Archive for December, 2009
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
To try to recall your favorite films from an entire decade (and then to limit them to only ten titles) is to immediately set yourself up for uncertainty and ridicule: first off because it’s hard enough to remember what you saw ten days ago, much less ten years ago, and secondly because to limit the list to ten is to leave hundreds of excellent films out, titles that you’ll undoubtedly get bludgeoned to death with through later feedback (“You blithering idiot~pretentious snob~Hollywood tool! How could you leave out Judd Apatow~Jean-Luc Godard~Abbas Kiarostami~McG,” read the heated responses to already posted lists). To create a list of a “the best” of a year (or a decade) is to confront what makes a person “love” a film in general: sometimes your response depends not just on personal taste, but timing, audience, and mood; you may have seen The Dark Knight or There Will Be Blood with a pounding headache and a group of incessant popcorn munchers to your left; you could have watched Beau Travail and Nobody Knows in a tiny overheated multiplex with a seven-foot-tall Dutchman blocking the subtitles in front of you, or you could have just been getting over some personal tragedy when, suddenly, you saw a film that made it all—life, love, friendship, whatever—make perfect sense.
Because of these random accidents of viewing, any list is bound to be personal; some of the following films were chosen because they affected the decade’s zeitgeist, others chosen because they just affected mine. Some are probably not in a top-ten for box-office, or even artistic merit; instead, they are ones that affected me the most with their intelligence/craft/humour/etc, or the ones that, due to whatever reasons of mood and life, moved me beyond belief.
Most interesting trend of the 2000’s: the return of regional styles of filmmaking to independent American cinema. Starting in 2000 with George Washington, with its decaying Southern setting and just-as-precise Southern aesthetic and mood, American film moved away from its “Anywhere, USA” style and instead rooted itself in a particular, evocative setting. Films like George Washington and … Read the rest
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
Concluding a decade in which specialty film distribution boomed and busted, and in which the identity and composition of filmed entertainment itself was challenged, perhaps it’s not surprising that David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, the ultimate unstable cinematic text, wound up on top of Filmmaker Magazine’s Editor’s Poll of the Best American Independent Films of the ’00s. Begun as television pilot but finally assembled as a feature according to the unconscious urgings of its creator, Mulholland Drive is a dyspeptic musing on the cinematic dream machine, one that launched an actual movie star (Naomi Watts) while also serving notice that the edifice of Hollywood fantasy was in deep disrepair.
I was a little surprised that Mulholland Drive topped our list, but by now you are probably not, as the film also ranked highest on the indieWIRE and Film Comment polls as well. Filmmaker has never presented itself as a comprehensive critical journal (we are more dedicated to the film practice of independent filmmakers), so we are limited our list to American independent and specialty film division titles — the type of work that is focused on in the magazine. We decided to leave our definition of American independent broad, encompassing not only “purely” independent films but also those made through the studio specialty divisions. One of our respondents — invites went to all of our editors and freelancers for the last year — asked if there was a list of all eligible films, but there wasn’t: memory was a prerequisite of this list. For a film to have registered as one of the best of the decade, one had to have remembered it. And as I tabulated the list, I wondered how much of memory was a function of repetition and prominence. The bigger films, titles that were well advertised, that received other critical acclaim, and that have had a healthy after-life in the ancillary markets, dominated the list. (You have to drop down to number 4, David Gordon Green’s George Washington, before you come to a film produced with private money and released by a non-studio distributor.)
Or, … Read the rest
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
It was the aughts, and I went to (and made a few) movies. I did it mostly for pleasure, sometimes for distraction, often to see what others thought of the wild world around us; by the end, I did it simply because it was the only way I saw fit to make a living (sort of). It was a bell curve of sorts, a graph of this burgeoning obsession, this ecstatic object of study, of debate, of joy. By the middle of the decade, I was watching somewhere between three hundred and fifty and four hundred movies, old and new, each year, often alone on big energy eating screens, my carbon footprint be damned. I see a little more than half that number these days and surely saw about half that number back in 2000. When I reflect on it now, on this decade “from hell” as Time Magazine recently put it, I wonder what forces of early century American life drove this profound and insatiable passion of mine into something that could be described as a rote professional obligation. It couldn’t have just been debt (student, credit card) and the widespread mediocrity that I was one of the few privileged surveyors of. Hey, at least I still had something I could refer to as a job.
On a March night in 2001, when I turned my TV off in frustration as Michael Douglas announced that Gladiator had beaten Traffic for the best picture, I knew being disillusioned might be on its way to becoming my default psychological state. It had only been four months since I had gone to bed one night with Al Gore comfortably ahead of votes in Florida and awoken to find that George W. Bush had been elected President and only three months since the Supreme Court decided that we should stop counting votes. I was already getting prepared for a brave new post millennial world; I had decided I was an atheist (a stance I no longer sustain) with a blond Afro in the middle of my Catholic school years. I had stopped playing … Read the rest
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
Hollywood can compete, but the pirates are always fast on their heels….
… Read the rest
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
Topping the Korean box office is no small feat for a first-time filmmaker, given the perennial offerings of sassy romantic comedies and vivid, attention-grabbing genre flicks from this nation’s impressive stable of film artists. It’s even more improbable when you’ve made a no-frills documentary (not so popular in South Korea) for less than $150,000 about the relationship between an elderly farmer and his aged ox. But a few months after it hit the market at the 2008 Pusan International Film Festival, where it won the best documentary award, Lee Chung-ryoul’s Old Partner became one of the most successful indies in Korean film history, playing on more than 150 local screens and drawing 1 million viewers on word-of-mouth buzz alone. It went on to jostle for the Grand Jury Prize in world documentary at Sundance last January, the first time a Korean documentary has been entered in the Park City competition. No one must have been more surprised than Lee, a veteran TV producer whose humble maiden feature—a human-bovine buddy film—has captured the imagination of audiences from Seoul to Vienna.
Shot on HD over the course of a year, Old Partner is a real-life fable of earthy, heartbreaking simplicity. Choi Won-kyun is an 80-year-old farmer in poor health still toiling in the rice fields of Bongwha without benefit of modern machinery. Instead, he relies solely on his bony, barely thriving female ox, perhaps the oldest in Korea, which he treats like a member of the family, caressing it tenderly (“this ox is better than any person to me”) and swatting at it with his cane when he’s annoyed at the animal’s sluggish pace. Choi’s wife, Lee Sam-soon, works alongside her husband, berating him for indulging the beast of burden with specially gathered feed, clearly jealous of their unusual, cross-species bond. (Betrothed at age 16, in an arranged marriage, she feels her life was ruined by marrying “the wrong man.”) Lee observes the trio in their rustic labors, often capturing plaintive glimpses of Choi and his ox in gracefully composed long shots, emphasizing the dignity of toil as well as the pitiable … Read the rest
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
I and the Filmmaker blog received a nice holiday present with Ted Hope’s “21 Brave Thinkers of Truly Free Film 2009″ list. But you’re already reading this blog, so you don’t need to know about me. Click on the link to check out the rest of the list. I am happy to be in such good company, which includes various forward thinking filmmakers, producers, new media distribution types, and even a few Filmmaker contributors.
From Ted’s intro:
Frankly though, I think anyone that commits to creating film, particularly independent film, and specifically artist driven truly free film, is truly brave… or at least, insane. It is a hard road out there and growing more difficult by the day. All filmmakers getting their work made, screened and distributed deserve recognition, support, and something more significant than a good pat on the back from the rest of us. As great their work is both creatively and in terms of the infrastructure, it’s easy to lose sight of how fragile all this is. Our ability to create and screen innovative and diverse work is consistently under threat.
It is truly great thing that this list of BRAVE THINKERS is growing rapidly; I first thought it would be ten, then twenty. I expect we will see some new folks joining this list in the months ahead. I know there are those whom I’ve forgotten that deserve to be included here. This list, although it includes many artists, is about those who are working and striving to carve a new paradigm, to make the future safe for innovative and diverse work, to build an artist-centric content economy. The TFF Brave Thinkers lead equally with their ideas, actions, and generosity. They set examples for all of us and raise the bar. These are indie films true new leaders, and for those that think they are in power, those that are just starting out, or those that want to find a new angle on industry you work in, you should make sure you meet these folks in the coming year, because they are redefining the way we
… Read the rest
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
Back in 2003 we selected Stefan Nadelman for our “25 New Faces” on the basis of his excellent short, Terminal Bar. I hadn’t kept up with Nadelman to see what he’s been doing since until I came across this recent video for the band Ramona Falls. Check in out — it has some of the same antique beauty as that earlier, amazing short.
… Read the rest
Friday, December 25th, 2009
Best wishes to all of our readers — hope you all have happy and safe holidays, and see you later on the weekend or early next week back here on the blog.
Experience Mobile Mobile from James Théophane Jnr on Vimeo.… Read the rest
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
A couple of quick links here. First, congratulations to critic (and occasional Filmmaker contributor) Karina Longworth, who becomes the new film editor at the L.A. Weekly. I’ll miss seeing her here in New York City, but I’m happy that I’ll be able to read her regularly via the Weekly. She replaces Scott Foundas, who became the Associate Program Director at Lincoln Center.
Second, a link to Filmmaker columnist Lance Weiler’s always essential the Workbook Project, which is just a little bit more essential this week with its “2009 in Tech and Entertainment” podcast. If you want a crash course on the technological forces that are reshaping our business, download and listen to this. It is a particularly information-rich conversation between Weiler, journalist and also occasional Filmmaker contributor Scott Kirsner, and venture capitalist Woody Benson. Subjects covered: the real-time web, geo locational services, emergent gameplay, transmedia storytelling, crowdfunding, augmented reality, DIY, 3D cinema investment, the impact of the Comcast / NBC Universal merger, Avatar and Paramount’s new micro budget division. I got a lot out of this podcast, which is really more about 2010 and beyond than 2009. Check it out.… Read the rest
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
With the Financial Times reporting that Apple will announce their long-awaited tablet on Tuesday, January 26, it is time for all of us in the magazine business to think seriously about digital versions of our content. (Well, of course, the major publishers I’m sure have already done this — expect to see tablet-ready versions of a number of major publications announced alongside the device.) Filmmaker has offered a digital edition for about a year now, and it’s a great deal because for half the price you get every issue as well as all back issues through 2005. It mimics the print edition with turning pages while adding functions like search and translation. But what will Filmmaker 2.0 look like on the web? I’ve taken a look at two design comps linked to in this New York Times blog.
First, there’s Sports Illustrated.
And then there is this interesting and elegant set of design ideas from Bonnier.
Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.
What are your thoughts about the coming digital magazines? Are you wedded to print or excited about switching? Are you interested in an experience that replicates the experience of reading print or one that adds more bells and whistles? Will you be an early adopter or do you expect to stay with print publications for a while? Or for the perhaps majority of you that read mostly online, is this new formulation of digital media something you are interested in?… Read the rest
