CANNES 09: "Antichrist" Gets a Stoning

Yet, despite all of the extreme responses this film has received since its screening in France, I still really want to see it, and may even want to see it more now. Good or bad, it looks damn interesting. (Ebert said it may, in fact, be unendurable, but it's not a boring movie, and that's plenty good to me.) And even if director Lars von Trier is the most self-righteous man on the planet, he makes some courageous films that look astounding, here aided by longtime collaborator Anthony Dod Mantle, who just won the cinematography Oscar for "Slumdog Millionaire." (Trier's a little like Kanye West in this regard: makes some irresistible stuff, but I abhor the man himself.) I enjoyed what he said at the conference that followed a few days after the screening where he was heckled to justify his work. (Anne Thompson has more from the conference.) He said something to the effect of "You are all my guests...I don't have to justify myself..." or this little picture of his, which he called "a dream" and has on several occasions also called his form of therapy after a bout of depression, and this little picture is a piece of his mind and soul. He is not our guest, so he doesn't have to humor us.

While not every reaction has been pure hatred and disgust, I think the Spartan yelling match is going to deem the dissenters the winner for the time being. Its chances at wide domestic release and/or success are in jeopardy. But I think they'll come around. Eventually. I think.

Do bad reviews excite you?


IMAGE from: Slashfilm

This is "Moon"

When done right, there's nothing that gets my heart racing better than a good science-fiction movie. They're such versatile creatures, the sci-fi flicks, with their capacity to meditate very powerfully the human condition, to discuss politics (though not my favorite use of the genre and stock imagery, though it has its heroes), to discuss science and religion, the science of life and death, the struggle for solace, personal/societal collapse and enlightenment. What's most fun and satisfying for me is when a movie achieves a heightened level of intrigue with a great throughline, but quickly jettisons all standard logic and leaves you with pieces to graft together. There's almost no incorrect way to do so (except when there is), and I love the conversations that ensue after the credits roll. Science fiction is a more visual genre than others, and I think it's most effective when there aren't a million things flying about at once.

Duncan Jones' "Moon" usurps those nice conceptions we have of Mother/HAL-3000-type computers (this one astoundingly well-voiced by Kevin Spacey), mashes them with the conceit 'space-as-final-frontier' and simultaneously as literal landscape of the mind a la "Solaris," and with a touch of the same human desperation that pervaded "Sunshine" and its predecessors. It stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, who composes a one-man team to mine Helium-3 from the moon for a contracted three years, with the aid of said computer. Bell comes upon the scene of some freak accident only three weeks before his contract expires, and everything starts to unravel. It was filmed on a small budget, so it's amazing that the film can look and sound so beautiful and creepy. As I've said on Twitter, I think this film is a perfect vehicle for Rockwell to show off his unique talents as a wordy, neurotic performer with a knack for the oddball and slightly threatening - emotes the internal drama one would expect of a person alone in space. The image at right is the poster, which also communicates an odd, not-of-this-time sort of feel.

Early reviews out of Sundance and SWSW come from James Rocchi and Peter Sciretta. A better synopsis comes from IGN, linked below, that I didn't want to copy here because I think theirs indulges too many details. But a gorgeous trailer from them is below. The title cards and review snippets are really effective. As is Clint Mansell's score.


Will you be flying to this "Moon"?


IMAGE from: Film School Rejects
POSTER from: Ain't It Cool
TRAILER exclusive through: IGN Filmforce

USC Stays Connected

I really enjoy the different perspectives on technology and the blog phenomenon in these USC/Cisco shorts, although at times they reek of shameless plugging for the wireless router that's the common variable in each. I haven't figured out whether any or all of them are graduates of the university -- it's likely, but it wouldn't matter much either way. They're all at least adequately successful media- and corporate-bloggers and I guess that's all USC would really care about; whatever lassoes in some new partners/donors/lecturers/honorees. (Steven Spielberg never went to the school, but was offered an honorary degree before UCLA got a chance to so now he's all over the film program. Of course this means greater opportunities for me and others, but there's so much politics going on - especially in the rivalry between my school and that one across town - that it can often muddle the real issues.)

Seeing their adoration for blogging makes me want to blog. And it did, it worked: I've chalked this up as a response. Though I'm personally afraid of having to maintain close, strong ties to news of the day, of the hour, of the minute like these people seem to; I struggle to even coalesce all new tidbits into something that's coherent that I could possibly post about. And now, I also have to keep up with Twitter, and news of the second. My feed updates every hour or so on my BlackBerry, but in that hour there can be up to fifty new tweets to catch up on. Luckily, most of it is redundant, the same news coming from multiple outlets. I follow Anne Thompson, Jeff Wells, Kris Tapley and Cinematical the most (only the first and last being remotely reliable to make tweets throughout the week -- otherwise I just check the sites). [I also subscribe to Nikki Finke, Patrick Goldstein, Sharon Waxman and David Poland. But they all have such a harshness to their rhetoric and a tendency for self-inflation that I only ever go anymore if I have extra time and want something provocative - if that's the word for it. I'm aware there's a blog war going on, but I'm not going to link to it because it's only a battle of egos. And it hurts this discourse we're involved in online, makes us all look like babies.]

Tim Ferriss, author (4-Hour Workweek) and productivity guru:


Shira Lazar, media blogger and host of LXTV's 1st Look:


David and Amy Wenzel, online creative assets producers:



Do you keep a blog?
I'd really love to know, please comment your thoughts and leave a link! The value of blogs, aside from their spontaneity and instantaneity (also their pitfall), is in the ability to network.

We Are Critics

If you know me well enough and have spoken with me at any point in the last year, you'd know that I've been laboring intensely over an undergraduate thesis - a rather long ethnography - which I hope becomes the subject and foundation for my visual anthropology graduate work to be continued at USC. It's about film critics and their ongoing predicament of job losses, the seeming decline in relevance in the public, and the surge of competition being contended with in the arena of the internet. (It's a dilemma that I share some part of too as my goal is to write criticism either primarily or peripherally to some other job.) I'm specifically exploring the role of the internet in the community of critics and their popular consumption, and how the rapid succession of technological changes - from the advent of the Blackberry and mobile to YouTube to the review aggregates to the blog phenomenon to Twitter and so on - has either produced or might be impacting this dilemma. Most of the work has been chronicled in chapters of my monitoring of the industry over the last many months, expressed in some of these paradigm-shifting events, coupled with my familiarity with criticism and film journalism after several years of personal obsession. When it's finished, I will try to get it hosted someplace and provide a link so you all can read it and get your "nutritional" food-for-thought (as Jeff Wells might say) on the matter if you're not quite well-versed. Or you can validate/invalidate my two cents. It's become pretty comprehensive: a heavy dose of historical and theoretical discussion for context, life history and ethnographic portraiture (Kael, Sarris, Agee, Farber, Haskell, Bazin, etc.), sociological statistics, and of course some anthropological writings (Bourdieu for talk of taste, Foucault for some aspects on articulation and authorship, Hall for power structures). I hope it becomes a staple on the shelves of critics, critic-lovers and cinephiles as it's most definitely a tome of good faith and of pure love for the art of criticism. The cinema has already had its lovers strewn across celluloid in documentary-form, now it's time for the great commentators to get their dues.

So how nice for me to see that I might have yet another source to extract some tasty morsels of information in quotation and some further historical data in the SXSW-debuting "For the Love of Movies: A History of American Film Criticism." Witten and directed by Gerald Peary, produced by Amy Geller, and narrated by Patricia Clarkson (ever the literate thespian), it is a project that has been in development for years - not unlike my own - and takes on the gargantuan task of the issue which, as any historian or storyteller might tell you, opens up into a much larger dialogue. Jeff Wells puts it:

"It's a hell of a subject -- a chronicle of magnificent obsessions and magnificent dreams, and a rise-and-fall story covering scores of critics, the entirety of the Hollywood film culture from the '20s to the present, and hundreds if not thousands of movies."

The documentary assembles a wonderful set of critics both big and small to discuss their positionality in the industry and the spectrum of criticism. So wonderful are they I may not have to interview folks like I thought I might. (But if you'd like to make a contribution to my scholarly examination of the industry, then please let me know. I'd love to still get some good direct sources in.) Being a film, though, and subject to time constraints (this isn't PBS, after all) the film doesn't look to give you a piece-by-piece dissection of the business or its constituents, but it does "agreeabl[y] canoe ride down memory creek" and "with a tinge of melancholy" as Wells says, serving up the task more than sufficiently and with enough provocation and neutrality to stimulate spirited discussion. Discussion about what the critics now mean to us as targets of an endless flurry of infinitely variegated movies. The trailer (which is rather short, and sparse of the prevailing issues) is below:


Do you read anything by the critics anymore?


IMAGE from: Listal
IMAGES from: The NY Times
SCOOPED first by: Cinematical

Vote for this "High School President"

It's always a disappointment - for director, stars and potential audience - when a movie comes to any one of the festivals and fails to deliver, because it makes the film all the likelier to succumb to a fate at the hands of a tainted reputation ("Blindness" is a movie that debuted at Cannes in 2008 that never recovered from poor reviews), or to eternal obscurity as the filmmakers retreat to add and chop details which threaten its original integrity ("2046" is a case where drastic alterations post-Cannes aided its later reception). So it's even more tragic when a film, like "Assassination of a High School President" an arrival at Sundance in '08, comes to attract loads of high praise but then falls under stresses outside of its powers that can impede or altogether prevent its distribution. The Brett Simon-helmed comedy/noir which is equal parts murder mystery, a la Rian Johnson's "Brick" from 2005, and John Hughes-style high school comedy was furnished to Sundance last year by the Yari Film Group. It quickly attracted buzz for its irreverent and smart plot and "colorful, sexy characters," but because of recent events of Yari being forced into bankruptcy, the film is now threatened with being passed over for theatrical distribution and sent direct to DVD release, thereby relegating it to some dark, dusty corner of the local video rental store to be seen only by adventurous passers-by.

Even though the company is still able to operate and produce pictures, it was their releasing unit that filed Chapter 11, so this remains among several other pictures waiting to see an actual audience actually see it (say that five times fast). If "Brick," a hardboiled neo-noir with spit-fire dialogue and a relatively unknown cast, can make it and find its fanbase, then I see no reason why this film can't. "Brick" boasted Joseph Gordon-Levitt as its headliner who has emerged as an immensely talented young actor, but he's not quite as popular as, say, Mischa Barton ("The OC"), so I'm sure with the proper marketing of the involved talent and material, not to mention the great reviews it's already been getting throughout the blogosphere, I think this could become a rather successful niche film. I must also mention that Bruce Willis is in it as well, so there's an entirely other reason to commit the dollars. Being a tremendous fan of "Brick" myself, and a lover of noir in all its incantations, I relish any opportunity to see what kinds of twists can be applied to the genre, which suffers from general assumptions about its look, pacing and tone. (Jules Dassin's "Night and the City" was one of the films I watched in my earliest film classes which made me stop wanting to produce movies, and just write about their enchanting effect.)

Sony possesses the home video distribution rights and feels it best to just send it direct to DVD, but other studios are still waiting around and testing the waters to see if anything bites. In this economy, you can't really blame them. The film has an official Facebook page, so if it becomes known that there is a comparable audience for the film, it could be enough for a company (or Sony itself) to take the step up and write up the checks for the theatrical rights, press and adverts, and for distribution. As "Slumdog Millionaire" has shown, it's not always a longshot for an independent film to maneuver around its financial stakes to become a popular success.

Will you be making a 'hit' on this "High School President"?

Hats off to Slashfilm for scooping this (via Twitter, no less) and getting the ball rolling on this campaign. Cinematical has also thus far pitched in, as has Ain't It Cool News. (Slashfilm also has nice links to various reviews with snippets.)


IMAGE from: Slashfilm
IMAGE from: Cinematical

Circle of Critics Loses Another.

It was last year that Premiere Magazine succumbed to the pressures of online, and published its last issue (it had Will Ferrell on the cover promoting Blades of Glory) only to retreat to a tiny corner of the internet where their old prominence and clout became virtual anonymity wrapped up in ugly page designs. Do you think the site will last much longer next to more extensive and expansive sites like Empire and even Entertainment Weekly (which is less a cinema mag and more a tome of pop culture and box office numbers) who have successfully made the transition to digital? It's the scenario that many print publications are facing - either go online, or get out. I'm not so sure Premiere.com will last, especially now with the forced departure of one of their best, one of their vets who was also one of the only to draw any kind of traffic (so says Anne Thompson; I'm sure a majority of readers for any given columnist/critic don't look them up online and probably don't even know their names - a sad truth). Glenn Kenny was one of my personal heroes at the magazine and he was one of the earliest to leave an impression on me (Peter Travers of Rolling Stone is the other), so his absence there will surely be felt (and tallied and analyzed on their feed, since that's how these publications have to do it now). (Read his comments to some other "critics" in defense of his art, which is a dying art.) He's got a great mind and a lucid, distinct writing style, so I'm sure he'll surface again soon, and hopefully on a better-looking interface. Read his final words on the Premiere Blog.

IMAGE from: GeekRoar