In Sickness and In Sickness: Reading About 'The Family Stone'

Ouch. My arch-nemesis California has taken cosmic retribution on me since I arrived early yesterday morning, all but crashing my laptop and smacking me down with a kind of flu-symptom whiplash that I would not wish on… well, actually, I can think of a few people. This is me, loving the holidays.
Speaking of the holidays, my time spent withering in the analog world allowed me a little bit of airport-catching up with the print folks at The New York Observer, New York Press and Village Voice, all of whom featured some wildly divergent digressions on Thomas Bezucha’s The Family Stone. Nothing about viewing the film had really inspired any deep aesthetic reflections in me; nevertheless, it was nice to see critics like Dennis Lim and Armond White care enough to unlock the truths undergirding Bezucha’s story about a dysfunctional liberal family that welcomes a son’s priggish fiancee (Sarah Jessica Parker) into their home for Christmas.
For his part, the Voice’s Lim has a radical new subgenre down to a science. Literally:

1. Include an outsider. The most useful figure in the (Holiday Family Reunion Movie), the interloper serves either as counterpoint to the functionally dysfunctional family or as the tight-knit brood’s common object of ridicule. … Will the loosey-goosey Stones thaw out the WASP icicle? Will she in turn, once she literally lets her hair down, teach them not to be so judgmental? People who have never seen movies will be on the edge of their seats.

2. Add minorities. The HFRM is a bourgeois white preserve, but a sprinkling of Others conjures the illusion of social relevance. … In (Bezucha’s) all-of-the-above scripting masterstroke, the youngest son is (a) deaf, (b) gay, and (c) has a black boyfriend. The movie lavishes praise on the enlightened Stones for not treating these attributes like handicaps. Or maybe, since these are the two most boring, neutered homosexuals in film history, it’s just that no one notices them (Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas in Philadelphia look like Genet sodomites by comparison).

3. Give Mom cancer. Other illnesses with other family members work too, but this combo has a foolproof classicism. … (F)or Mom, you’ll need someone with presence: Patricia Clarkson in (Pieces of) April or, better still, Diane Keaton in Stone, looking like a Sontagian lioness and acting batshit. Don’t play the terminal card before the second half, though. This gives you enough time to set her up as eccentric, unstable, even mean. The crazier the better—all will be weepily forgiven in due course.

Yikes! Is Lim oversimplifying? Let us ask Armond White, who thankfully was able to squeeze resonant 17th century French drama and a swipe at his pet cinematic peeve into 1,174 words of his own:

Before romantic slapstick chaos leaves the family bruised, exhausted yet slowly healing, Bezucha achieves moments of desperate revelation more beautiful than you expect. … Meredith finally protests her mistreatment and her outcry is so unabashed it galvanizes the movie. Meredith’s plea pushes the film’s sit-com premise to the furthest edge. Parker’s wail contains the bitterest dregs of sorrow. And in this context, it has the force of Moliere.

Bezucha and Parker accomplish what Sex in the City never did; they glimpse the everyday tragedy of people caught up in social and family competition. And they make you feel it. This intelligently sentimental Christmas movie manages the miracle of never being cynical.

I guarantee you Fox is printing up new posters with the blurb, ” ‘A miracle… the force of Moliere’–Armond White, New York Press” as we speak. Anyway, none of this would have really mattered that much to me had I not stumbled on Erin Coe’s Family Stone premiere report in this week’s Observer–an oddly reverent-yet-revolted series of interviews that meets Lim’s cynicism and White’s miracle (or at least the miracle of celebrity) halfway:

Saunter along with us as The Family Stone cast and friends share their own Christmas-time tales of awkward moments, alcohol-induced comas and horrible gifts. Hooray! …

After the screening, Luke Wilson, in a pinstripe suit and brown sneakers, looked like he could use a nice, long nap himself. His family and friends were in town to go to the screening and after-party at the Plaza Athénée, along with Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld and Paul Giamatti. He seemed just a bit stressed!

“If you knew me, you’d find out how wound up I am,” Mr. Wilson said. “Like right now, I’m exhausted, but I’m wound tight. I’m uptight. I got a bunch of people here. I’m trying to get them all to the party.” O.K.!

And so on and so forth! If only I could have sent along a question or two with Coe, because someone really needs to ask Bezucha exactly what screenwriting software converts one’s Holiday Family Reunion Film to Moliere. I think she would have had the nerve, and those exclamation points would have presented just enough irony to get away with it in the end. Alas, there is always next Christmas, I suppose–assuming I survive California.

The Reeler Walks to Queens

Sorry for the early sign-off today; I must navigate my way to JFK and hop a plane for the Reeler Family Holiday Spectacular in California. I called for a horse, they sent me a donkey, and just like that, my trip home is doomed before it starts.
Anyhow, I plan to be back tomorrow for at least a little while–even if it means getting on the wireless from the middle of the BQE. I look forward to seeing you then.

Allen Just Loves to Dote on Little Scarlett's Sex Life

Today’s Page Six notes that Scarlett Johansson moved into Josh Hartnett’s Tribeca apartment and that she “is seen walking her dog mornings on Hudson Street.” I mean, it is good to know that Johansson and Hartnett spend time out together, but I can hear you preparing a breath to ask, “Why the fuck is this news?”
I did not take it too seriously either until reading Jeanette Walls’s Scoop column this morning on MSNBC, which had me feeling nine ways of sick:

Scarlett Johansson says Woody Allen was obsessed with her love life. “He’s not always sure of himself, and that’s a sexy quality,” the Love Match [sic] star tells the upcoming issue of Life magazine regarding her director. “But you know what cracks me up? He’s fascinated with my love life. And John Travolta [Johansson’s costar in last year’s A Love Song for Bobby Long] is even worse than Woody–he wants to know everything. I guess it’s because they’re both married with kids and want to live vicariously.”

I will forgive the “Love Match” error; after all, Roger Friedman’s trangressions over on Fox make Walls look like Lillian Ross. But if Allen’s insecurity is “sexy,” I can only imagine how all that classically Woody-esque paternal tenderness is going to develop as these two continue working together. Let it suffice to say that if Hartnett thinks he can fight Allen off by clearing a spot on the sink for his girlfriend’s toothbrush, he might reconsider his adversary right… about… now.
Travolta? Just another horny Scientologist. Allen? By his own admission in Manhattan, “Beneath his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.” So hell yes–in a simmering battle between a dog and a cat, my money is always on the cat.

NYC Transit Strike: Do Not Panic, The Sopranos Took the Week Off

So New York’s transit workers are officially on strike, and most of the reports I have read so far today say the city is either “plunged into chaos” or “in gridlock.” It is, however, fairly quiet outside The Reeler’s uptown Manhattan HQ, which should not be too surprising considering no private vehicles carrying fewer than four passengers are allowed below 96th Street.
Inside, of course, I am freaking out about getting to the plane I have to catch this afternoon at JFK. But as Reuters implied last week, the NYC film community as a whole faces major hassles of its own. The Reeler now hears that not only have emergency transportation regulations nullified the City Film Office’s special parking permits, but the free NYPD support customarily offers to location crews has been yanked. (City officials claim NYPD overtime could reach $10 million per day as the strike drags on.)
NYC Film Office representatives were unavailable for comment this morning, as was a spokesman from Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens. A source at Long Island City’s Silvercup Studios indicated that most of the productions based there (including The Sopranos) has taken the week off as a holiday, and that no other production delays he knew of had arisen because of the transit strike.
Meanwhile, a representative for Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios told me that the only problem to arise was a little more protracted commute. “A lot of people who work here live in Brooklyn, so they carpool,” the source told me, asking not to be named. “Everything’s pretty much taken care of right now, but who knows, if it continues?”
Who knows, indeed. One guy who might know is Transit Workers Union Local 100 boss Roger Toussaint, whom I would like to bug for a ride to the airport after he has dropped off a few of his biggest fans on Craigslist (via Gawker). We have to have four to a car, anyway, right? Then he can go downtown and help out whatever half-dozen Law & Order episodes the stoppage so cold-heartedly paralyzed. Deal?

NYU Strike Costs Cinematographer Ties, Decades of P.C. Street Cred

This week’s New York Magazine features a short item about the latest adversity to befall New York University in its continuing graduate assistant strike. According to NYM’s Shana Liebman, the International Cinematographer’s Guild has effectively broken off its relationship with NYU’s film school:

The Guild’s protest … means the country’s most prestigious and progressive film school (Spike Lee is the artistic director) will lose out on the lectures, seminars, and networking opportunities with professionals to which it has become accustomed. John Amman, a business representative of the ICG, says it’s a matter of solidarity. “We’re not doing this to punish the students. But not doing it would be the equivalent of crossing the graduate students’ picket lines,” which his group—many of whose members graduated from Tisch—feels obligated to support.

But if ICG is not punishing the students, then its action seems intended to punish the university, which in the end represents pretty much the same thing, does it not? In other words: Please do not piss on their shoes and tell them it is raining.
Seriously, what those disgruntled students need to do is jump ship for NYU journalism; when I was there, anyway, we could get just about any of those sanctimonious Hollywood types to cross a picket line for us.

The Weinstein Company: Penny Wise, Phone Foolish

It seems like it was just yesterday I was rejoicing that The Weinstein Company was up and running at last. Harvey had moved in the last of the Disney coin furniture, Bob hooked up the phones, and the future was rosier than a Miramax-era welt. Alas, a set of internal TWC memos now making the rounds indicates that a billion dollars in capital cannot necessarily buy morale:

From: REDACTED
Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 3:03 PM
To: REDACTED; #TWC All
Cc: REDACTED
Subject: RE: Think Outside the Box Employee Incentive Program
i hope i’m the first one in with this suggestion (drum roll, please):
install a phone system that works!!!! by doing this, i feel confident that we would (a) increase the likelihood that potential sellers and business partners will take us seriously as a company, (b) increase our ability to actually close deals for the company, as phone communication has, in the past several decades, become a near-essential part of doing business and (c) decrease (or eliminate) the equipment replacement costs that we incur every time REDACTED throws his phone out the window, (d) decrease the medical bills that employees in the l.a. office have been running up due to treatment for banging our heads against the wall every time our calls get cut off or we get emails telling us that our phones don’t work (and for poor REDACTED, who has now become so morbid about the phone problems that she’s become a cutter) and, most importantly, (e) decrease the amount of time that REDACTED has to spend listening to me, REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED and dassorted [sic] other bitter l.a. employees bitch and moan about the problem (and how can you really place a price on that???).
if you have any questions, please call me through my office….five or six times…..

I have said it before, and it bears repeating: If only Harvey would go back to shouting the color out of his employees’ hair, these poor bastards would not even need phones.
Read the full memo in all its impudent glory after the jump (via eugonline)

Read the full article »

We Apologize For Technical Difficulties…

A few readers have notified me that the blog looks great except for the missing “Reeler” banner at the top. Indeed, the template is optimized for Internet Explorer. So please hang in there, all you Safari, Mozilla and Netscape users–I am working to straighten out whatever the problem is.
Thank you!

Three Days to Live: 'Mormonsploitation!' at the Pioneer

After a lengthy gestation in the gentle-yet-sick minds that run the Pioneer Theater, the week-long Mormonsploitation! film series is underway. Actually, it has been underway for a few days now, but you still have until Wednesday to catch some rarely screened Mormon-centric pictures like 1917’s A Mormon Maid and John Ford’s 1950 LDS-er Wagon Master. Each of the films precedes Ian Allen’s outlandish silent-film parody Trapped by the Mormons (right), and taken as a whole, they should effectively curb your appetite for Mormon cinema until the Rapture. At least.
In fact, the Pioneer’s resident horror and zombie film programmer, Dr. Reinhardt van Nostrand, helped out with the Mormonsploitation event by virtue (or lack thereof) of his knowledge of the occult. “Mormonsploitation! is the most important cultural program in New York City this year,” he told The Reeler in an e-mail last weekend. “This includes the commemmorations [sic] celebrating John Paul II. For too long, the LDS (so-called ‘Mormon’) community’s dangerous immorality and improprieties have polluted the world unchecked. In this program, the Pioneer brings together an extraordinary range of critical documents, revealing the LDS community’s viciousness and danger. From the polygamous zombie vampires in Trapped by the Mormons to the marauding LDS pioneers in Wagon Master, the range of devious ‘Mormons’ depicted here is enormous! Beware the pamphleteers! Prepare yourself, by attending Mormonsploitation!”
Right. Absolutely. Even if you are only half-prepared with three days of viewing, that is three days more than many New Yorkers will have once the streets run white with choir boys and cotton shirts. This is the only chance you are going to get.
Incidentally, if you are interested in a closer look at how folks at the Pioneer spent 2005 when they were not fomenting fake religious discord, the theater’s year-end blog entries tell the tale. Headmaster Ray Privett fell in love with Broken Flowers, while Jeffrey the Projectionist praises the feminist touchstone Chaos for, among other things, starring “Sylvester Stallone’s public toilet of a son … as a chubby weasel drug guy.”
Best thing I saw at the Pioneer this year? Easy: Douglas Buck’s brilliant, exhausting, horrifying Family Portraits. Granted, I have yet to drop in for the Mormon effect, but unless Wagon Master features a missionary losing his lips in a tragic bicycle/scissor accident, I do not think it can even be close.

Bloggers Narrowly Avert Violence in NYC Panel Discussion

I do not know how it ever came to this, but indieWIRE actually followed through with its promise to bring seven New York film bloggers to the SoHo Apple Store last Friday for the ultimate movie dork smackdown. Actually, the discussion remained fairly civil overall; I think the most heated moment came when Aaron Dobbs of Out of Focus and Alison Willmore of IFC disagreed about The Squid and the Whale for about three seconds. Alas, they sat on opposite ends of the long, tin table–too far to take a swing, yet too close to throw a bottle of water.

The view from the Blog Panel Table of Garrulous Death (Photos: STV)
And while all in attendance enjoyed a truly wild time (see the ghetto-splice photo illustration above for an idea of how close we came to a full-blown orgy), there is not a lot else I can pass along to you that would not plunge you into an instant narcoleptic stupor. I just cannot be responsible for that on a Monday. However, IFC News correspondent Matt Singer showed up to ask the participants some questions, so I guess we will see how that went sometime this week. I am sure the executive memo to air only my stupidest answers is already posted in the editing room; please let me know how it turns out.
Anyhow, the after-party at IFC Center also went well. Cinematical editor Karina Longworth and I hatched a plan to continue some sort of film discussion series in the near future, so stay tuned for that. Rest assured we will start with alcohol next time rather than finish with it–you have to admit that the potential for a barroom blogger brawl wields a sort of undeniable appeal.

Top of the Morning From New York

I am sure we have met somewhere before, but just in case: Hello. My name is S.T. VanAirsdale, and The Reeler is my blog covering news, gossip, business and personalities from around the New York City film community. I have been on the beat since June–most of which time I spent on indieWIRE’s blog network–and I am excited to join Movie City News in a kind of NYC eyes-and-ears capacity.
Obviously, nobody sees and hears everything. Nevertheless, that is my goal. So please feel free to send me your tips, hints and story ideas–I am open to anything and everything happening here in town. You will find me hanging around premieres, crashing parties or chatting with everyone from mainstream Oscar favorites to self-distributed indie geniuses. But I am equally excited to bring you the latest on the heroic Harvey Weinstein, the “anti-studio” Lionsgate, or any especially awful colorectal spasms that happen to wind up in Roger Friedman’s Fox 411 columns. I work pretty hard to supply original reporting when I can, and I break stories as gleefully as I quote them from around the Web. Nothing much is going to change around here except for the main server.
Which reminds me: Take some time to browse The Reeler archives as I prepare to move them here (I know, I know–moving during the holidays. Totally ridiculous), but please refresh your bookmarks and RSS feeds if you are a regular visitor. I am hoping to settle in for the long haul, and I genuinely appreciate you joining me.