STUART GORDON, “STUCK”

By Nick Dawson

MENA SUVARI IN DIRECTOR STUART GORDON’S STUCK. COURTESY THINKFILM.

Since the very beginning of his career, Stuart Gordon has set out to shock and disrupt. Gordon, a native of Chicago, began his assault on the public after developing a love of drama at the University of Wisconsin. He subsequently started the Screw Theater – which made national news in 1968 when they performed a nude, psychedelic version of Peter Pan – and went on in 1970 to found the Organic Theater Company in Chicago, where he was artistic director for 15 years. Over that period, Gordon worked with Roald Dahl, Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, championed the work of the then-unknown David Mamet, and had Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz as ensemble members. In 1985, he left Organic to direct Re-Animator, based on an H.P. Lovecraft horror story, which won the Critics’ Prize at Cannes and gained instant cult status. Gordon has since adapted three more Lovecraft works for the big screen, as well as works by Edgar Allan Poe (The Pit and the Pendulum) and Ray Bradbury (The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit). In addition to horror and gothic, Gordon directed the futuristic prison drama Fortress and the campy Space Truckers, and wrote Honey, I Shrunk the Kids with his friend and fellow horror specialist Brian Yuzna. Recently, Gordon’s work has shifted from the fantastical to the horrors of real life with the gritty thriller King of the Ants (2003), David Mamet’s psychological drama Edmond (2005), and now his latest movie.

Stuck is based on the shocking true story of a care assistant from a senior citizen’s home who, while drunk and on Ecstasy, hit a homeless man with her car, breaking his legs – and leaving him lodged firmly in her windshield. Rather than calling the police, she returned home, left her car in the garage and regularly visited the injured man to check on his waning condition. In Gordon’s film, the names of principal characters – played by Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea – have been changed, but much of what … Read the rest

SIDNEY POLLACK, 1934 – 2008

By Scott Macaulay

Sidney Pollack, director of such films at Tootsie, Out of Africa, Sketches of Frank Gehry, and Three Days of the Condor died today of cancer. He was 73. In addition to directing, Pollack was an active producer (credits include Michael Clayton, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain) as well as an actor, appearing in such films as Eyes Wide Shut, Husbands and Wives, and, recently Clooney’s Michael Clayton.

Within the world of big-budget Hollywood moviemaking, Pollack brought intelligence, political awareness, and solid craftsmanship to projects in a variety of genres and subject matters. He was also one of the film world’s most well spoken ambassadors to the public at large. Speaking about films and filmmaking in interviews like his appearances on Charlie Rose, Pollack evinced a real passion for the craft of filmmaking and the nuances of storytelling. While still being commercial films aimed at mass audiences, his films were elegant movies attuned to both the DNA of his stars but also to the sociological and political currents of the times in which they were made.

Here is Pollack discussing Bobby Deerfield and one of my all-time favorite films, Three Days of the Condor.

… Read the rest

THE QUESTION OF REALITY

By Scott Macaulay

It is a sign of insanity to do the same thing over and over (like make an independent film) and expect different results? At GreenCine, Jonathan Marlowe re-poses the question of the moment in a piece entitled “Studios didn’t build their sales models for you”:

Under these circumstances, why are filmmakers still holding out for the legendary promise of a theatrical release? When the likelihood of success for films made on spec (that is, a film made with private money on the hopes of selling it to an established studio or distributor) approaches the same statistics as the chances of winning the lottery, why do so many filmmakers persist? Why do they essentially follow the same established patterns? Why, for instance, are otherwise intelligent people still playing by the studio rules? The whole (to oversimplify) festival-circuit-followed-by-theatrical-release-followed-by-video-debut-followed-by-television-sale – the notion of cascading windows of availability – was created to benefit the multiple-sales cycle of the studios, in essence carving out different periods of time to sell the same “product” again and again. Conversely, this process rarely benefits independent filmmakers at all. For just-starting-out directors, playing by these tired rules generally does more harm than good. Don’t expect to hear this angle from the old hands of the business because they’ve often bought in to the basic storyline.

… Read the rest

BRIAN ENO AND THE NEW FOLK MUSIC

By Scott Macaulay

Brian Eno, who just turned 60, is interviewed in Wired, and as part of his long conversation he talks about the changing definition of the artist in the digital/social-networking age.

Wired: Much has been made about the way tech (MySpace, digital distribution) has sped up the whole hype/buzz process. Had your career gone from 0 to 160mph the way it could today, how might that have influenced your development as an artist? What effect has Internet technology and culture had on art and artists?

Eno: That’s an interesting question. The effect of highly accelerated careers could be this: Ideas are put out into the public sphere much earlier, and less completely formed, than they would have been in the past. This is an invitation for other people to cherry-pick those ideas and finish them in various different ways. I think this makes culture a more widespread conversation, the result of a host of untraceable contributions webbing together to produce new things. It erodes the image of the artist as a lonely genius and puts us into a more “folk music” situation, where anyone can have a go and ideas spread out in all directions.

That doesn’t mean there’s no difference between the participants. It means that every participant is different, and it’s almost impossible to know which participants are going to turn out to be the critical ones. The whole field now is characterized by what Per Bak called “self-organizing criticality”: You have no way of knowing which particular grain of sand is going to start the avalanche, and no way of knowing whether that grain was intrinsically more important than all the others.
I’m not saying that we’re in this situation — it’s just that we’re much closer to it than we were 20 years ago. The primary effect of new digital media is to introduce a lot of new voices and skills and perceptions to the conversation, and to make far more cross- links between them.

On top of that, of course, there still exist the remnants of a business structure that want to try to

… Read the rest

FREE IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR…

By Scott Macaulay

If you’re an indie film pontificator who likes to talk about Radiohead’s and NIN’s innovative free pricing models, then you should check out the weekly podcast Econ Talk, which spent an hour with Wired’s Chris Anderson, whose next book is all about the trend towards no-cost goods and services. (This topic was explored by Anderson in a recent Wired cover story. I subscribe to Wired, not because I read it that much, but because it’s only $8, and I get enough out of it to justify that cost. But I didn’t read Anderson’s piece in Wired, although I did listen to the podcast, which is free, and which I’m recommending to you. There’s an economic lesson in there somewhere, but, hey, it’s a holiday, so I’ll refrain from figuring it out.)

Anderson and Econ Talk’s Russ Roberts talk about the economics of free, and while they don’t deal explicitly with film, we’d all do well to start thinking about the implications of their conversation. I’m paraphrasing here, but one of Anderson’s dictums is that any business that can go digital will go digital, and that digital businesses want to get to free pricing. He and Roberts also discuss economies other than monetary ones functioning in the digital space — gift economies, charity, etc. — and, at the end, Anderson talks about his own business model in a way that a lot of filmmakers could relate to. Again, I’m paraphrasing, but Anderson says, “My business is not publishing, my business is ‘me,’” explaining why it’s in his interest to make as many free copies of his next book available as possible.… Read the rest

CANNES WINNERS

By Scott Macaulay

Indiewire has the winners of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and there are surprises all around. First, the Stateside scuttlebutt that Soderbergh’s Che would be awarded the Palme d’Or was wrong. Benicio del Toro won the Best Actor award for the film, but the festival’s top honor went to Laurent Cantet’s Entre Les Murs (“The Class”), the latest from the director of Human Resources and Vers le Sud and the last film to screen for the jury.

Here’s the lede from Justin Chang’s Variety review:

A fully sustained immersion in the academics, attitudes and frequent altercations of a group of junior high school students, “The Class” marks Laurent Cantet’s return to the sharply observed social dynamics and involving character drama that distinguished his 1999 debut, “Human Resources.” Talky in the best sense, the film exhilarates with its lively, authentic classroom banter while its emotional undercurrents build steadily but almost imperceptibly over a swift 129 minutes. One of the most substantive and purely entertaining movies in competition at Cannes this year, it will further cement Cantet’s sterling reputation among discerning arthouse auds in France and overseas.

Michael Phillips at the Chicago Tribune is equally enthusiastic.

And here are excerpts from Cantet’s Cannes press conference.

(A big congratulations to Laurent and the producers, my good friends Carole Scotta and Caroline Benjo from Haut et Court.)

The Grand Prix (runner-up) went to Gomorra, by Matteo Garrone; Best Director to Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Three Monkeys; Best Screenplay to the Dardenne Brothers for Lorna’s Silence; the Jury Prize went to Il Divo, by Paolo Sorrentino; and the “Prix to 61st Festival de Cannes” went to Catherine Deneuve, for her performance in Un Conte de Noel, and Clint Eastwood, director of The Exchange.

The Camera d’Or for Best First Feature went to the British artist Steve McQueen for his debut, Hunger. A special mention went to Ils Mourront Tous Sauf Moi, by Valeria Gai Guermanika.

The Palme d’Or for best short went to Metron, directed by Marian Crisan, and Jerrycan, directed by Julius Avery.… Read the rest

DISTRESSED ASSETS

By Scott Macaulay

The New York Times Sunday business section has an article on Cinetic Media’s new digital rights division. Here’s the painful lede by Brooks Barnes:

MORE than 3,600 independent features were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival this year, a record driven by inexpensive digital equipment and an abundance of film financing. But only a couple hundred of those movies will ever be distributed in theaters. Does that mean that almost 90 percent of indies have zero value?

… Read the rest

A TALE OF TWO CANNES

By Admin

As the fest folds its tent, in this tepid market American distribs have failed to make a major buy. Last year, after all, Miramax bought The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for 3 million and James Gray’s We Own the Night brought 11.5 million. This year IFC went on a buying spree, picking up at least six titles. And last minute, SPC acquired two.

Overall, the fest has been a letdown, complete with bad weather, and a large helping of miserablist films depicting social and economic evils. Some good, solid films; no great, magical ones. On the plus side, the internationalism of Cannes enables you to see provocative auteurist works with subtitles that, given the crowded U.S. market, may never come stateside. Delta by Hungarian Kornel Mundruczo is a mesmerizing Bela Tarr-esque fever dream of a brother-sister couple who build their own refuge in the middle of the insular area’s shimmering waterways, only to be destroyed by the villagers’ hostility toward their “unnatural” union. From the young Swedish filmmaker Ruben Ostlund comes a provocation called Involontaires. Stitching together a series of vignettes that eventually yield a thematic unity, the film portrays people who engage, for a variety of reasons, in games of coercion.

This year also saw the repeated use, or abuse of auteurist tics and smart-alecky mannerisms that should be rationed out or proscribed. They are:

Shooting from the waist, groin, or knees down
Protags with expressionless faces
Plots so subtly drawn you can’t tell who did what to whom when or where

As for the human component to the festival, Cannes is like a microcosm of the larger society — at least a snobby, elitist, royalist one — in its strict stratification into castes. Apart from the celebs and mysterious money men who wag the tail of the festival, the working writers covering the event form their own non-porous sects. It’s not about black/white, rich/poor, nice/shit, Christian/Jew — it’s about perceived status. The whole thing is so oppresive, I needed to fly home to rescusitate my self-esteem. One cocktail hour I’m gracing the Macedonian Film Fund blowout with … Read the rest

AND THEN WE CAME TO THE END

By Admin

It’s been a season with no persuasive candidate, as of this writing, for the Palme d’Or. Three films found favor however, with many critics. One is Waltz with Bashir from Ari Folman, a notably original animated doc about reconstructing the memory of atrocities in Lebanon. What grabbed me about “Waltz” is the unexpected mix of politics and haunting surreal imagery. The Changeling by Clint Eastwood unspooled like silk, but was conventional, manipulative, and cursed by Angelina, could-we-hold-the-histrionics, doing acting. Third, Conte de Noel from Arnaud Desplechin, an ensembler about a wildly dysfunctional family. Rather than conventional narrative, Desplechin favors a fluid swirl of cutaways from truncated scenes and direct to camera confessions, all of it buoyed by Mendelssohn at his sunniest. The sight of Catherine Deneuve’s face conveying wry bemusement over life’s unkind cuts is alone worth the price of admission.

I caught the first half of Steven Soderbergh’s Che, which was largely dismissed as unfinished — though Benicio del Toro drew praise as the titular character. Presumably titled “The Argentine,” Part I traces Che Guevara’s evolution from doctor with a ratag bunch of rebels, to military leader who unseated Batista. Soderbergh intermittently flashes forward to faux news clips in 1964 of Che’s UN speech and interviews with an American journalist.

I admired the Fitzcarraldian folly of Soderbergh’s effort, a labor of love that gives the finger to commerce — I mean, four hours? With subtitles? I was relieved to find reverence for Che’s mission, rather than pious put-downs of his role in what some consider Cuba’s anti-democratic regime. What drives a revolutionary? asks the journalist. Love, says Che. Love for humankind. True, the impact of Part I is reduced by battle maneuvers which are hard to parse and often indistinguishable from other jungle shoot-outs. And though Benicio has charisma, his sleepy charm is less than ideal for a firebrand. And if the film is a hagiography, which is fine by me, the asthmatic revolutionary nonetheless remains an elusive figure. It’s exciting to contemplate how Soderbergh will go on to sculpt this rich raw material.… Read the rest

PARVEZ SHARMA, “A JIHAD FOR LOVE”

By Nick Dawson

GAY MUSLIM REFUGEES MEET IN DIRECTOR PARVEZ SHARMA’S A JIHAD FOR LOVE. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES.

After a distinguished career as a print and television journalist, Parvez Sharma has made a notable transition to documentary filmmaker. Born and raised in India, Sharma studied English at the University of Calcutta before gaining three film and journalism related masters degrees at universities in India, Britain and the U.S. He spent the nineties as a newspaper reporter in India and then moved on to working for his country’s premier news network, Star News Channel, using his position to draw attention to human rights and LGBT issues. He also produced and edited the Sundance Grand Jury Award winner Silverlake Life (1993) and acted as assistant director on the award-winning Indian drama Dance of the Wind (1997).

A Jihad for Love, Sharma’s debut as a director, is a highly personal documentary informed by his own status as both Muslim and gay. It is a revelatory examination of the paradox of Muslims who remain devoutly within the religion despite Islam’s persecution of them because of their sexual orientation. Sharma presents a panoramic view of Islamic homosexuals throughout the world such as Muhsin, an openly gay Imam in South African; Mazen, an Egyptian refugee who was incarcerated because of his sexual preference; Ferda and Kiymet, a lesbian couple living in Turkey; and Amir, a young Iranian man forced to flee to Turkey. Shot in 12 countries over six years, Sharma’s film is an intelligent and eloquent exposition of a taboo subject that not only movingly pays tribute to the strength and integrity of the film’s embattled subjects but – despite its provocative title – maintains a reverent rather than critical attitude towards the Islamic religion.

Filmmaker spoke to Sharma about the difficulties involved in making the film, reclaiming the word “jihad,” and designing his own Bollywood film posters as a child.

PARVEZ SHARMA, DIRECTOR OF A JIHAD FOR LOVE. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES.

Filmmaker: Was it a difficult decision to embark on this project?

Sharma: With documentary film, I think sometimes a … Read the rest