Screen Rush is the blog of film critic and journalist Eric Kohn, whose work regularly appears in indieWIRE, New York Press, Filmmaker, Moviemaker, Heeb Magazine and a half dozen other outlets. A true twenty-first century movie buff, his writing centers around the impact of new media on the moving image, the changing face of film criticism, and the tempestuous relationship between pop culture and independent artistry. This site includes links to his recently published work and allows for additional thoughts on cinema's modern state. E-mail Eric at erichkohn(at)gmail(dot)com.
I was a big fan of The House of the Devil, Ti West’s neatly executed slice of old school horror, when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year. But Ti was not, complaining in a retroactively controversial interview with Spout about four minutes that were missing from his version of the movie.
I spoke with Ti for The Wall Street Journal this week. In the midst of our conversation, he revealed that Magnolia agreed to put those hotly contested four minutes back in the movie after they bought it a few months out of Tribeca. So now you can check out Devil this weekend and know for a fact that it’s Ti-approved. Ti-ed up. You’ll be Ti-dyed. Welcome to Ti-land? Okay, I’ll stop now.
Earlier this year, I was contacted by a start-up called Filmmortal that had an interesting agenda: The site serves as a middleman between filmmakers and companies interested in product placement. It helps producers build their budgets with sponsorships while connecting companies selling products that might fit the movie environments. Naturally, the driving motive here is capitalistic rather than creative, but it does help filmmakers in desperate need of financial assistance—and there are ways to place a product without necessarily degrading the quality of the movie itself (as far as I know, only Wayne’s World got away with combining sly self-parody and actual product placement).
Well, I think the folks at Microsoft could use a service like Filmmortal. First, they hired Bobcat Goldthwait to direct a series of hilariously over-the-top browser commercials, and wound up deleting one that contained a porn element. Now, they’ve retracted a decision to sponsor a commercial-free episode of Family Guy because they found Seth McFarlane’s comedic tendencies to be distasteful.
Seriously, Family Guy? Was nobody able to clue them in?
It’s less surprising that McFarlane would allow his program to become a tool of corporate machinations (but I don’t think The Simpsons would ever sell an entire episode like this). If Family Guy is up for grabs, the right people ought to grab it.
Am I late to the game on the whole ParanormalActivitymarketing story? Actually, I was early. Really early. I first saw this lo-fi spookfest back the Slamdance Film Festival in 2008, when director Oren Peli was still building early momentum for it. When we met on Main Street, he revealed the complex strategy he had in mind for tricking people into believing the movie’s content—“found footage” of a couple filming dangerous supernatural activity in their home—had a basis in real life. Things moved slowly for Peli after that. It seemed like a big deal when Dreamworks bought the remake rights, but then it appeared they had shelved it. When Dreamworks left Paramount later in the year, the studio abandoned the remake plans once they saw how well the original played in theaters. So they concocted an original scheme—well, not so much an “original” scheme as a Blair Witch 2.0 scheme—to build audiences’ interests. They discovered people wanted to see it around the country. And so Paranormal Activity delivered the goods.
But when I wrote about the movie, I focused on a different phenomenon: “This year’s program includes several markedly similar attempts to tell fictional stories within a documentary framework,” I wrote. “These aren’t lighthearted mockumentaries of the Christopher Guest variety: YouTube generation filmmakers have adapted the style as a non-ironic storytelling device—and when the tactic works, it’s stunning.”
In addition to Paranormal Activity, I noticed that two other Slamdance narratives—Fix and The Project—functioned as fake documentaries with strong dramatic intentions. If this reflected a new wave of storytellers moving toward a deeper understanding of the language of non-fiction cinema, then it had already begun to encroach on the mainstream. To wit: At the time I wrote my Slamdance report, Cloverfield was making bank at the box office.
Now, that encroachment has gone even further. Paramount realized it didn’t need to “enhance” Paranormal‘s effect with a do-over. Regular audiences, who have grown comfortable with amateur entertainments on YouTube and the like, respond to low budget entertainment on nearly the same level of a polished Hollywood product.
But if studios are picking up on grassroots techniques for catching viewers’ attention, it’s important to call them out on subpar efforts. Transmedia storytelling should have aesthetic standards like the movies themselves.
Thus: The “viral” campaign behind Universal’s The Fourth Kind represents a lesser attempt to take advantage of audiences tendencies toward “fake-fiction” thrillers. So I decided to break it down on the Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog. Read more here.
An apparently random tangent during a recent film critics panel in the Hamptons sucked up more attention than anybody thought it needed, as I’m sure many more valuable ideas arose during the conversation beyond any sort of dubious “ranking” of critics. That said, Karina’s response was amusing, thoughtful and—for me and many of my colleagues, I’m sure—all too familiar. (How does one become a “professional”? Not simply with a salary, as I’m sure some of the critics on the Hamptons panel who freelance would agree.)
Unfortunately, the attention given to this isolated incident overshadowed a much more valuable panel that I participated in at the Woodstock Film Festival last weekend. The ever-resourceful Film Panel Notetaker did his job. Here’s a brief clip:
I tied the point I was making about the need for critics to escape a “preexisting hierarchy” into this brief piece for The Wrap about the recently-concluded New York Film Festival.
I guess it wasn’t surprising that most New York critics had negative reactions to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers at yesterday’s New York Film Festival. This is a movie with incredible avant garde aspirations—a first-person movie assembled out of morbid imagery and feelings of isolation. As Korine intended, it does play like found footage by leaving out a generic narrative or mythology to guide its characters. It also works as a provocation, pushing audience’s limits as far as what they’re willing to endure, but if you jive with the rhythm of this playfully bizarre experiment (and I do), it’s no less engaging than a Jonas Mekas diary film. (And if a Jonas Mekas diary film bores you to tears, then Trash Humpers won’t do it for you, either.)
But I do have a problem with a number of critics having hostile reactions to “the idea” of Harmony Korine and allowing that to inform their hostility toward his latest film. I spoke to several people who freely admitted that while they had only passing familiarity with his other works, they found him to be an outrageous figure whose latest film was exclusively empowered by his reputation. Puh-leeze. The “naughty Korine” legend was kickstarted by the media ten years ago, when a punkish kid not yet old enough to legally drink randomly stumbled into the spotlight with a major first screenplay. Couple that with these same critics simply hearing about how Gummo and Julien Donkey Boy contain meaningless subversion, and you have two vaguely defined ingredients that often lead to Korine hatred. (Some people who have seen these movies dismiss them only because they think Korine is aesthetically lazy, which I find troublesome as well.) This treatment is unfair to Korine’s artistic intentions. He’s a guy heavily inspired by underground cinema and video art, which makes Trash Humpers wholly consistent with his earlier achievements (with the exception of Mister Lonely, an enjoyable digression) and an impressive elaboration on them.
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