Updated: “Aftershool”—opening TODAY at the Cinema Village, where I’ll be hosting a Q&A with the director after the 7:20pm show—was the cool, mystifying and brilliantly executed surprise of Cannes 2008. Antonio Campos’ feature debut—combining teen angst and Hanekean dread—seemingly came out of nowhere, but by festival’s end, many critics, from Howard Feinstein to J. Hoberman, cited the movie as a veritable discovery, convinced they had witnessed the work of a budding auteur.
(Producer Ted Hope has also signed on as an official supporter: He sent out an email to some hundred New York based directors to come out and give their support to the film, which he called the “strongest debut work to come out of NYC in a long, long time.”)
After that first viewing in Cannes, I wrote: “Gus Van Sant‘s ‘Elephant’ and Atom Egoyan‘s voyeuristic visions come to mind, but Campos’s style remains unique: he frequently employs dislocating, fragmentary, or off-center frames - even a major kiss is barely seen, shoved to the bottom corner of the frame in favor of bobbing foreheads. And his thematic concerns are also his own: coming-of-age becomes a pathological condition and strange disconnected state, where the virtual worlds of violence and sex intermingle with the real.”
Since Cannes, Campos has been struggling with getting his film out to an audience. With his high-art sensibility and global ambitions, it’s no wonder he held out for some sort of theatrical release, albeit a limited one, before IFC funnels the film through its massive VOD pipeline. (Fortunately, the movie’s title begins with an “A,” which should help it find viewers on the cable company’s alphabetically-listed menus).
But the film deserves the theatrical screen. Its juxtaposition of pristine wide-screen 35mm film with a prolific dose of pixilated video images, ranging from YouTube clips to DV-camera footage, absolutely needs a large screen to appreciate. As Campos told me for this Village Voice interview when the film played at last year’s New York Film Festival, “I always knew I wanted the video to appear in center-frame, and that jump to anamorphic was important,” says Campos—because, as a result, “the universe and scope of the film [becomes] bigger than just a high-school teen film.”
Do check it out this weekend in the theater. Not only because it’s a smart, disturbing and memorable movie, but it also presents a model for ultra-low-budget films that don’t want to employ a grainy verite digital aesthetic, but aspire to glossy, cinematic celluloid images that recall the glory days of art cinema.
Last week, America’s indie film community took a long, hard look at its precarious state… In the midst of glimmers of boosterism and blind faith, it was yet another sobering reminder of the dour economy and the painful shifts currently hitting the entertainment business.
My report on the week that was, “No One Knows Anything,” currently available at IFC.com, looks more closely at Indepedent Film Week, the Project Forum, and what up-and-coming filmmakers faced and can expect to face in the future. As IFP’s executive director Michelle Byrd acknowledged, filmmakers must have encountered “a lot of doom and gloom.” “It’s taken some people a long time to realize that the independent film business has not been working as a business, but in reality, it never really was,” she added.
Just what film critics don’t need: A new survey suggests that film audiences across most demographics don’t rely on movie reviews to help them decide what to see. According to a report called Moviegoers 2010, organized by former New Line marketer Gordon Pattison, which was highlighted in Variety, “most films are now considered critic-proof, especially among the younger set, with 84% of moviegoers saying, ‘When they make up their mind to see a movie, it doesn’t matter what the critics say about it.’”
Additionally, 75% of respondents said they trust a friend’s opinion more than a movie critic; 80% said they were more likely to see a movie after hearing a positive review from other moviegoers, while only 67% said a thumbs up from a professional critic had the same weight.
Perhaps that’s not all bad news: 67% is still a 2/3 majority, so it’s not as if critics were completely obsolescent. But I can imagine Hollywood suits and newspaper publishers looking at these new statistics and using them as evidence to further push reviewers aside.
Study was conducted by surveying 1,547 moderate-to-heavy moviegoers over eight days in July, with an additional 2,305 questioned by phone or online during July. Nielsen NRG managed the research fieldwork.
I will let others investigate further, but allow me to be one of the first to break the sour news, as I often appear to take on the role of killjoy messenger, pessimist that I am: “Unfortunately, due to the recent economy, CineVegas is going on hiatus and canceling the 2010 event,” I was just informed via email. “We will keep the name going online and with some local Vegas events, hopefully starting the fest back up in the future.”
As a regional film festival with plenty of fans and solid programming, the news does not bode well for the fate of film festivals around the country. Many events have scaled back their number of days; others have cut back in their programming; lavish parties are obviously a thing of the past. But what happens when entire film festivals go AWOL? This isn’t just bad news for filmmakers, but also distributors, who need local events to help boost their regional distribution efforts, as well as the cultural life of communities. All I can say is “ouch.”
indieWIRE just published my only critic’s take on this year’s Toronto film festival, a survey of just a small handful of movies that moved me. (For the most part, I was busy reporting on the biz side of things for the WSJ.com.) Because of my limited time at the festival, and the fact that I totally burn out after 4-5 full days, there was a lot that I regretfully missed (Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime”) and others I will hopefully catch at the New York Film Festival (new films by Bruno Dumont and Claire Denis). For now, you can read my thoughts on some of the fest’s best, artfully created cinematic downers.
There was another Toronto film that I saw (pre-festival, actually), Don Argott’s engrossing doc “The Art of the Steal,” that I also wanted to write about, but with all the global breakdown reflected in the fest’s other docs, I felt I didn’t have the space to discuss this more subdued atrocity: of how Philadelphia’s powerbrokers systematically stole one of the world’s most valuable private art collections.
Some Toronto attendees thought the movie was about an actual art heist—which I guess it is and just as compelling as one—but Argott explores a robbery that’s decades in the making. The film carefully lays out the life and intentions of Albert Barnes, a self-made anti-elitist philanthrophist, who amassed a billionaire-dollar collection of impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces and detested museums. His only wish was that his work be exclusively shown for educational purposes, where it was for many years in a mansion outside of Philly, until his close associates died and others came in and ultimately, gut-wrenchingly, betrayed his mission and his legacy.
What unfolds in the film is a totally involving story about the exploitation of art and the thorny entanglement of culture, capitalism and politics. There are some fascinating racial complexities to the drama, as well, which only makes the film all the more engaging. From a filmmaking perspective, the movie was fairly straightforward, but affectively, I left the movie outraged. I hope that it can be used as an activist tool to protest the building of Philadelphia’s downtown Barnes museum, scheduled to be completed in 2010. While those I talked to in Toronto familiar with the case say the museum is a done deal, maybe the film could hit theaters early enough to help stop it
Syndicate this site