JOHN AUGUST, “THE NINES”

By Nick Dawson

RYAN REYNOLDS IN JOHN AUGUST’S THE NINES. COURTESY NEWMARKET FILMS.

John August holds a unique position as not only one of Hollywood’s most sought-after screenwriters, but also one of the filmmaking community’s most active and helpful members. August’s first produced script was Go (1999), directed by Doug Liman, a triptych of interweaving stories which played out like a junior version of Pulp Fiction. He has since written the animated Titan A.E. (2000) and both Charlie’s Angels movies, and collaborated with Tim Burton on Big Fish (2003), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride (both 2005). All the while, he has also been passing on his professional expertise to others by answering online readers’ questions, maintaining a blog (at www.johnaugust.com) and participating in Sundance labs.

It is a sign of August’s ambition that the script he chose as his first directorial project, The Nines, is his most complex and challenging by far. The film is a psychoreligious existential conundrum told across three consecutive stories, in which leads Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy all play multiple roles: Gary, Margaret and Sarah in the first, Gavin, Melissa and Susan in the second, and Gabriel, Mary and Sierra in the final part. The segments are all shot in differing styles and begin to overlap somewhat in their stories of an out-of-control actor, a TV writer, and a computer game inventor (all played by Reynolds). However August’s film refuses to make things too neat or give easy answers to the questions he poses about creative responsibility, the nature of existence and, yes, storytelling itself. The Nines may not please audiences seeking superficial pleasures, but it delivers a cinematic experience which is smart, thought-provoking and deeply memorable.

Filmmaker spoke to August about the world of The Nines, drawing on his own experiences for inspiration, and his continuing love of The Muppet Movie.

JOHN AUGUST WITH MELISSA MCCARTHY ON THE SET OF THE NINES. COURTESY NEWMARKET FILMS.

Filmmaker: I believe the inspiration for the film stemmed from an incident in your own life when you were … Read the rest

SMILE LIKE YOU MEAN IT

By Scott Macaulay

I want to thank David Lowery for contributing the great interview with Ronnie Bronstein that’s up on the main page right now. I love Bronstein’s film Frownland and am really happy to be hosting a special screening of it with director Lodge Kerrigan at the IFC Center next Wednesday at 7:30 pm. Lowery is right when he calls Frownland “one of the most confrontational and uncompromising visions to emerge from the American independent scene in recent memory,” and I hope that a lot of you come to this special edition of Filmmaker‘s series at the IFC.

Here’s a taste of the interview, but click on the link above and check out the whole piece:

Filmmaker: What was the production of the film like? Again, judging from the credits, it looks like you had a tiny crew. The entire picture seems quite handmade.

Bronstein: Yeah, I wanted to make something that felt really intimate and it’s funny how a sort of crummy, slipshod aesthetic can do that. Sort of like the feeling you get from reading some hand-scrawled Xeroxed fanzine, where the sloppiness of the presentation becomes a kind of expressive asset to the work, rather than something you have to excuse. I don’t know. I mean if you run across a typo in The New York Times, it’s just flat-out distracting. It doesn’t bring you closer to the writer or the ideas or anything. It merely outs some birdbrain who didn’t do his job correctly. But in the case of something loudly handmade, an error can actually reel you in closer. It points to a total lack of pasteurization and makes a beeline between you and the person that created it. You get this feeling from Syd Barrett records and you get it from Robert Crumb comics and it’s something I want to give off in the work I make. But, yeesh, to actually answer your question, we were a small group of 6 or 7, cast and crew included. Petty quarrels, bad moods and various levels of insidious coaxing were common occurrences I guess, but that’s only

… Read the rest

BLEAK MOMENTS
By David Lowery

Winner of the 2007 “Best Film Not Playing At A Theater Near You” award at the Gotham Awards, Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland has been a favorite of ours since we saw it at last year’s SXSW. Now it will finally be in theaters as it’s currently playing at the IFC Center in New York. Here’s an interview we ran last summer with Bronstein by David Lowery.

Traveling on the festival circuit and spending days in darkened theaters, one grows accustomed to the ebb and flow of certain trends in independent film. Talkative, shakily digital twentysomething dramedies; sensitive tone poems; documentaries both edgy and lyrical. Then a film like Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland comes out of nowhere and reminds us why we go to festivals in the first place: to see things we’ve never seen before.

Frownland premiered at the SXSW Film Festival this past March, after which those who loved it and those who hated it found they had one thing in common: they couldn’t stop talking about it. In fact, the only thing more galvanizing than watching the film itself was hearing that it was awarded a Special Jury Prize. “That’s kind of the beauty of SXSW,” notes festival programmer Matt Dentler. “A film like Frownland was not going to go unnoticed.”

The jury didn’t play it safe, but then again neither did Bronstein, who spent several years crafting a directorial debut that is at times almost unbearably abrasive – a grimy, manic masterpiece of black comedy that buries its humor beneath layers of egregious discomfort. Shot on 16mm and blown up to a feverishly grainy 35mm print, Frownland follows Keith, a stuttering door-to-door coupon salesman, as he negotiates the highs and lows of life on the fringes of New York City. The film begins as a kitchen-sink drama, narrows itself into a character study and then, through several structural permutations, gradually worms its way right into the unstable psyche of its protagonist. Keith, as played by Dore Mann, is a raw nerve of a human being, incapable of coherent communication, as exasperating as he is compelling.

Likewise, Frownland is one … Read the rest

SOFT VOICES

By Scott Macaulay

For all the talk this past week about mumblecore — what it is and how these films are similar — it should also be noted how different the aesthetics of its various directors are. A case in point is this week’s opening at the IFC Center, Quiet City, directed by Aaron Katz, which boasts some of the trademarks of the genre — 20-something protagonists, a focus on transitory lifestates, relationship issues, an extreme naturalism — but which also has its own very distinct sensibility that’s quite different from some of the genre’s other filmmakers. As its title suggests, the film references that just-barely noticeable phenomenon when a city of 7 million people can be, actually, very quiet. Try it. Stand on a city street late one night, and listen for the tiny details you’ll be amazed you can even notice. Of course, the film’s “quiet city” is just a stage for its characters and their equally subtle, at times barely audible feelings, but what I like most about the film is actually this conceptual unity. Quiet City is of a piece. It’s delicate, wafer-thin at times, but, like the best minimalist narratives, it winds up saying something memorable with the slenderest of means.

Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote a lovely review of the film today:

The mumblecore genre, with its minimalist aesthetics, minuscule budgets, home-movie casting of friends and acquaintances and its fly-on-the-wall, quasi-documentary spontaneity, is so wide-open for parody that it is a sitting duck for the most withering send-up. “Quiet City” is fortunate to arrive just before the inevitable demolition crews arrive to tear it to shreds. Tender and sad, it is a fully realized work of mumblecore poetry.

… Read the rest

64th Venice Film Festival

By Admin

Venice decided to celebrate its 75th anniversary (it was suspended during Fascism and World War II) by naming a jury composed solely of film directors, and will present a Career Golden Lion to Tim Burton and another to Bernardo Bertolucci. Two short films from his early years and his 2004 film on Michelangelo will be shown in honor of Antonioni, who died recently, but no homage to Bergman is in the schedule.
Despite competition from other festivals, Marco Muller, in his fourth year as festival director, has scored 22 world premieres from various countries. There is also diversity in appearances by the famous, from the old guard, Michael Caine, Jeanne Moreau, Vanessa Redgrave, to current icons George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Charlize Theron, enough to generate endless publicity. Will similar enthusiasm prevail when the screens light up?
… Read the rest

EIFF: FADE OUT

By Admin

Things are coming to a close here at the Edinburgh International Film Festival: the press screenings have ended, the festival videotheque is increasingly empty, and thoughts are turning to everyone’s journey home. There is a less frantic schedule in these latter stages, so yesterday I was able to accept an invitation from the EIFF’s new artistic director, Hannah McGill to participate in Make Sure They’re Dead, a panel discussion about film biography. (I was asked because I am currently finishing a biography of Hal Ashby.) Alongside me on the panel were the esteemed chronicler of classic Hollywood, Cari Beauchamp, Diana Dors’ biographer, Damon Wise, and moderator Andy Dougan, himself an active film biographer. Though the event took place at noon on a Friday, there was a surprisingly good turn-out and a lot of audience participation in our lively discussion.

Today, however, was all about the awards. All festival long, people have been saying that Control, Anton Corbijn‘s exceptional biopic of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, was a shoo-in for the Michael Powell Award, the prize for the best British film. Control, which also won raves in Cannes and is released Stateside in October, has quickly won a legion of passionate followers, all of whom were delighted to see it rightly receive not only the Powell award but also the PPG Award for Best Performance in a British Feature Film, which went to its lead, Sam Riley (above). Riley, a former rock singer, makes his screen debut as Curtis and inhabits the role so completely that there is a very strong case for him to get an Oscar nomination come the beginning of 2008.

Another film which first surfaced at Cannes, Argentinian debutant Lucia Puenzo‘s excellent hermaphrodite coming-of-age movie, XXY, took home the New Directors Award, ahead of a lot of very strong contenders including Catherine Martin‘s in the cities, Kirt Gunn‘s Lovely By Surprise and Jeffrey Blitz‘s Sundance-winner, Rocket Science.

Billy the Kid, a firm favorite with audiences here, won the … Read the rest

SHIT HAPPENS

By Scott Macaulay

Police Beat writer Charles Mudede pens a curious ode to Stanley Kubrick in Seattle’s The Stranger. After opening by saying that Kubrick’s contempt for mankind was “deep,” he moves on to a fuller explication of his worldview:

“I’m in a world of shit,” says Private Joker at the end of Kubrick’s unremittingly dark Vietnam War film, Full Metal Jacket. That is what Kubrick has to say about the state of everything: The world is shit, humans are shit in shit, life is worth shit, and there is nothing else that can be done about the situation. In Kubrick’s movies, progress, sustained enlightenment, and moral improvement are impossible because the powers of reason, love, and religion are much weaker than the forces of generation and degeneration, desire and destruction, sex and death.

And yet, Kubrick’s films endure, not decomposing in some celluloid wastebin but regenerating themselves in the form of spiffy new HD editions.

Mudede explains:

Yet we still watch Kubrick’s films. And we enjoy them. We enjoy them because the hate he had for humanity was only matched by the curious love he had for the most expensive and impressive art form in the world: cinema.

… Read the rest

WHAT WOULD THE COMMUNITY THINK?

By Scott Macaulay

Over at his blog, filmmaker A. J. Schnack thinks about the whole mumblecore thing with tons of links to all of this week’s NYC press coverage and more (including the filmmaker’s own piece on Swanberg and DIY distribution in February, 2006). Schnack, a doc maker, considers the phenomenon and takes the right lessons away from it:

And perhaps the biggest thing that we should learn from these filmmakers is that we can and should work together. And I mean that literally. Although the doc community is a pretty tight-knit bunch, we should continue to find ways of collaboration, on screen and off. We should find new ways to build a truly interconnected community.

As Tom Hall, programmer of the Sarasota Film Festival, concluded in an expecially brilliant piece about this filmmaking movement (and some of the criticism it has received) wrote:

“If you need to know one thing, know this; If, on any given night in America, there is room on the couch, if someone needs a camera operator or an actor, if a script needs reviewing or a computer crashes and footage needs to be edited, I know that all of these artists would be there to help one another out. In the end, the auteur theory lives on in a collaborative network of very talented people, but each is his or her own creative talent, instantly recognizable.”

I think that’s the biggest lesson of this day. Because as talented as Joe is, as fine a film as HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS is, the celebration in New York is about a community.

We can, and should, learn from it.

… Read the rest

WE ARE CURIOUS… AND YELLOW

By Scott Macaulay

Our friends at MySpace have just launched their new Film page. It’s wider, with more features and info, and Filmmaker has even more real estate on it. And over on the Filmmaker MySpace site, we’ve changed our color scheme, away from our undeniably impressive but eye-straining backdrop of past covers to a stylish yellow/orange.

The MySpace site will have more on it in the days ahead, but, for now, here’s something I found: a clip from Lynch, the doc on David Lynch Nick Dawson wrote about in a posting below.… Read the rest

STILL GOIN’: IN CONVERSATION WITH JON VOIGHT
By Nick Dawson

September Dawn has been attracting controversy ever since it began shooting last year. The film, directed and co-written by Christopher Cain (Young Guns), tells the story of the events surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre when, on the morning of September 11, 1857, a wagon train of over 100 Westward-bound Christian settlers were brutally slain by Mormon militia. The incident has continued to be a historical talking point as the Mormons accused of the murders were disguised as Native Americans and have always denied any culpability in the matter. However a wealth of documentation backs up the claims against the Mormons, and Cain used this information as a background for a dramatic narrative about the massacre which features both real-life characters such as Brigham Young, here played by Terence Stamp, and composite creations like Mormon patriarch Jacob Samuelson (Jon Voight).

As is often the case with the films he appears in, Jon Voight’s performance is arguably the highlight of September Dawn. Voight began his career as one of the most compelling leading men in Hollywood, and was propelled to instant star status with his Oscar-nominated turn as Joe Buck in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969). In the 1970s, Voight was famously cautious about which projects to take on, but despite him being far from prolific during this period, he gave unforgettable performances in Deliverance (1972), The Champ (1979) and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, for which Voight received the Best Actor Academy Award. In contrast with earlier in his career, for the past decade Voight has been working non-stop as he has transformed himself into a ubiquitous character actor, appearing both in Hollywood studio fare and lower profile, more personal projects. In 2001, he was once again Oscar-nominated for his role as TV sportscaster Howard Cosell in Michael Mann’s biopic, Ali.

A few months ago, during a break from filming National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Voight came to New York to talk to Filmmaker about September Dawn and his thoughts looking back over an illustrious, and ongoing, career.

JON VOIGHT IN SEPTEMBER DAWN. COURTESY BLACK … Read the rest