Movie City Indie Archive for January, 2007
Sundance on Ice (Monday-Tuesday)
Sunderance: "It's not really germane to this document"
I’ve posted a review and want to get another one done in ten minutes. Deadlines are a fine pressure. The man beside me in the lounge outside festival headquarters press/filmmakers lodge, loudly conducts business on a cell phone, insisting he has to “helm” the “elements” for DVD extras, and says the project’s music he “got for a steal.” A man is throwing a baby in the air while its mother shakes a pair of large maracas loudly. The child squeals. Usually, there’s only a low hum of voices here. The man continues his checklist aloud. I have no idea who he is or who he thinks he is. He’s not wearing the small sandwich board of name and face that is the festival I.D. I catch his eye. He looks away, speaks louder. The baby and the man are equally unaware of their surroundings. It makes it almost impossible to type any words except the stream he’s letting: “There are a couple of non-integral clips that my attorney advised me and even wrote an opinion that passed E&O muster. If you guys want to take them out, we can talk about that. It’s Jane Pauley and some audio. We could always just re-track it.
S07 Fortune cookie #5-Peter Morgan
On hearing he’d received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for The Queen this morning, screenwriter Peter Morgan said, “This is, of course, the highest compliment our industry bestows and the greatest honor. I am proud and thrilled The Queen has been embraced internationally like this. The whole journey has been mind-boggling and exciting. I sincerely hope friends at home will still talk to me.“
Park City: it's hard out there for a party
Park City’s pulled a big ol’ crackdown on big parties, and rental agencies have followed suit, writes Dana Harris in Variety. “There are perhaps 100 top-flight private homesfive-, six- or seven-bedroom places that include 
hot tubs, wi-fi, granite countertops and daily maid service—available for rental during the Sundance Film Festival. But if you want to throw a party, the available number drops to just about zero… [M]ajor property rental companies in Park City like Deer Valley Lodging and Alpine Ski Properties say they have a clear-cut policy on renting to Sundance’s would-be party monsters: They don’t do it.” Two night’s cash damage deposit is required, as well as a no-party contract. Past damage “included wine-stained and cigarette-burned carpet and furniture, broken glasses, impassable neighborhoods and a general disregard for the fact that renters were, in fact, using someone’s home.” Harris does find one person skirting the rule, the owner of PM, a New York nightclub, who calls himself “Unik.” “It’s noon on Sunday, and Unik (say “unique,” no last name) is in a T-shirt and slippers, eating scrambled eggs and cilantro sausage as his staff clears away the last bits of detritus from the house party for 300 that ended just seven hours before. Laminated printouts are still pasted to the staircase, warning that your presence constitutes permission to use your name and likeness. .. “What a party last night,” said Unik. “We mobilized the whole Park City: Josh Hartnett, Sienna, Diddy, Nick Cannon, Harvey, Damon Dash, Jamie Lynn, Pharrell…” Unik and his right hand man “spent most of the night standing guard at the foot of their driveway, personally approving every would-be guest. Sometimes they wouldn’t let passengers get out of a cab. “If it’s three girls and one guy, fine,” said Unik. “Three guys and one girl? No way.”
S07 Fortune cookie #4: Todd Field
On the eve of Oscar noms in LA Times’ Sunday Calendar, Little Children writer-director-producer Todd Field sums up what he thinks about getting to make independent-minded movies to Paul Cullum: “The enormity of this opportunity is mind-blowing, but it is a privilege, and it’s not to be squandered. It’s serious. Yes, in the end, for a lot of people, it will just be entertainment, something they did one afternoon. But it can’t be that for you. You’re telling someone a story, and that’s the only connection we have to each other—the stories that we tell.”
Broken English: is the MPAA still all smoke and p.r.?
When This Film is Not Yet Rated preemed at Sundance 2006, producers Kirby Dick and Eddie Schmidt knew they’d be doing more research and editing before its release, and they said it might be an ongoing project. Voila! While the MPAA’s execs are in Sundance to announce a number of alterations to the ratings system, Dick and Schmidt in town as well. From the press release about their continued adversary role (in its entirety in extended entry): “The MPAA’s reforms simply address the public’s perceptions of the system, rather than affecting real change in the system itself,” says “Rated” director Kirby Dick. “All the basic problems of the ratings system remain: its secrecy and lack of accountability; its bias toward independent and gay filmmakers; its excessively harsh rating of films with adult sexuality.” [Bulletpoint pro-con at the jump..]
Swag the dog: Sam Jackson's givin' it away
The tsunami of swag has only begun, and this bit of p.r. is an auspicious leap into the absurd: “When Samuel L. Jackson presents his new film at Sundance, he’ll fuel the buzz of Black Snake Moan with a bluesy thump. Jackson will be gifting OAKLEY THUMP PRO digital music eyewear to a lucky few. Only 20 Special Edition versions of the Oakley invention will be created and 
each will come preloaded with three songs from the film soundtrack. The frame will be customized with Jackson’s guitar graphic and signed with the film title, laser etched in the lens. And because Jackson loves to golf with lenses that darken automatically, we’re crafting them with Oakley Activated by Transitions Photochromic™ lenses… THUMP PRO combines the world’s best optics with a fully integrated digital audio engine. Its adjustable speakers can be positioned for a perfect fit, and all controls are built into the frame for easy access. Engineered for sport training, the sweat resistant design blends all-day comfort with the freedom of interchangeable lenses that let you adapt to any environment.” [Including Park City, Utah.]
S07 review: Snow Angels
NOTHING LIKE A BITTERSWEET COMEDY-TRAGEDY AT 8:30 IN THE MORNING at Sundance: sigh. David Gordon Green’s fourth feature, the casual yet deeply serious, soulful Snow Angels continues along his own lovely path, reaching into particulars of working class life with wit and empathy. Life is a river, and sometimes it freezes over: Gordon, 
working with generous breadth in adapting Stewart O’Nan’s book, warms the heart. The cast is large, Altman-sized. Green moves between them fluidly. There are at least ten major characters, their interactions marshaled with novelistic care. It’s a tapestry of overwhelming complication, adroitly described, demonstrating well the abiding truth that you must forgive trespasses in tiny towns. Set in an unnamed Pennsylvania town (but shot in Nova Scotia), the movie conveys the chill of disillusionment, yet in the foreground or in the corner of many of the widescreen shots, tendrils reach. Trees, rooted, that will revive come spring. Annie (Kate Beckinsale) is the mother of Tara, a small girl. Working as one part of the seemingly entirely non-Asian staff of the local China Town restaurant, Annie tries to avoid estranged husband Glenn (Sam Rockwell), who’s developed a few messianic tics since their separation, and keep meetings with Nate (Nicky Katt), husband of China Town co-worker Barb (Amy Sedaris), a secret from all. Another co-worker is teenaged Arthur (Michael Angarano), whom Annie babysat for many years, and who is in a want-a-first-kiss flirtation with Lila, a proto-glamour-geek behind cats-eye glasses, under rats-nest tangle of dark hair (Olivia Thirlby). Theirs is a sweetly hopeful young romance despite the quietly catastrophic onset of middle-aged disillusionment in Arthur’s parents (still floppy-haired Griffin Dunne, weary yet luminous Jeanneta Arnette). The acting is very, very good, with the performers matching the capacity of Green’s fully furnished world to surprise from shot-to-shot.
The world falls apart terribly in this small, unspecified town and the landscape swallows many sorrows. And yet. Things change but life does not stop: young love, old love, they are as true as the hurts notched across years of acquaintance or relationship. Establishing shots are used as socioeconomic shorthand, and meticulously gathered props and interior design have talismanic weight.
As always, Green and his regular cinematographer Tim Orr observe landscape, working as the first-est second unit of them all. (How do they find the time to shoot all this concrete yet lyrical coverage?) Shots matter in movies like George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow and Snow Angels: An overweight grandmother with faded tattoos on her forearm. Kate Beckinsale’s bare calf, cocked, across a motel room bedspread. Snowflakes on red wool. A lovemaking scene that builds from the elegant example of Don’t Look Now (plus a bonus goofball cunnilingus button). We see a boy in class seen drawing an enormous power transmission line, and Green cuts to the real line, which dominates a hillside and horizon without a lick of majesty. Among many other glorious instants, I would single out one of Lila, outdoors, watching Arthur leave the school grounds, taking a photograph of this boy to whom she is all the time more drawn; it’s from a bit of distance, and unsteady, framed just a little high on her as she looks over her glasses through the glass viewfinder of her twin-lensed medium format camera, contrasting geometry both above and below her of the outdoor stadium, and her bulky-at-the-base winter coat planting her there like a tree. The next couple of shots? Landscapes in the style of the photographs she’s taken: for a second, her eyes are the film’s omniscient vision. Green is good at this, at throwaway beauty. “Let me take your breath, okay? Now let’s move along.”
Dialogue matters to this still-young writer-director, too, as anyone who likes his films would tell you. A girl browsing a slang dictionary as a tease: “Fellatrix. I like that”; “If Tom Cruise were a little girlie, girlie, he’d look like you”; “Can you say that in Spanish?”; “She had a pickle”; “I’ll suck you right up my tailpipe, bud”; “I’m nice, aren’t I?… Do you have any idea of how adorably cute you are? … Right now?” And emotion, with motion: a girl’s “Stupid things you say make me like you even more,” caught in a handheld shot that moves uneasily back from a two-shot into an empty high school corridor, leaving them framed at the center of their world.
Aside from worthy embellishments on Robert Altman, Green makes a wry nod to Cameron Crowe with a bit involving a pencil earlier; the two men are parallel sweethearts. An end-credit bonus unlikely to be found in Altman or Crowe: there’s a tune in the movie entitled “Four Robots Fucking in A Wool Sock.”
S07: Spletzer on Mudede on Zoo and AOL
For an admiring piece, Andy Spletzer‘s interview at GreenCine with screenwriter Charles Mudede (Police Beat) about his essayistic Sundance doc entry, Zoo, has quite the lede: ““It’s hard to believe, but one of the most beautiful films at Sundance this year will be about a guy who was fucked to death by a horse.” 
“Back in 2005, when the Seattle Times reported on the “Enumclaw Horse Sex Incident,” the story spread like wildfire across the Internet and became their most-read story of the year. It also caught the eyes of Seattle-based director Robinson Devor and writer Charles Mudede, whose dreamily poetic feature film Police Beat debuted at Sundance just six months prior. The resulting documentary essay is Zoo… Far from a traditional documentary, the narration is taken from extensive audio interviews with members of the group and was edited together to form the spine of the story. On top of that, they hired actors to portray the incidents that were being spoken about, and they brought in their Police Beat cinematographer Sean Kirby to create beautifully evocative images to punctuate the story.” The story broke in the summer of 2005, with the revelation that bestiality was legal in the state of Washington. “[T]he Internet made it possible. There’s no other reason why they got together, which is wonderful when you think about it. We didn’t get this out in the film and I wanted to express this, but you can only do so much. I like the fact that the Internet, this advanced form of technology, made it possible to do something that you’d almost say was kind of… primitive. Right? You know what I mean? At the root, at the center of all of this, the exchange between nature, the wild, the animal and the human was only made possible by the foremost technology of our time.” Spletzer notes that the caretaker of the barn says, “I got a computer in 2002 and started with AOL.” Mudede: “Yes. That’s right. “And I discovered myself. I discovered who I was. I was a zoo.” I mean, he discovers it on the Web, which is amazing.” [More amazement and perplexity at the link.]
Sundance movies are bad for you, Corliss sez
Sundance defines indie, by the definition of Time magazine’s Richard Corliss. “[T]he kind of indie film nurtured by Sundance has become the dominant non-Hollywood movie form for smart people,” he asserts in a predictable plaint that could use some fresh reporting. “Sundance has become the crucial farm system for the major studios. 
Problem is, indie movies are getting as predictable as Hollywood’s. Sundance movies have devolved into a genre. The style is spare and naturalistic. The theme is relationships, beginning in angst and ending in reconciliation. The focus is often on a dysfunctional family (there are no functional ones in indie movies) that strives to reconnect… Given the typical Sundance pace, which is leisurely to lethargic, these road movies rarely get in the passing lane. The predictability of recent Sundance films is a pity, because the fest used to discover original movie minds. The honor roll of those who introduced their early work there includes both the big fish of indie cinema (among them Joel and Ethan Coen, Jim Jarmusch, Kevin Smith and Darren Aronofsky) and some of the mainstream’s champion swimmers (including Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Bryan Singer and Christopher Nolan). What most of these directors share is a gift for bending, sometimes gleefully mutilating, film form: taking old narratives styles like the crime movie or musical or horror film and making them fresh, vital, dangerous… You don’t find as much originality in Sundance films these days, and for a simple reason. In the beginning, the festival was a home for the homeless… There was no need to be cautious, since indie films were rarely hits. But as Sundance became the showcase for a form of movie gaining marketplace pull, young directors naturally made films to fit the new mold. Sundance films weren’t quirky; they did quirky. Quirky became another genre. In fact, truly imaginative movies have always been anomalies at Sundance…” [More of less at the link.]
S07 fortune cookie #3—Baudelaire
After watching the gentle teen romance inside the darker matter of David Gordon Green‘s Snow Angels: “Genius is childhood recovered at will“—Baudelaire.
S07 reviews: The Savages
Note-perfect, Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages puts an awful lot of American moviemaking to shame. Witty about neurosis and unblinking about mortality, her long-in-coming second feature is an unlikely fusion of the comedic precision of Annie Hall and the melancholy humanism The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and I mean that in the most admiring and positive fashion. Line for line, The Savages has some of the most formidable comic dialogue I’ve been fortunate enough to hear in ages, and the screenplay is lovingly structured. I’ll have more in a bit, but here’s a sampling of Jenkins’ ear for dialogue: “We’re not in therapy right now, we’re in real life”; “I’m not leaving you alone, I’m hanging up”; and “It’s back to Krakow for Kasia. Your brother won’t marry me, but when I make him eggs, he cries.” [Like many other behavioral niceties one could cite, Cara Seymour’s limpid yet freighted delivery of that line is dead-on lovely.] A quick free-range free-association: The surreal, heartfelt final shot, in its own strange way, evokes the “We need the eggs” scene that closes Annie Hall.
