sofia could just include one small gesture, a look, something to give that character a small amount of humanity, it wouldn’t be so irritating. Instead they are completely dismissed as useless human beings. And these people always exist outside the rich main character’s world.

Part of me is hesitant to even bring up the issue of racism/classism because by doing so I become exactly the person her films is trying to vilify–I am one of those peasants with torches and muskets rioting outside Versailles calling for the poor burdened queen’s head. I was also one of those peasants while watching Lost in Translation, and also Virgin Suicides. I am one of those meanies intruding on Sofia’s perfect world and trying to force her to acknowledge reality. And there is something to be said about the way we watch movies, the way we demand to see suffering of the rich and elevation of the poor and downtrodden. I had to acknowledge that part of what irritated me about Lost in Translation is that it was about a couple of rich people who weren’t apologizing for being rich. That’s what we demand of rich characters in films. Should they have to? I don’t know. But it’s not just that. Her characters are rich and they ridicule anyone who isn’t. And they get away with it. That’s the extra step she takes that makes her films unsympathetic to me. I keep thinking (hoping?) that with each of her films she’s trying to remake Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy, where a rich couple travels–yet stays in their isolated bubble–through Italy. These people don’t apologize for being rich but their isolation from reality is highlighted, especially in the final scene, where they grasp for each other among a sea of peasants–giving up their attempt to enter reality and returning to their isolated bubble. This is a whole, complete, subtle, and complex treatment of the issue and I think it’s what Sofia is striving for. But she has missed the mark every time.

-isms aside, the film had other flaws. The acting was horrible throughout, especially Dunst and Jason Schwartzman. But there’s not much they could have done with such bad dialogue. The modern music was not too distracting so long as it was not diegetic, but once it became so it was very irritating–in a party scene the revelers danced to Siouxie and the Banshees. And the film runs so quickly through historic events, touching so slightly on them, that a lot of it probably didn’t make sense to anyone who doesn’t know the story already. Of course a light touch fits with the themes of Marie’s obliviousness, but it’s not handled properly here–bringing them up so quickly only confuses people.

But as I said with Lost in Translation–while I am irritated by the themes in Sofia’s films, I am glad she at least has them. She has a point of view. She has a set of issues she keeps dealing with in each film. She is an auteur.

And besides, those bored rich bitches really need someone to voice their pain.

See Me In Greek

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Apparently a review of mine has been reprinted in Greek, for a special program for the Thessaloniki Film Festival. Anyone happen to have a copy? I’d love to see myself in Greek. Here’s me in Portuguese. Here’s the original review that was reprinted.

Me me me MEEEEEE!

LOL the Movie Soundtrack

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As I said earlier, I really loved the movie LOL, and I got one of the free copies of the soundtrack at the IFFBoston screening. I’m really digging it, though I’m also perplexed by it, does anyone else out there have a copy? It is all written and recorded by Kevin Bewersdorf, who plays a musician in the film and performs much of the music in the film. It’s all electronic and has a sort of Clockwork Orange feel in some places, and I like the sound, but the lyrics in some places are outright ridiculous, and I don’t know if they’re supposed to be that way. How do you take seriously a song that has a lyric like “The chill of winter/is nothing compared/to watching your lover/be murdered in spring”? That has to be intentionally funny, right? It’s so Spinal Tap. I like the sound of the song though. The scene where he performs it in the film reminds me of a scene in Caveh Zahedi’s A Little Stiff, where he’s trying to impress a girl and shows her one of his films–a completely depressing and dour and graphically violent short animated film–and it falls flat, she’s kind of like “Um, great…” It’s totally the wrong film to show in that moment, and shows he’s a little out of touch when it comes to connecting with people. The character in LOL is supposed to have that same character trait–he relies too much on technology and allows it to screw up his real-life connections to other people–so I’m wondering if this is all intentional. Perhaps I will contact the filmmakers and ask.

Marie Antoinette Trailer�

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…looks utterly ridiculous. How can you not laugh at Jason Schwartzman as a French fop? Not to mention perky cheerleader Kirsten Dunst as a fucking French queen. Ridiculous. Let’s hope it’s meant to be funny.

IFFBoston Roundup

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Well I ended up skipping Walking to Werner last night, figuring it might be brought back at some point while a Jeanne Dielman screening is too rare to pass up. So let’s hope Walking to Werner comes back. And if anyone else out there saw it, please let me know what you thought. It seemed to have the potential to be ridiculously self-indulgent and irritating (and probably full of shakycam) so maybe I didn’t miss much.

As for the rest of the screenings–I’d still say LOL was the best in the festival, and among the others I saw, In Between Days was a runner-up. It did make me a little nauseous with the shakycam, but I loved the simple storyline of a teenage Korean girl’s quasi-unrequited crush on her male best friend, as well as getting a peek into the world of first-generation Korean immigrants moving about in their own subculture in America. Barely a word of English in the film, and it takes some time to even realize where they are.

Another favorite was Arctic Son, a documentary about a man living in tough terrain in the Yukon who brings his teenage son to live with him in an attempt to get him off drugs and alcohol and out of trouble. The boy is also an artist, and he shows us his book of drawings, most of which feature women suffering, he says, “because women go through a lot of pain in their lives. A lot more than men.” One is of his female friend who killed herself, another is of his mother, who raised him by herself after her husband, his father, left. “I’m really angry at him for not being there,” he says. While this issue is never discussed between the two–indeed, nothing intimate is ever discussed, it’s mostly lots of hard work and small talk–over the course of the film a bond develops between this stoic, unaffectionate man and his wayward son.

One of the most hyped films in the festival was Guatemalan Handshake, which sold out most likely on its advanced press comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite (a film I hated). But I went, and while the film has some superficial similarities–rural setting, a cast of weirdos who do inexplicable things, etc–it’s really not very similar. It’s not a comedy first of all. And the storyline doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I read an interview with the filmmaker who said he was worried it made no sense and people wouldn’t get it, and I think that’s a reasonable concern, because what he says it’s ‘about’ wasn’t really what I got out of it, but I think people will like it anyway. These days your film doesn’t have to make sense for people to like it. In fact that might be a benefit. Quirky and amusing is good enough.

I also caught The Legend of Lucy Keyes which is representative of everything that’s wrong with the term “independent film.” It has stars (Julie Delpy and Justin Theroux) and a completely conventional ghost-story plot, and the director said afterward that the film was just bought by Lifetime. The film is moderately interesting (apparently the people sitting behind me were involved in the making of the film and were pointing out their names in the credits–one a hairstylist, the other a videographer–and when the film was over they said “well, it wasn’t that bad.”) but more interesting is the story of its making. It was shot on high-definition video using one of those cameras that has a hard drive–not a single tape was used in the making of the film. And it looks like film, doesn’t look like video at all. The future is here, baby.

And finally, I went to the podcasting panel, mostly to see the makers of the Four-Eyed Monsters podcasts, which I have been following and I really like. Gerald Peary was in the audience and is apparently a big fan as well. You should check them out if you get a chance–they have six podcasts up, and showed us a sneak preview of episode 7. I was so inspired. Now I want to get a video camera and start podcasting myself.

Overall the festival was a lot of fun–makes me want to be a filmmmaker and just travel around to festivals and party and meet new friends and make connections. I think that is my next goal in life. Better get cracking on that screenplay…

I (Heart) Photoshop

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You can erase your whole nose!

My final IFFBoston update coming up tonight…I’m feeling very torn because the only film that I was DYING to see in the festival was Walking to Werner, a doc about a guy re-creating Werner Herzog’s legendary (and dubious) walk from Germany to Paris to see Lotte Eisner. But the only screening is tonight, and I T/A class tonight, and the
screening in class is Chantal Akerman’s Jean Dielman, a 3-hour film
that is very rare. Not really something I can pick up at Blockbuster,
nor something that I want to see any way other than on print anyway. Decisions, decisions…

IFFBoston: LOL

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How could anyone in our generation not go to see a movie called LOL? If you can, try to see it at IFFBoston Sunday, the last screening of the film. So far it’s the best I’ve seen. It’s an entirely improvised film about relationships–between people, and between people and social technologies–that was made for $3000. That means lots of IM, email, cell phones, etc. The film has little plot other than following the development or degeneration of a few friends and their relationships, and how technology is an integral part of that, both bringing them together and keeping them apart. You might say that the organizing device in the film is a musical project one of the characters is putting together–making short videos of people making random noises with their mouths, which he then edits together to make music out of just their sounds. Watching the film I felt it had a very Andrew Bujalski feel, and then *poof* one of these video heads making noises is Bujalski. Turns out the filmmakers, who live in Chicago, sent out a bunch of emails to people asking for videos of themselves making noises, and Bujalksi sent one in. So did several other indie filmmakers. It’s like a who’s who of indie festival darlings. At the screenings they are giving out free copies of the soundtrack as well, which was actually made by the actor in the film, who is in fact the musician he is playing in the film. So as you can see, like Bujalski, the filmmakers keep their characters close to the actors’ actual performances, which makes for excellent performances, because there’s not much performance going on at all.

Today I’m off to see In Between Days and Guatemalan Handshake, more soon…

A Plea To Filmmakers:

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Please stop with the excessively shaky camerawork. It’s unnecessary and vomit-inducing. Please learn to handle your camera more carefully. I’d like to tell you what I thought of Chalk, which I tried to watch at IFFBoston tonight, but I had to leave after about a half hour for fear of vomiting. And I was so nauseous I couldn’t go to any other screenings either. So please stop torturing your audience. Thanks.

IFFBoston Opening Night: Half Nelson

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Let’s get this out of the way first: Ryan Gosling is sexy. Sexy in that smooooth, cocky, I – know – he’s – working – me – but – it’s – so – much – fun – falling – under – his – spell kind of way, the way we girls kick ourselves afterward for being attracted to. I kicked myself for it while watching the movie, in fact. It’s all in the way they look at you. A guy who’s not afraid to look you dead in the eye, and hold your gaze, subtly predatory yet at the same time slightly elusive, luring you in rather than pouncing. It is even literalized in his body movement in one scene where he’s talking to a girl while peeking from around the corner.

That’s the main impression I came away with after watching Half Nelson, anyway. It’s not really the point of the film, and in fact I wonder if it might have detracted a bit from the film, which is about a drug-addicted high school teacher and the friendship he strikes up with one of his students who discovers his secret. After awhile his shtick got a little annoying, and felt instead like he was hamming it up for the camera. But it is also all a part of the inappropriateness of his character–his highly sexually-charged persona, like his drug addiction, is something we don’t expect, nor want to think about, in our teachers. In fact, thinking of them having personal lives at all usually brings a grimace to the face of any high school student. Maybe college too. The Village Voice says the film “pays fond tribute to, even as it slyly subverts, the inspirational classroom fable,” and I suppose that’s true, though a film that plays with genre conventions really only accomplishes a stretching of those conventions–it doesn’t ever break them. The genre just folds them in and they become new conventions. Overall it’s a strange beast–an “edgier” Lean On Me, where the teacher is as flawed as his students and no one is really saved in the end. In the obligatory inspirational teacher’s speech near the end, he preaches against Western black-and-white values that refuse to acknowledge that a tree can be “both crooked AND straight, a person both right AND wrong…” making sure you get the point the filmmakers are trying to get across.

But Gosling’s performance is the real reason to see this movie–there are shades of greatness, and once he learns to control the hamminess I think he’ll be one of the truly great actors of his generation. Newcomer Shareeka Epps likewise delivers a wonderfully subtle performance–so subtle that I thought it might just be the effect of shyness or nervousness in a young, new actor, but when I saw her gregariousness at the Q&A afterward I realized that was some serious acting going on there.

Tonight it’s more of the same themes as I’m off to see the public high school satire Chalk and then the morally-ambiguous drug-addict drama Cocaine Angel. More soon…

IFFBoston Opening Night Tonight

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You’ve probably seen the posters all over town. I’ll be covering opening night tonight, where they’re screening Sundance fave Half Nelson, and hopefully will see a lot of people I haven’t seen in a long time. The festival is looking good this year, and they expanded it to six days to accomodate the demand. Last year pretty much every show was sold out, and some are already sold out this year. More soon…

My Herzog Thesis Now Available

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I finally got around to shaping it up and posting it here. Werner Herzog and the Documentary Film. I was such a precocious little bitch.