Spike Punch: Conspiracy-Minded Lee Sits Down with the Observer

It is Deadline City around Reeler HQ, which always makes for less-than-prolific blogging but at least means that somebody is paying me for a change. Lest I lose Thursday to a marathon transcribing run, allow me to refer you to Sara Vilkomerson’s Spike Lee profile in this week’s Observer. While you may not necessarily find any earth-shattering exclusives strung through the piece (OK, fine: I am a little giddy to share a ZIP code with the guy), Universal has to be thrilled that Lee’s Inside Man interview yielded exactly one paragraph about the film and a bounty of gleeful indignance:

Mr. Lee recalled the story of a shopper who approached Ms. Rice at the pricey Ferragamo shoe store on Fifth Avenue during (Hurricane) Katrina and reportedly shouted “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!” before Secret Service physically removed her.

Mr. Lee picked up The Observer’s tape recorder and held it close in front of his face. “To the lady that got in Ms. Rice’s face in the store before you got pulled off by Secret Service,” he said. “If you read this article, please contact The New York Observer because we’re trying to find you for the documentary we’re doing on Hurricane Katrina.” Caggle, caggle. “If you are still alive, that is.”

Then there are the usual yawny bio, background, compliments etc. before Lee fires off his grand finale:

Last October, he tussled with Tucker Carlson (“the guy in the bow tie”) on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher when Mr. Lee said he’d be including in his documentary the conspiracy theory that it was the U.S. government who bombed the levees.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “Even today, a large part of the African-American community of New Orleans thinks that those levees were bombed. Now, whether that is true or not, that should not be discounted.” He rattled off past government trespasses: 1927’s Great Flood of Mississippi, when the levees were, in fact, blown up; the flooding of the Ninth Ward during Hurricane Betsy in 1965; the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

“So, in the collective mind of African-Americans, it is not some science-fiction, hocus-pocus thing to say that the government is doing stuff,” he continued. … Would he be shocked if it turned out to be true? “No. No, I would not,” he said.

You tell ’em, Spike. Now–anyone up for a heist flick?

Tribeca Competition Selections Named; Overwhelmed Programmers Seek Therapy

The Tribeca Film Festival sent word today that it has officially locked and loaded its competition lineup for 2006, and if the selections do not blow your mind, then the statistics will: 169 features and 99 shorts were cherry-picked from 4,100 submissions, 1,950 of which were feature films. That is about three times the total submissions to the inaugural festival in 2002.
Joining the insanity are 90 world premieres, 10 international premieres (and there IS a difference), 29 North American premieres, seven U.S premieres and 28 New York premieres from 40 countries. A quick overview reveals a few easy must-sees like Colour Me Kubrick, starring John Malkovich as a real-life conman who successfully passed himself off as Stanley Kubrick for the last decade of the filmmaker’s life; Eric Steel’s documentary The Bridge, which intercuts a year’s worth of Golden Gate Bridge suicide plunges with interviews with the deceaseds’ families; Marwan Hamed’s The Yacoubian Building, a big-budget Egyptian epic that supposedly breaks all of its homeland’s taboos; and Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes, edited from footage shot in Iraq by National Guardsmen to whom the filmmaker supplied digital video cameras.
And then there is the local flava: The 26 films selected for the festival’s NY, NY competition include 13 narratives and 13 documentaries boasting all the high-strung New York themes we have come to expect from this classic sidebar. The Reeler will have plenty of interviews and coverage of these films and filmmakers in the weeks leading up to Tribeca’s April 22 opening day; in the meantime, hit the jump for a full list of our newly blessed neighbors.

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Lock Up Your Inhibitions as CineKink Returns for '06

The sweet perverts at CineKink return from their long winter’s nap tonight with a screening and submission party at Anthology Film Archives. No, sicko–not that kind of submission (although I am sure it can be arranged), but the kind where you supply your best filmed exploration of altternative sexuality and get yourself a festival berth this October.
Do not worry–you will have additonal chances to, um, submit in the months ahead; check CineKink’s Web site for deadlines and info. Meanwhile, I doubt you will find much better happening tonight than a shorts program screening Teale Failla’s Open (description: “An open relationship turns the lives of three women into a whirlwind of betrayal, bingo and sex toys”), Vicki Sugars’ Moustache (“Mother Nature lends a hand to spice up a woman’s boring married life”) or T. Arthur Cottam’s Pornographic Apathetic (“Sex like you’ve never seen it”). Nearly all seven of tonight’s films are award-winners from past CineKink festivals.
The reception starts at 7:30, so you should still have time to run home, grab your rubber suit and ball gag and get down to Anthology in time to sip drinks from someone’s stiletto boot. Cheers.

Yari: 'It's Really About Correcting the System'

Also in town for last night’s Find Me Guilty premiere was the film’s producer Bob Yari, who has been in the news recently for producing a mildly successful indie flick called Crash. Except he was not the producer. Or maybe he was half a producer. Either way, more than two weeks after his failed appeal to the Producers Guild and 10 days after nominal producers Cathy Schulman and Paul Haggis claimed Crash‘s Best Picture Oscar, Yari is still stating his case.
“Very regrettably, we’re in litigation,” he told The Reeler. “But the litigation is not litgation to punish anyone or to extract money from anyone. It’s really about correcting the system. It’s about correcting a system that I think is a blemish on the Academy. Once that’s fixed, I think the Academy can hold its head up high and do whatever it wants–as long as the process is open and fair, of course, and gives people a voice and a right to both respond to any allegations that may be (made) against them that they’re not being told about, and there’s the opportunity to for them to be properly scrutinized.”
Whether or not Yari has the juice to get the Guild’s arbitration rules revised remains to be seen (Sharon Waxman scraped together a nice overview of the Crash crisis last week in The Times), but I also wanted to get Yari’s impressions on the backlash against the film’s Oscar triumph. No fan of the film myself, it never occurred to me that its victory could provoke so many otherwise classy folks like Annie Proulx to such sustained, vitriolic revolt.
“I think a lot of people, when they don’t get the film that they’re passionate about winning, it comes out as an angry response,” Yari said. “The odd thing is that attacking Crash is not the answer. It’s sometimes just accepting the fact that maybe Academy members–as much as they liked Brokeback Mountain–liked Crash a little better in the majority. That’s not a bad thing. Keep in mind that Academy members voted for two films of the same nature–Capote and Brokeback. If there was any hesitation to vote for a film like that, then they wouldn’t have nominated those two pictures. Sometimes one picture is more liked by one group of people versus another. At the BAFTA awards, Brokeback won and Crash lost. So, you know, it’s very hard to just say, ‘I believe a film is better, and therefore everyone should agree with me.'”
And if Crash‘s banal self-loathing is indeed Hollywood’s gold standard, then Capote probably came closer to a win than anybody outside Price Waterhouse Coopers will ever know. Who would have thought the gays could get a worse break than Yari? Oscar ’06–the shocks never end.
(Photo: John Sciulli / WireImage)

'Guilty' Conscience: The Reeler Catches Up with Sidney Lumet

It is a rare film premiere that enables you to cross a goal off your “Things I Must Do to Die Happy” list, but that is how I would classify last night’s Find Me Guilty event at the AMC Lincoln Square. After all, for exactly 56 seconds, I chatted with Sidney Lumet.
Technically, I guess I should still try to work out a conversation with the guy before I move on to Michael Herr, Harvey Weinstein and other interview subjects of my dreams, but it will do for now. Find Me Guilty has Lumet directing the true story of Giacomo “Jackie D.” DiNorscio (Vin Diesel), a charismatic Lucchese crime family enforcer who, in the late ’80s, defended himself in what became the longest (nearly two years) and most involved (20 defendants) trial in American history.
Despite the case’s local legend, Lumet told The Reeler it was news to him. “I never knew anything about it until I got the screenplay,” he said.
So he had to go back and revisit the record, right? Familiarize himself a little bit?
“No!” Lumet said. “The trial transcript was four feet high and there was no way. The trial lasted two years, so there was no way I was going to go through that.”
OK, fair enough. But having two of cinema’s best legal dramas (12 Angry Men and The Verdict) on his resume, what is it about this story that made Lumet want to revisit the genre?
“Well, it was such a unique case,” he said. “It’s the only picture I’ve ever done about a personailty so dominant they wiped out everythng else in the trial. And that’s what happened here. That in itself is unique.”
I know what you are thinking: “But Mr. Lumet, why cast Vin Diesel of all people as this ‘dominant personality’?” Keeping in mind The Pacifier, The Chronicles of Riddick and the appalling hairpiece Diesel sports through Guilty, I do not necessarily hold your first impression against you. Nevertheless, you might be gettng a little ahead of yourself. Diesel has good roles in his past (Boiler Room, Saving Private Ryan), and Lumet coaxes just enough vulnerablity from DiNorscio to make the film Diesel’s best in years. I mean, he is an actor’s director–that is just what he does.

The many moods and faces of Find Me Guilty‘s Vin Diesel (Photos: STV)
If you don’t believe me, ask Diesel. “I learned so much as an actor,” he told me before last night’s screening. “In many ways, it was the point of working with Sidney Lumet. As an actor, there are very few directors who are around today who actually take you to the next level and that allow you to grow as an actor. … He created the environment. We had 300 people in this courtroom and never once hired an extra. He cast every single person in the scene. Every person you see in this movie was handpicked by Sidney Lumet. That’s a testament to a director who appreciates the craft of acting so much that every person in the movie has to go through this process. The amount of confidence that instills in you, I think, helps you grow as an actor. Sometimes it can be harrowing to do a 10- or 15-minute scene in one take, but somehow it makes your performance.”
But then there is Lumet as a director’s director as well–another advantage not lost on his star. “As a director,” Diesel said, “he was conscious of the fact that I was going to direct Hannibal and would take every opportunity to show me why he was picking the camera angles he was pickling, what tricks he was using–what dollies, multiple dollies, multiple cameras. He was so generous, so generous. So increíble.”
The love was almost enough to fill two theaters (“Hey T!” Diesel shouted out of nowhere to a man heading upstairs on the escalator. “Oh my God! It’s a family reunion! Bobby! Where’s your mother, Bobby? Where’s your mother, Bobby?”), and with a lumpy screenplay that reduces the story’s nuance to hollow goombahs-vs.-the-world caricatures, Find Me Guilty will need all the love it can get. Still, Lumet draws remarkably rich work from Ron Silver as the Lucchese case’s tortured judge, while Annabella Sciorra shines in a small part as DiNorscio’s estranged wife. Just the structure of his long takes alone makes for fascinating viewing; in one sequence, Diesel flourishes with grudging restraint as the Lucchese boss effectively banishes him from the tribe over lunch. The silence that follows recalls his ascetic masterpieces Dog Day Afternoon and Network–the tone Lumet has long since abandoned for the incongruous jazz quartet underscoring portions of Guilty.
It is still Lumet, though, and if you cannot find something rewarding in one of his pictures–even in The Wiz or Gloria–you just are not paying close enough attention. Besides reacquainting themselves with Vin Diesel’s chops, viewers face the bittersweet revelation that Lumet in 2006 only reminds us how great we all had it thirty years ago.

Jareck-ing Ball, Part II: Paging Mr. Denby

Just a quick plug for my colleague Ray Pride, who features a mind-blowing interview with Why We Fight filmmaker Eugene Jarecki in this week’s Pride, Unprejudiced column. Does it beat last month’s Scarborough/Hendrix/Donahue tilt over on Kaiju Shakedown? Only time will tell, but any exchange this profoundly inteligent and concentrated in its dismissal of David Denby has my undivided attention:

I’m happy for you to write anything you want about David Denby. I honestly believe that David Denby has hurt too many filmmakers by writing things in the mainstream press that are vicious, that reveal a too-great distance from the creative process. If that makes me unpopular with David Denby, I think that any artist should be unpopular with any critic who sets tyrannical parameters about art. I also was angry at the insult he dealt my cinematographers, my crews. To call what they’re doing stock footage ignores their work, it ignores the commitment they made to time in the field. They wrote a note about this; they were extremely upset about it and co-signed it, 19 of them. It’s a big deal. And it sends a shock wave. It’s kind of like, I guess, the way Mr. Denby would see the world, you’re either with him or you’re with the terrorists.

Click now for this one-time-only Jarecki offer, and get Pride’s chat with Oscar-winning Tsotsi director Gavin Hood thrown in free. Do not let anybody ever tell you we are not about the customer around here.

'Dreamland' Via NYC: Gen Art, Tribeca Festival Updates

Gen Art unveiled the slate Tuesday for its 2006 film festival, piling together seven features, seven shorts and seven trademark, far-flung West Side parties into one week in early April. The event launches April 5 with Jason Matzner’s coming-of-age drama Dreamland (right), followed by another Sundance ’06 alumnus, Goran Dukic’s wonderful Wristcutters: A Love Story. A few SXSW faves (Steve Anderson’s documentary FUCK, Andy Robin and Gregg
Kavet’s Live Free or Die) and Joshua Michael Stern’s star-studded Neverwas.
The Reeler just got off the phone with Matzner, who confirmed he will be dropping in for Dreamland‘s opening-night screening. “It’s right there in (Gen Art’s) demographic,” Matzner said of his film’s selection. “They’re kind of a 20-somehting organization and that’s kind of like the target audience for this movie–a youthful, cool cast and that kind of stuff. And it’s kind of a relatively feel-good movie, unlike some Sundance films. It’s nice to kick off the festival with some thing that’s not a dire, depressing story of child abuse and neglect or something like that.”
Most of the festival takes place over at the Clearview Chelsea West, but Matzner gets to experience the pleasure of seeing his film projected on the ginormous screen at the Ziegfeld Theater. (Fun fact: The only other movie Matzner has seen there: Oliver Stone’s The Doors). And while the director adds he is trying to round up as many cast members (including Agnes Bruckner, Gina Gershon and John Corbett) as he can for the event, co-stars Kelli Garner and Justin Long will be shooting films that day. Still, think about it–Ziegfeld, huge screen, Kelli Garner, that is close enough. Should be a blast.
In other festival news, Tribeca sends word that it has selected the 33 participating projects in this year’s Tribeca All Access Connects program. The festival launched the program in 2004 to establish relationships between the film industry and independent filmmakers of color; this year’s selections include 13 narrative features, 12 documentaries, six screenplays and two projects for established directors in Tribeca’s Signature Series.
Meanwhile, 2004 TAA Connects alums Tanuj Chopra, Stanley Nelson and J. Carlos Peinado will premiere their completed work at the festival next month. Sadly, Kelli Garner will not be attendance there either. But we will try to do the best we can without her. Again.

'V For Vendetta': Revolution Lite Premieres in New York

Right off the bat, I should tell you that no, the Wachowski Brothers did not come to last night’s V For Vendetta premiere at the Time Warner Center’s Rose Theater. The transgender-recluse-disguise speculation swept the red carpet with photo-flash velocity before giving way to the more benign concern that star Natalie Portman would be shepherded into the theater before the men covering the event could slip her their phone numbers.

Natalie Portman, winding down the press-gantlet part of the evening at Monday’s V For Vendetta premiere (Photos: STV)
The corresponding spectacle–bright lights, big mask (see below)–represented exactly the type of trouble Vendetta faces as the year’s most anticipated film to date. Portman fans, readers of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s source graphic novel and not just a few twitchy government types have been on the lookout for this movie since the actress shaved her head, Moore swore the project off and Warner Bros. pushed back its release date more than four months in the wake of last year’s subway bombings in London. Meanwhile, critics and cognoscenti awaited a Matrix-esque Big-Idea Movie that would signify the Wachowskis’ return to form. Vendetta should be a film that had everything, the world gasped, and that it kept us waiting only underscored its disinterest in compromise.

Yet as far as Big-Idea Movies go, Vendetta has all the incendiary juice of a Che Guevara T-shirt. It fetishizes revolution to the point where it persuades viewers to let it do the work for them–an ironic phenomenon at best considering the very possible–nay, very real–circumstances behind its delayed release. And the $50 million budget does not even buy producers Joel Silver and the Wachowskis or director James McTeigue (left) an especially powerful surrogate. We get the sound and fury of totalitarianism, we get its dehumanizing force, we get its vulnerability, but we do not get the sense that this endangered world is really our own. In other words, as Hugo Weaving’s masked freedom fighter V defiantly tells one of his victims late in the film, “Ideas are bulletproof.” Perhaps, but movies are not.
Which is not to say that Vendetta is a bad movie. It IS slow and discursive, in love with the sound of its own voice. But it is also redeemed through striking traces of Moore and Lloyd’s original dark vision; the bursts of violence that befall the naif Evey (Portman) and her English countrymen transcend Wachowski style, hinting more directly at First-World Apocalypse. From the start, we are to equate police with rapists, television with fascist propaganda and futuristic London with a city under siege. V and Evey’s unlikely partnership ostensibly emerges from their having saved one another from government attackers, but whether or not Evey’s complicity owes more to V’s protracted brainwashing exercises than to any political awakening (her own backstory, it turns out, is fraught with crisis) is left open to interpretation.
As such, neither character is motivated by the moral sense that contemporary culture associates with brand-name martyrs like Guevara or Malcolm X (or even Guy Fawkes, the would-be Parliament bomber from whose 400-year-old legend V draws his mission and his mask). This is V For Vendetta, after all–it is all personal. Nevertheless, it would not be Holywood without at least some pandering to altruism, which is where Inspector Finch (Stephen Rea) comes in. Torn between his duty to bring V down and his knowledge of the government conspiracy responsible for V’s grudge, Finch is supposed to represent a pervading ambiguity between right and wrong–he is Vendetta‘s central conflict.

But despite one of Rea’s typically earthbound performances, McTeigue and the Wachowskis so overemphasize the “right” that Finch becomes almost all agenda and no tension. “Cops are logical people,” Rea told The Reeler at Monday’s premiere. “They like to see a pattern. They like to see it going a certain way, you know? They’re best at getting subversive activity. It’s supposed to lead him in a certain direction, but this leads him toward government. And he’s freaked out. But he is a proper cop, and he says, ‘Well, I have to believe what I see.’ He doesn’t cover up when he realizes there’s something bigger going on. So he’s a bigger person than just the Average Joe.”
Sure, but Finch also symbolizes the potential for the Average Joe to come around–not only that, but also to take action. The film’s high point, in fact, has nothing to do with its explosions or patently stupid domino tricks, but rather intercuts a revelatory Finch monologue with a swift-moving montage of civic uprising. It is as explicitly dark and sincere a statement as Vendetta makes, but it arrives too early in the final act to sustain its raw nerviness.
“What the movie is saying is that the governement is responsible for a lot of lawlessness and that isn’t good enough,” he said. “We hired them, and we’d like them to do their jobs a little more responsibly, please. We don’t like to be lied to about weapons of mass destruction or anything else. We don’t want to be lied to.”
Nor do we want to be preached to, which is where V For Vendetta trips most violently. This is the film that overthrows a government so you do not have to; it informs you that you are not alone, even though you are. It is revolt as romantic fantasy and politics in black and white. V’s control of Evey may provide the story’s most perverse nuance, even as McTeigue mishandles it as a sort of banal, unrequited love. Portman’s conversion from victim to true believer is about as grotesquely severe as Weaving’s black wig, although the latter actor deserves commendation for fleshing out V’s three-dimensional identity from behind his Fawkes mask.
“I think essentially, the essence of any character is not really what they look like, although of course that’s important,” said Weaving, who is currently starring opposite Cate Blanchett in BAM’s presentation of Hedda Gabler. “But it’s how they feel or what they say or how they think. And that’s true with any character. Someone you talk to on the phone, you can still inderstand what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. You can’t see their face, but you can imagine it. I figured with V, it was pretty much the same. The same approach to anything you would approach V in that way as well. Having said that, there was obviously a need to humanize the mask, and to bring the mask to life.”
Easily fascinated, I asked how he went about doing that. “I think just keying in really to what he was saying was the thing that helped that. I kind of started to use the mask, it to puncuate things he was saying. There’s a fluidity to the mask in some scenes which is important. But after the first couple of days, I didn’t think technically or consciously about the movement of the mask. Except I tried to avoid lots of little shaking movements because they just looked appalling.”
OK, then. Weaving moved on, and a murmur swelled to a roar several yards away. Mark Ruffalo, Gina Gershon, Petra Nemkova Joel Silver and Robert Downey Jr. had already come and gone. That left one person, one last red carpet icon.

Do not let the broad, beautiful smile fool you: Red-carpet refugee Natalie Portman flees in terror
You got it: David Carr. The Carpetbagger himself. He stood 20 feet behind the the photo well, observing a Natalie Portman frenzy with his twin daughters. “Am I going to like this?” he asked. I told him I did not know, that I thought it was just OK, definitely a second-act movie. He sighed. “How long is it?”
A few reporters shrieked from the carpet. “Miss Portman, what about your hair?” “Natalie!”
Ugh. Where is a Wachowski when you need one?

Friedman Swallows Pride, Real Estate Developers at 'Smoking' Premiere

Face it: New York’s gossip ecosystem would just be Page Six’s cold, cutthroat domain were it not for the adorably impaired ramblings of Fox’s Roger Friedman. Whether reviewing movies or gagging on celebrity genitalia, Friedman is all about the real dirt, which is why I am so thankful he escaped his Michael Jackson beat for one night to report on MoMA’s Thank You For Smoking premiere.
All the brain-damaged epiphanies are here: “I think (Aaron) Eckhart will be a big star after this”; “(Katie Holmes’s) career is on its way to becoming a footnote”; etc. But perhaps most notable is Friedman’s gratuitous plug of Extell Development, the surging New York builder that rolled out the red carpet:

The evening, which looked like it cost a lot more dough than usual, was sponsored by Extell Development Corp., a realty company launching two new luxury high rises on the Upper West Side. Owner Gary Barnett started the evening by awarding his top two salespeople year-long chauffeur-driven Maseratis.

I’m telling you, even Halle (Berry) looked envious. Extell’s Raizy Haas didn’t get the prize, but took home an even bigger one: one of the best events of the year.

Were it not for nagging space constraints, Friedman certainly would have noted that Extell was the perfect choice to sponsor the premiere of a lobbying satire; the company dropped $140,452 last year on lobbyists for the City Council alone.
Friedman likely would have added comments from worried uptown residents who hate the neighboring high-rise project, or maybe a wink and a nod from the Fox-friendly, neocon-affiliated Carlyle Group, which went in halfsies with Extell on a corresponding land deal that stirred enough shit to get Donald Trump to sue his own business partners. And then there is the hotttt incest action between Fox News and Smoking distributor Fox Searchlight, not to mention the Page Six dispatch guaranteed to extol Extell Tuesday morning.
So kudos to Raizy Haas–she may not have gotten her Maserati chauffered, but nothing says “immortality” like a multi-tiered endorsement from the Murdoch gossip apparatus. Only in New York, kids. Only in New York.

Chelsea Bank Robber Grosses More Than 'Failure to Launch'

Admittedly, I erred Wednesday when I disgraced the Failure to Launch premiere in Chelsea with my failure to give a fuck. And now that the good people at Open All Night tell me the event paid extra-special homage to Dog Day Afternoon, I am kicking myself into next week:

Just prior to the premiere, with a full coterie of camera crews waiting on the red carpet, the Citibank branch at 322 W. 23rd Street, across from the theater, had been robbed. … The robber did apparently run right through the media setup, escaping through a walkway next to the movie theater, although those on hand weren’t aware of it until the police showed up.

An NYPD spokesman confirmed the robbery, and told OAN that no one was injured, and the suspect had no weapon, and that he took some money from a bank customer, and “fled north on 23rd Street”. The spokesman would not disclose whether any money was stolen from the bank, or how much. We on the red carpet did not notice any exploding dye packs from a fleeing robber.

See? Who says there are no real reporters on the red carpet? At any rate, I could not have said it any better than OAN newshound Bennett Marcus: “Staging a bank robbery directly across the street during your movie premiere is fucking brilliant.” And how, pal. And how.
(Photo: Open All Night)

Screening Gotham: March 10-12, 2006

A few of this weekend’s worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:
–Just as the ethos and logistics of horror filmmaking are famously friendly to independent filmmakers, the war genre is often perceived as the domain of explosives, costumes and other big-budget accessories out of indies’ reach. But Brooklyn filmmaker Ari Taub spent the last decade proving that perception wrong with The Fallen, opening this weekend at the Pioneer Theater. A meditative glimpse at World War II as seen through the eyes of American, German and Italian troops on the European front, The Fallen expertly navigates the war’s moral crises without stretching its no-budget premise beyond credulity or craft. Rather, Taub invests everything he has in story, and the labor of love pays off dramatically. In other words: Don’t expect Saving Private Ryan, but maybe something even better.
–The New York Underground Film Festival continues at Antholgy Film Archives this weekend with programs all day Saturday and Sunday. Chiefly interesting among these is Google Me This, featuring a couple dozen underground filmmakers and visual artists scavenging Google Video for the most bizarre, dismaying and generally obscure movies on the Web. Also of interest: the shorts program Happy Together, which includes NYC filmmaker Shiri Bar-On’s Making Me Happy and a somehow-enthralling documentary about a Swedish tax worker. On a weekend where filmgoing alternatives include Failure to Launch and The Shaggy Dog, trust me: Paying Tax is Sexy really is sexy.
–Check it out: Lionsgate rereleased Crash! And hey! Look over there! A swarm of locusts!

'Game 6': A Tale of Two Hoffmans (and Some Guy Named DeLillo)

Don DeLillo stood across West 24th Street waiting to jaywalk, but the train of taxis and limos crept before him like a sluggish urban crisis from one of his novels. Or from one of his screenplays–from his only screenplay, Game 6, the film of which was hosting its premiere party on the north side of the street.

Game 6 co-stars Bebe Neuwirth and Michael Keaton, teetotaling the night away at their film’s premiere party (Photos: STV)
I had snuck into Sapa only a moment before; bursting with cacophany and low-lit glamour, it was near the bottom of the list of places you could imagine DeLillo willingly attending. And he had arrived before the celebrity rush promised on the tip sheet: Game 6 stars Michael Keaton, Griffin Dunne and Bebe Neuwirth; newly crowned Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman (no relation to Game 6 director Michael Hoffman); filmmaker Noah Baumbach; actress Julianne Margulies and others. DeLillo had long ago carved his public niche somwhere on the slippery slope between introvert and recluse, and last night, in his jacket, glasses and a ballcap pulled low over his eyes, DeLillo had no less a figure than Paul Auster running interference for him inside the restaurant.
“Mr. Auster,” I said, leaning close in the noise. “It would be really great to get a picture of you and Mr. DeLillo.”
“No,” Auster said. “No, I don’t think Don would want that.”
Ah, failure–DeLillo’s muse, the evening’s motif (for me and at least one colleague, anyway), and the theme undergirding much of Game 6 itself. The film takes place on Oct. 25, 1986, when playwright Nicky Rogan (Keaton) is preparing for both his new play’s premiere and the possibility that his beloved Boston Red Sox could win the World Series that night at Shea Stadium. “This could be it,” Rogan says to himself, invoking the mantra that will come to represent the film’s wary, grudging embrace of hope.
And nothing is as hopeless as Rogan’s attempt to cross Manhattan from his perch on the East Side. On one gridlocked street after another, he philosophizes in cabs, happens upon his jaded daughter (Ari Graynor) and a burned-out playwright peer (Dunne), stops for a quickie with his worrisome mistress (Neuwirth) and idles in the dread induced by Steven Schwimmer (Robert Downey Jr.), the city’s most feared drama critic. An oft-produced playwright himself, DeLillo all but fetishizes the medium’s potential for disaster; Rogan’s legendary lead actor (Harris Yulin) suffers from a “brain parasite” devastating his memory, while Schwimmer indulges such paranoia that he attends plays in disguise–with a gun–lest some aggrieved writer(s) seek vengeance.

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NYUFF Hosts Outrageously Rare Screening of 'World's Greatest Sinner'

As noted yesterday, the 13th annual New York Underground Film Festival is off and running, and organizers are wasting little time in asserting the fest as this weekend’s can’t-miss event. To wit: The Reeler just confirmed that the NYUFF plans a secret, surprise screening of Timothy Carey’s exceedingly rare 1962 film The World’s Greatest Sinner tonight at Anthology Film Archives.
Probably most famous for its unavailability, like, anywhere, Sinner is a film so infrequently seen that to call it a cult classic would be to overstate its exhibtion history; it has not been screened in New York in almost 45 years. Inveterate character actor Carey wrote, produced, directed and stars as an insurance salesman who quits his job to start a new life as a charismatic rock star/preacher/politican. The film represents the only filmmaking credit for Carey–who came as close as anybody to being one of Stanley Kubrick’s stock players in the late ’50s and early ’60s–and also features the music of a 15-year-old prodigy named Frank Zappa.
The screening features a few Timothy Carey trailers and an introduction by Lia Gangitano and Walter Ocner; it starts at 11:30 tonight in Anthology’s upstairs theater. Tickets are $8.50 and go on sale at noon. Do not worry if you miss it, though–it should probably be back in New York around the year 2050 or something.

Vote Early, Vote Ondi: Timoner In the Running on MTV

The gang at Interloper Films passed along a bit of groundbreaking news to The Reeler late Wednesday: It appears that the filmmakers behind the Sundance Jury Prize-winning documentary Dig! are one step closer to cornering the shrieking-teenager market they have been chasing for years now:

Hey All,

An exciting FYI for those of you who can’t be home at 3:30 in the afternoon…

Ondi Timoner’s/ Interloper Films’ latest video–“Mandy” by the Jonas Brothers– has made it into the Top 10 on MTV’s “TRL” in its debut week!

We’re really just sharing with you the exciting news that we’re making it with the teeny-boppers, but if you’d like to vote and help keep us cool with the kiddies… it’s an interesting foray into the world of the high-schooler!

“Voting is simple,” the note goes on to say, delineating a multi-step phone-voting routine that could push “Mandy,” Ondi and the Jonas Brothers right to the top of the apocalypse. If the live “record a shoutout” option at (800) DIAL-MTV just is not going to cut it for you at the office, you can always just do your usual anonymous Web thing and vote online. This is an “interesting foray,” after all, and God knows you will not be working anyway.

Media Bistro Presents: Mastering The Opposite of Oscar-Winning

In case you had any doubt that New York is nursing a lingering provincial resentment over a shitty Los Angeles film claiming the Academy Awards’ top prize, the folks at Media Bistro have just the seminar for you:

From MB’s course description:

How many times have you gone to the movies in the past year and thought, “I can tell a story better than that!” Truth is, you can. After all, you write stories of one kind or another all the time. What you don’t know yet is how to write and develop that story so that it works on screen.

And on Oscar night. Oh, wait.