Today/tonight, I'm moving this blog from Blogger to Wordpress. I was going to try to hold of until the weekend, but I just can no longer stand the way Blogger insists on fucking my shit up. In case the URL transition does not go smoothly right away, you can temporarily look for new posts at misskarina.wordpress.com.
Personism: List of Woman Speakers For Your Conference
Just followed a link and found this Personism's List of Woman Speakers For Your Conference. A great, much-needed idea. I've just returned from SXSW, a conference which goes out of its way to program its panels diversely, and still I was the only woman on the panel I moderated. Go follow the link and if you have suggestions, post them in the comments over there. I sent Jen, who moderates the site, an email suggesting a number of female writers and filmmakers (and myself, of course).
I'll have further in-depth considerations of several films over the course of this week (I have a lot of real work to catch up on first), but here's my take on each film I saw at SXSW 2007, in Twitter-inspired blurb form. Everything's Gone Green dir: Paul Fox/stars: Paul Costanzo, Steph Song Has Douglas Coupland left the house since 1996? His first screenplay recycles sub-plots and pretension from his first four novels, and not surprisingly, zeitgeist 15-years stale doesn't translate. It's visually stunning, but there's no getting around the fact it's a 45-year-old man's fantasy of late-20s angst. The Prisoner: Or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair dir: Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker Epperlein and Tucker make some inspired choices in telling the story of Yunis Khatayer Abbas, an Iraqi journalist who was imprisoned at Abu Ghraib for allegedly plotting to kill the British Prime Minister. The last thirty minutes of the film, in which an American Abu Ghraib guard who befriended Abbas picks up the narrative, is one of the most powerful sequences in any of the Iraq films I've seen over the past two years. Unfortunately, the film is crippled by the first 40 minutes, which consist primarily of Abbas himself, speaking directly into the camera in English, with an accent that is often unintelligible. Unless the filmmakers scramble to add subtitles before the picture opens in New York on Friday, I'm afraid The Prisoner won't be able to break through the "just another Iraq movie" malaise that has kept so many of these movies from going mainstream.
Hannah Takes the Stairs dir: Joe Swanberg/stars: Greta Gerwig, Andrew Bujalski, Kent Osbourne, Mark Duplass Certainly the best narrative feature I saw at the SXSW this year, Hannah's integrity, immediacy and insight is all the more impressive when seen within 24 hours of something like Everything's Gone Green, which so drastically misses the mark on each I-word front. Releasing a new, heavily-improvised digital video opus each year, Joe Swanberg is seemingly hellbent on documenting his generation in real time, making each progressive production a must-see. More on this one later. Running with Arnold dir: Dan Cox An imminently watchable piece of propaganda that could only be consequential if the Governator's camp manages to change the Constitution to allow the green card-holding former action star to run for president. Even then, a new, hopefully more serious documentary will need to be made in order to put that disaster into context. Read my full review here.
King Corn dir: Aaron Woolf Fascinating post-Super Size Me look at the realities behind the American agricultural dream. Will have more on Netscape later this week.
Quiet City (pictured above) dir: Aaron Katz/stars: Erin Fisher, Cris Lankenkau Aaron Katz' follow-up to 2006 SXSW competition entry Dance Party, USA (which I blogged about here) is a more sophisticated and substantial tour through similar territory. With both films, Katz is pushing DV to unexpectedly lovely places, to tell dreamy stories about what happens just before a new relationship is consummated. More on this one later as well.
Orphans dir: Ry Russo-Young/stars: James Katharine Flynn, Lily Wheelwright A two person character study, buoyed by Russo-Young's smashing sense of style, but doomed by the "what is she thinking?" performance of one of the leads. After a knockout first thirty minutes, the film loses its way; I'd love to see it cut down into a short. More on the film's highpoint scene later.
Inside the Circle dir: Marcy Garriott The kind of niche music documentary that finds its ideal showcase at SXSW. Garriott tracks several years in the life of two Texas teenagers, former best friends turned breakdancing rivals, as their relationship to b-boy culture and one another defines their coming of age. It's a little long, but it could be a smash hit with urban teens. If VH1 doesn't pick this up, they're leaving buckets of money on the table.
Silver Jew dir: Michael Tully A mostly-verite look at a two-day stop in Israel on the first ever Silver Jews tour, during which the newly-religious David Berman meets fans, visits holy spots, and ruminates on his spirituality and his career. I just don't get the Silver Jews, and the drably shot performance scenes didn't change my mind on that, but Berman's an interesting character. I probably would have liked to have seen a more in-depth exploration of his life, his battles with addiction, etc, but for fans of the band, I'm sure it'll be a must see.
Kurt Cobain: About a Son dir: A.J. Schnack This Spirit Award nominee, which has been making the festival rounds since Toronto '06, apparently screened at SXSW in its theatrical version for the first time. Comprised almost entirely of new footage shot in Aberdeen, Seattle and Olympia set to audio interviews with Cobain conducted by Nirvana biographer Michael Azzerad, the end result is a fascinating, if at times obtuse, portrait of the personality behind the one great American rock band of the 90s. It's got a scrapbook nature to it that I like a lot - it resembles Cobain's own journals and collages. I'd like to see it again; I'd also like to hear A.J. talk about some of his visual choices, which range from literal to ironic to somewhat puzzling.
Helvetica The surprise doc hit of the festival (who knew there were so many font geeks out there?), Helvetica is an unexpectedly academic look at the typeface that has come to dominate Western culture. I think I would have gotten more out of it if I hadn't been such a slacker in freshman year Vis Com at SAIC; ten years removed from the peak of my interest in design, I had a hard time distinguishing one Swiss master from another. Still, Helvetica allowed me to indulge my ever-present nostalgia for RAYGUN Magazine, and that's probably enough.
Does Your Soul Have a Cold? dir: Mike Mills A somber look at a strange chicken vs egg quandary. In 2000, Western drug companies began to advertise anti-depressants in Japan. Before that, the concept of depression really didn't exist in the culture. So did Prozac treat a problem already occurring within the populace, or did the availability of drugs help to create it? Mills doesn't provide a satisfactory answer, but his film, a super-intimate look at the lives of five youngish Japanese men and women grappling with mood disorders in different ways, is troubling and engaging nonetheless. I may write more on this on Netscape.
Manufacturing Dissent dir: Rick Caine & Debbie Melnyk This attempt at a Michael Moore take down pops out of the Fox News-stoked pack of anti-Moore propaganda for two reasons. First, and most obviously, it's only an attack by accident, coming from liberal Canadians whose attempts to make a pro-Moore film where frustrated by Moore's unwillingness to cede control over his own image. But second, and in my mind more interestingly, the filmmakers seem to be more interested in documentary film theory and ethics than in politics. Again, I'll definitely write more on this later, for Netscape.
Jesus Christ ... for the first time in my life, I'm actually on top of a tech trend:
Also: lots more SXSW stuff to post. Unfortunately, I spent half of today struggling with the hotel internet, and the other half investigating moving this blog to WordPress (prognosis good so far). Tomorrow is a sparsely-scheduled day, so I'll try to get caught up before I get back to New York.
If you've been following the film component of SXSW 2007 at all over the past week, you've probably read more about Hannah Takes the Stairs than any other narrative film at the Festival. If you're reading this blog, chances are you've already read profiles and reviews in much larger outlets (although I must note that I received no response to any of the three pitches I sent out several weeks ago to various print publications, suggesting a feature on the Amerindie revolution that continues to grow at SXSW, which Joe Swanberg and his collaborators have been instrumental in stoking, and which Hannah now sits comfortably at the center of). So although there's really no need for me to chime in here, I feel compelled to anyway. Two years ago at SXSW, I was one of the first people to write about Swanberg's first film, Kissing on the Mouth, and sitting in the back row at the Paramount the other night, I got a little teary over how far he's come. I don't think the film is an unqualified success. For one thing, in pursuing narrative coherence and overall polish, Swanberg has cut back on the formal experimentation that made his first two features so uniquely exciting. Hannah Takes the Stairs is not quite as pop as Swanberg's Nerve.com soap opera, Young American Bodies, but like that series and in contrast to his previous features, Hannah is fairly incident-driven. There's enough room in the timeline for a few extreme close-ups and a couple of longish makeout sessions, but Swanberg has otherwise subsumed his usual visual expressionism into the story to an as-yet unprecedented degree.
Which is not to say that Hannah Takes the Stairs feels like a film directed by anyone but Joe Swanberg. In partnership with his various collaborators, Swanberg has always displayed a virtuosic knack for capturing the way young people actually speak to one another, and talking about Hannah with other festival goers this week, the one thing that seems to stand out for everyone is the film's interest in ordinary language. As usual, Swanberg is particularly fearless in exposing the destructive potential of words -- whether that means direct verbal cruelty, or even worse, the inarticulate stammers we employ and silly conversational tangents that we take in order to passive-aggressively avoid saying what we actually mean. We think of pop culture as being obstinately youth-oriented, but there's absolutely nothing in mainstream media that reflects the attitudes and lifestyle of the average white urban 20-something as accurately as these new American indie films (here I'm lumping together the work of Andrew Bujalski, Aaron Katz, the Duplass brothers, the Four Eyed Monsters kids, and surely a handful of other filmmakers who I haven't yet heard of). There's a single, improvised speech towards the end of Hannah that says more about the way young people mis-manage sex and romance than 25 seasons of The Real World combined.
Swanberg's films, like those of many of his peers in the so-called Mumblecore movement, seem to be supremely unconcerned with social class, and that seems to bother some (see the comments on this post). He tells stories about kids who apparently aren't lacking for cash -- they have decent apartments, nice clothes, and just about everyone is gainfully employed. Though many of his characters are artists, no one seems to struggle with societal pressures or maintaining creative inspiration. This is all, no doubt, intentional: wanting for nothing, the characters in Swanberg's films have virtually nothing to do but psychologically torture one another. Watching them do it is almost always fascinating, even when repellent. Even more fascinating, if only on an inside baseball level, is the fact that the films themselves are produced in a climate of abject poverty compared to that of most films. As far as I can tell, no one is going hungry in order to afford tape stock, but Hannah is still a film made with pro-sumer tools by a two man crew. The actress who plays Hannah, Greta Gerwig, accidentally arrived at the film's premiere wearing the same belt her character wore in the film; as she put it at the post-screening Q & A, "I just don't have a lot of clothes."
When I first met Joe two years ago, during Kissing's premiere at SXSW, Swanberg professed a desire to make films that divorced sex and nudity from the association with pornography, that displayed flesh and intercourse as mundanely as they deserve. I was not the only person who felt that Kissing didn't quite get there; though on repeat viewings, the comedy shines through, the sex in that film never stops feeling like a deliberate provocation. Hannah may feel less risky that his previous efforts in a lot of ways, but when it comes to normalizing nudity, Swanberg has finally truly succeeded. It's only March, but right now I'm going to go on a limb and say that Hannah's final shot, which features full-frontal nudity from two of the film's protagonists, will stand out as one of the most memorable cinematic images of the year. He may be an old pro at emotional verisimilitude, but for the first time, Swanberg has managed to put together images of real beauty and resonance.
My first SXSW story for Netscape just went live. Here's an excerpt:
The South By Southwest Film Festival is widely considered to be one of the top showcases for documentary film in North America, and if we're to take the 2007 lineup as an indicator of general trends, then there is currently no hotter nonfiction genre than the election movie. The Festival (which began last Friday and runs concurrently with the famed SXSW Music Conference through March 18) is screening at least five feature films focused on elections. An inordinate amount of attention has already been bestowed on just one of SXSW 2007's election films, the Michael Moore expose Manufacturing Dissent. But while that production by Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine offers an undeniably alluring behind-the-scenes peek at the documentary world's biggest blowhard, another SXSW election doc has managed to embroil pop culture notables as disparate as Alec Baldwin and Jello Biafra in a massive smear against the most powerful man in California.
I've got a ton of catching up to do with SXSW coverage. Expect stories on and Running with Arnold and King Corn on Netscape later this week; I'll have some notes on Hannah Takes the Stairs, Orphans, and Everything's Gone Green here shortly. In the meantime, follow my adventures at Twitter.
2) The Rise of the BlogebritySunday, March 11 5pm The title says it all. I'll be cowering in the shadow of the hot video blogger girls on this one. Also on this panel: Moderator: Kyle Bunch Co-Founder, Blogebrity Amanda CongdonCo-Pres, ABC News/Oxmour Entertainment Henry CopelandFounder, Blogads.com Casey McKinnonExec Producer, Galacticast Nick DouglasDir, Look! Shiny!
3) StudioSX - I've never attended one of these, but I think they're basically 20-25 minute chats between two people who sort of know each other, about a topic of their choice. The chats are conducted live in front of an audience, and then taped for streaming online later. I'll be talking to Jette Kernion, of Slackerwood and Cinematical, about ... well, maybe we'll get a drink before Tuesday and figure that out.
The History of the 20th Century Via You Tube: British Celebutantes Mangle Michael Jackson
Wow. Just ... wow. I actually kinda like Amy Winehouse, but this is possibly the most painful thing I've attempted to endure all week, and as someone who gets paid nicely to make sure "funny" cat videos abide by a corporate TOU, that's saying something. If this kind of god-awful repurposing of the 80s is what even British kids are willing to settle for ... well, then we need Dr. Jean now more than ever. Continue reading...
When your film's got a bleached-blonde, wild-eyed Christina Ricci half-naked with a chain around her waist, you really don't need a critic's blurb to make your poster. But, just in case the folks at Paramount Vantage decide to pursue critical credibility with the DVD release of Black Snake Moan, here are their best bets for the pullquote:
"Capra for alcoholics and bar-hounds!" - Vadim Rizov, The Reeler
"[Should] be remembered come Oscar time ... Justin Timberlake has a commanding presence!" - Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle
"Outlandish, hilariously overripe, and possibly sexist! A very colorful movie!" - David Edelstein, New York Magazine
"The good ol' boys [will get] what they came for!" -- Rob Nelson, Village Voice
"A wet, hot, lurid Bible lesson and music jamboree! Accessible to boys and men who mostly want to see Ricci's peachies!" - Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
It took surprisingly long for this to hit the New York Times, but I've just learned that Jean Baudrillard died on Tuesday at the age of 77. Baudrillard is pretty much the only serious French theorist I can name whose reputation survived a brief moment at the forefront of American pop culture. Eight years after the scholar -- always something of a drunken brat -- flirted with total obscurity by daring to suggest that "the Gulf War did not take place," his key concepts of hyperreality and simulation were transplanted into The Matrix cleverly managed his moment under the spotlight of the simulacrum, dismissing the . BaudrillardWachowski's as having "misunderstood" his work. To some extent, that's probably true, but this in itself was vintage Baudrillard: it's not just that the guy was a born negater, it's that negation was his only move. It was a character flaw that became a dialectical imperative.
The best thing about reading Baudrillard, I think, is stumbling across the odd passage where he's obviously straining to resist the lure of hyperreality. I haven't finished the book yet, but a couple of months ago I picked up The Conspiracy of Art, a collection of essays and interviews with Baudrillard edited by Sylvere Lotringer. Reading the transcriptions of his interviews, it's clear that he had a fondness, maybe even a passion, for contemporary film. It may have been partly a guilty pleasure, partly academic interest, but he's not by any means entirely dismissive. Here's a passage from within, re: The Matrix:
After the release of the first episode, the staff of the Wachowski brothers got in touch with me, hoping to get me involved with the following ones. But this was out of the questions [laughter] ... Other films have already dealt with the growing blurring between the real and the virtual: The Truman Show, Minority Report, or even Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's masterpiece. The Matrix's chief value is that it pushes all these elements to a paroxysm. Yet it does it more crudely and in a far less complex way. Either the characters are in The Matrix, and belong to the digitized universe, or they are radically outside it–in Zion, the resistor's city. it would be interesting to show what happens at the point where these two worlds meet. The most embarrassing part of the film is that it confuses the new problem raised by simulation with its arch-classical, Platonic treatment. That is a serious flaw.
Baudrillard's inability to completely dismiss popular culture is all over America, his diary of a coast-to-coast drive published in 1986. He never stops being critical, but no man could write so lovingly (even if semi-ironically) if his sole intention was to scold. Here he he's talking about a Southern California suburb:
The only element of culture, the only mobile element: the car. No cultural centre, no centre of entertainment. A primitive society: the same motor identification, the same collective phantasy of an unfolding ritual–breakfast, movie, religious service, love and death–the whole of life as a drive-in. Truly magnificent.
I've spent the last hour going through Baudrillard's many obituaries, and this quote seems to manage the best sum-up. It comes from the Times Online:
Opposition, Baudrillard came to assert, could only now be realised in the form of singularities that could in principle never be absorbed into western cultures. Ultimately, his writing became unclassifiable, a kind of singularity itself. His own project, nihilism and hermetic language were unique, lending themselves neither to codification nor to being organised into a coherent doctrine.
It's a gloomy, icey day in New York, and I'm dreaming of Austin. So, here's some SXSW miscellany that I've collected this afternoon. I leave on Friday. If you'll be there, add me as a friend on Twitter so we can keep track of one another. I also plan to Festmob.
Speaking of that StudioSX thing, it's been an, uh, less than productive year, so they're billing me as "Karina Longworth from Vidiocy.com." Thus the uptick in recent blog posts. Hopefully it won't matter that traffic on this site hit an all-time low just last week.
I've been sent so many documents claiming to be the "SXSW Master Party List," that I'm just on the verge of being so overwhelmed that I'll probably do a lot of what I did last year: hang out at the hotel eating room service slliders and watching Superman 2. But if you're feeling more adventurous, here's a guide to Interactive parties. Even I might not be able to resist something called "The Great British Booze-Up."
Matt Dentler has too much cool, inside-SXSW film stuff on his blog to single any one item out.
Morgan Spurlock, who produced the SXSW documentary What Would Jesus Buy?, encourages the rabble to try to talk their way onto the premiere party guest list.
Finally, Kyle Bunch and Nick Douglas have wisely re-launched Blogebrity, just in time for Sunday's SXSW panel which Kyle is moderating, which also includes Nick, Amanda Congdon, Casey McKinnon, and me. In related news, who wants to meet up at around 4pm on Sunday for some power drinking?
The History of the 20th Century Via You Tube: Orson Welles Shills
The news of Ernest Gallo's death at the age of 97 immediately made me think of Orson Welles. Like so many children of the late 70s/early 80s, my first awareness of the auteur behind what some consider to be the greatest Hollywood film ever made came from his appearences in telelvision commercials for Gallo and Paul Masson wines.
It's well-known that Welles spent a chunk of the 70s nearly destitute, living in the guest room of the house Peter Bogdanovich shared with Cybill Shepherd (I've read that years later, Quentin Tarantino offered the same favor to a down-on-his-luck Bogdanovich, but I don't know if it's true; Bogdanovich filed for bankruptcy in 1985, and it would have been at least another seven years before Q.T. would have been in a position to help him out). The story, as it's often told, is one of aged alcoholic, too far gone to find proper employment, mooching off his young protege. The fact that Welles spent roughly the last seven years of his life shilling cut-rate booze and frozen vegetables is supposed to be the punchline to his downward spiral. That's a cute narrative, but I don't entirely buy it.
Welles had moved back to Hollywood in 1970 after an 11-year stint in Europe, during which he produced The Trial and dabbled in television. The next decade saw Welles receiving an honororary Oscar and an AFI Lifetime Achivement award, and spotily working for hire, as he struggled to finish his last feature, The Other Side of the Wind. That project (in which Bogdanovich co-starred alongside a mutual friend of he and Welles, John Ford) was produced with Iranian cash. It fell into a legal mess just shy of completion when the Shah of Iran was deposed, and Welles was forced to give it up. Welles allegedly gave Bogdanovich instructions for how he'd like to see the film completed before he died.
It was during this era, when Welles was working on the film on which he and Bogdanovich collaborated, that Welles would have been staying at Bogdanovich's house. During the same time, according to Cybill Shepherd's autobiography (parts of which are worth reading for 70s cinema completists, as a woman's first-hand account of the American New Wave), Bogdanovich and Shepherd were both in the midst of professional crisises. After their two follow-ups to The Last Picture Show, Daisy Miller and At Long Last Love, both flopped, bad press was essentially tearing the couple's personal and professional alliance apart. At Welles' advice, Shepherd moved to New York for a while, took acting classes, shot her role in Taxi Driver, and eventually had an affair with Elvis. Bogdanovich stayed behind and made what, to my mind, are his most interesting films, Saint Jack and They All Laughed. Orson Welles was hardly an imposition in this household -- he was a friend and mentor to two kids who needed his help.
Which is not to deny that the fact Orson Welles, in 1976, was actually broke. A cursory glance at his IMDB profile shows that he would have earned no income as a director between 1971 and 1974 (and it's doubtful whether or not he would have been able to pay the rent on the film that broke that streak, F is For Fake), and was otherwise barely meeking out a living on the occasional TV cameo or voiceover. Add it all up, and it seems clear that shilling wine was Welles' only option if he wanted to ever move out of Casa Bogdanovich.
Outtakes from the Masson commercials (see above) have become something of a sensation on You Tube -- it's easy to laugh a drunk old man, especially one who has seemingly fallen so far. But for Welles, who claimed to call two steaks and a pint of scotch his nightly dinner, drinking wine on television must have been something of an ideal gig. Say there are no second acts in American lives, but don't bedrudge an old man the chance to pay his rent.
Regardless, I think this fake ad for Rosebud Peas is funnier than watching the real Welles slur. Note that this Welles is voiced by Maurice LaMarche, the same actor whose voice was dubbed over Vincent D'Onofrio's Welles impersonation in Ed Wood.
I write about a blog about film for Spout. I co-founded and used to edit Cinematical, and I've contributed to NewTeeVee, TV Squad, FILMMAKER, Huff Post, and more. I like Joy Division, coffee, bitter greens, Mad Men and Val Lewton. I'm scared of doctors, drugs, cockroaches, the ocean and Hillary Clinton. I wish I had been old enough to truly enjoy the heydays of Kurt Loder, Bret Easton Ellis, Adam Ant and Pat Buchanan. I'm very serious about that - especially the part about Pat Buchanan.
