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 had a pleasant chat with Spike Jonze yesterday for the release of his new documentary, Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak, which came out on DVD this week. At a concise 40 minutes, the movie is genuinely touching and entirely sustained by Sendak’s colorful personality from the very first scene. (See above for a clip of the octogenarian to get a sense for his endearing shtick.)
I also asked Spike about the changing face of indie film distribution, since he had a short film at Sundance and made another one with Kanye West that leaked online before it could be sold on iTunes. Here’s what he told me:
With the Kanye thing, our experiment was going to be putting it out on iTunes. With the short film, the experiment was to get it funded by Absolut Vodka. There are many ways to get the story out there. Smarter people than me are trying to figure it out.
John Pierson’s essential 1995 tome, “Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema,” features interstitial Q&As with a 24-year-old Kevin Smith designated as the book’s hesitant “generational spokesman.” At one point, he strikes a prescient tone: “Note to myself,” he says. “If I ever in a future life get a new start as a first-time filmmaker, give me lines to be funny with.” With Smith’s lack of screenwriting credit on “Cop Out,” that new life has ostensibly begun, but the essential Smith contradiction remains agreeably intact. In another 15 years, who knows?
The news that New Yorker Films has returned to business certainly gives people in the indie film world something to get excited about. New Yorker’s success rate for specialty releases might put many modern distributors to shame. But last week’s announcement of the Oscar nominations testified that at least one relative newcomer has been playing its cards right: Oscilloscope Laboratories, which wound up with two films in the awards race a mere two years after its humble origins as the experiment of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch. Here’s my profile of the company and its co-founder in the current issue of L.A. Weekly:
Adam Yauch — aka Nathaniel Hornblower, aka MCA of the Beastie Boys — has unorthodox plans for the Oscars. “I’m going to distribute sandwiches outside the theater,” says the 45-year-old founder of Oscilloscope Laboratories, an indie film–distribution company based in New York. “Maybe Harvey Weinstein will be hungry.”
Wallace and Gromit aren’t as synonymous with Oscar wins as the infallible Pixar brand, but they should be. Since 1993, this cheery man-and-dog claymation duo from the U.K. has charmed audiences all the way through awards season, garnering a total of three Oscars for creator Nick Park and losing only once, in 1991, to Park’s own short Creature Comforts. In less than a decade, Wallace and Gromit worked their way up to the big leagues: Park won Oscars for best animated short film in 1993 and 1995, then took home the best animated feature award for The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the pair’s first full-length vehicle, in 2006. This year, the Da Vinci of stop-motion slapstick has returned to the short-film category with Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death, and seems all but guaranteed victory once again, and not just because the film runs much longer than anything else in the competition.
In “Bass Ackwards”, one of the entries in Sundance Film Festival’s recently launched low budget NEXT section, an unkempt loner (Linas Phillips, also the writer-director)—having lost both his job and his girlfriend—drives through a series of lush American landscapes in a cramped Volkswagen bus, hoping to find a better life. Considering that vehicle’s now-famous association with “Little Miss Sunshine,” a major Sundance breakout in 2006, the metaphor here writes itself: “Bass Ackwards,” a comparatively small film not destined for the kind of massive bidding war among distributors caused by “Little Miss Sunshine,” looks like a Sundance movie in search of a home.
But, like its solemn protagonist, the movie has in fact already found several homes. After its Sundance premiere, the producers plan to release “Bass Ackwards” on multiple platforms, ranging from iTunes to video-on-demand. The approach is adventurous but also quite practical, because “Bass Ackwards” makes for a difficult sell. It unfolds as the sort of meandering adventure that some audiences may consider a chore while others herald it as quietly meditational. Although the “Bass Ackwards” team have likely made the right choice in evading the search for a conventional distributor, the movie faces plenty of uncertainty in the road ahead—as does much of Sundance’s new NEXT section, and any number of other Sundance hopefuls entering Park City unsold.
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