Ellen Barkin
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
Forget that the world economy is inching precariously close to tanking, yet again. Forget that new film festivals are also streaming out of the starting gate. “The inaugural Singafest Asian Film Festival hits Westwood this weekend,” the email proclaims. So just how many festivals are there? “First Palo Alto Film Festival opens with a bang.” The emails won’t stop. A lowball count is 4,000 worldwide, although doubling, possibly tripling, that number is probably closer to reality.
Forget that we know all the top-tier festivals, the celebrities attending, the films winning, and the festival race-chatter: Toronto is up and Venice is down … Full Frame is stumbling and Tribeca is again ascending … Edinburg is dead and Busan is rising higher….
Having schlepped to some 60 film festivals in the last two years, I have learned that hardcore festival junkies and quite a few “chippers” (a drug term that means shooting up only occasionally) dismiss all this talk as low-grade gibberish. They say create your own top-tier. There are too many variables, too much diversity, and too much subjectivity for objective comparisons, they insist. Film festivals are about what you like. It doesn’t matter how many fests there are, but how many you like. Fest junkies are very opinionated.
Waiting for the Woodstock Film Festival awards gala to begin, I walk around the packed hall of some 500 festivalgoers and randomly ask: “What do you think about the Woodstock Film Festival?” Although a few were too blitzed to vocalize, and I’m really lousy at reading quivering lips, most did come through.
“Awesome. It’s really laid back, and unlike lots of festivals, Woodstock treats people very well.” — Valeria Mogilevich
“It’s like an artist’s festival. It’s an open mic. It’s — I need a thousand words to explain this, can I get back to you in an email?” — Director Tony Kaye (American History X), his Detachment the festival’s closing-night film.
“Woodstock is what Sundance started out as, intimate and easy to meet people.” — Randy Barbee
“It’s like a hug of a festival, an oasis.” — Filmmaker Lisa Gossels (My … Read the rest
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
This post was originally published when Shit Year premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. The film opens today at the IFC Center.
It is both accurate and reductive to call Cam Archer’s Shit Year, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight section, the story of a retiring actress grappling with the emotions produced by her move away from the Hollywood spotlight. Of course, on narrative terms, that is what it’s about. Ellen Barkin plays the actress, who has just given her final talk-show interview, moved to a cabin in the woods, and now spends her days avoiding her neighbors and flashing back to a brief affair she had with a younger actor (Luke Grimes) on the set of her last film. In an eerily composed performance, Barkin projects the steely emotional control of a woman determined not to descend into the full-blown sadness that seems just a beat away. It’s a performance that reminded me a bit of Tuesday Weld’s similarly dazed heroine in Frank Perry’s under-seen adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays. Both films — along with more recent work like David Lynch’s Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive — view Hollywood more as a corrosive mental state than an actual place.
But the film is also about other things that exist beyond the outlines of its plot and its often dead-on dialogue. What those other things are, however, is up to you. Freeing himself of the melodramatic conventions of the midlife crisis movie, or the Hollywood cautionary tale, Archer, shooting in beautiful black-and-white with his usual cinematographer, Aaron Platt, has captured a state that we all pass through at some point in our lives, a time in which the outside world recedes and all we are left with is what’s inside of us — and, perhaps, the company of an exotic space alien (played here by Theresa Randle) who would like to know just what it is that makes us tick.
I spoke with Archer for a few minutes at the American Pavilion in Cannes.
Filmmaker: What … Read the rest
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
It is both accurate and reductive to call Cam Archer’s Shit Year, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight section, the story of a retiring actress grappling with the emotions produced by her move away from the Hollywood spotlight. Of course, on narrative terms, that is what it’s about. Ellen Barkin plays the actress, who has just given her final talk-show interview, moved to a cabin in the woods, and now spends her days avoiding her neighbors and flashing back to a brief affair she had with a younger actor (Luke Grimes) on the set of her last film. In an eerily composed performance, Barkin projects the steely emotional control of a woman determined not to descend into the full-blown sadness that seems just a beat away. It’s a performance that reminded me a bit of Tuesday Weld’s similarly dazed heroine in Frank Perry’s under-seen adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays. Both films — along with more recent work like David Lynch’s Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive — view Hollywood more as a corrosive mental state than an actual place.
But the film is also about other things that exist beyond the outlines of its plot and its often dead-on dialogue. What those other things are, however, is up to you. Freeing himself of the melodramatic conventions of the midlife crisis movie, or the Hollywood cautionary tale, Archer, shooting in beautiful black-and-white with his usual cinematographer, Aaron Platt, has captured a state that we all pass through at some point in our lives, a time in which the outside world recedes and all we are left with is what’s inside of us — and, perhaps, the company of an exotic space alien (played here by Theresa Randle) who would like to know just what it is that makes us tick.
I spoke with Archer for a few minutes at the American Pavilion in Cannes.
Filmmaker: What were the origins of Shit Year?
Archer: After making Wild Tigers I Have Known, the first [movie], I started to feel disenchanted … Read the rest
