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.
The theatrical experience is in a unique state of evolution, both technologically and financially, causing the industry to continue experimenting with new ways of getting audiences into seats. While not perfect, James Cameron’s “Avatar Day,” wherein 15 minutes of his 3-D sci-fi action movie were previewed for audiences around the country, may actually qualify as a greater nugget of history than the supposedly groundbreaking technology behind the production. Here are my thoughts on the footage and the event from The Wrap:
The man who famously declared himself King of the World on Oscar night 10 years ago has now become the ruler of an entire planet. Directing his first feature since “Titanic,” James Cameron appears to have gone in a similarly epic direction with “Avatar,” a technologically audacious 3D sci-fi production—predominantly set on an alien planet—that was previewed for audiences on IMAX screens around the country on Friday—a day he dubbed “Avatar Day.”
Attendees eagerly reserved their free tickets for the 15-minute preview well in advance, crashing the site on multiple occasions. Nevertheless, two of the four screenings that took place at the AMC Empire in Times Square Friday evening contained dozens of empty seats, an absence that Fox representatives blamed on the rainy weather.For such a highly ambitions marketing scheme, there seemed to be a fair amount of confusion among casual moviegoers.
Read the rest of the dispatch here and check out the Avatartrailer.
My Cannes review of InglouriousBasterds, which appeared for a second time in IndieWIRE this week, brought back memories of a busy week. I reviewed around two dozen movies at Cannes this year, leading to the sort of hectic deadlines that a newsroom usually only reaches in the wake of a national catastrophe. Information moves fast these days, particularly in the ever-transient world of the festival circuit, where a big movie on one day becomes history by the next. I tapped out my late morning reaction to Basterds shortly after the 8:30 a.m. press screening, finishing it up while Tarantino and Brad Pitt still had a few minutes to go in the press conference a few feet away.
Writing these sort of instant reactions provides a unique experience each time. I won’t deny that there’s a sheer thrill involved in capturing critical ephemera in the precise moment they come together, but I don’t want to discredit the value of taking time to deliberate over one’s feelings to deliver a thoughtful analysis. As it happens, upon returning to my Basterdsreaction on Tuesday, I found little about my opinion that I would change, although I could have used some extra time to refine a few of the ideas. I do think the movie relies too heavily on dialogue that’s rarely as clever as Tarantino intends for it to be, and that the espionage plot drags near the middle (even in the post-Cannes cut, which I saw a few days ago). It may have been a good idea to answer some of the questions I posed in the final graf: Why does Tarantino do this or that? Well, because he wants to. As an auteur, Tarantino embodies the “want to” tendencies, truly becoming a kid in the candy store of cinema pastiche. Generally, that’s been enough for me. Here, I’m mixed.
I think the first third of Basterds moves quite efficiently, and I even found the documentary tangents and the Western soundtrack a lot more entertaining on my second viewing. I should have focused more clearly on the strength of Christoph Waltz’s performance, as he’s probably the only believable persona in the whole movie, even when he chooses to go over the top. But nothing in Basterds matches the genuine flow of Pulp Fiction or near-perfect blend of homage and new age spectacle that Tarantino accomplished with the Kill Bill movies. Basterds has some strong moments, but it’s real accomplishment has less to do with its cinematic merits than the implications of its radical climax. (See my cover story in the current issue of Heeb if you want to know more.) Of course, since I’m not a major Basterds defender, you’ll have to look elsewhere for a deeper analysis of the film. As the not-so-subtly-disguised commenter “jeffreichert9” points out on the page where my review has been posted, this essay offers some interesting thoughts.
Watching Zombie Girl: The Movie this week on SnagFilms, I kept thinking about this apparently well-known soundbite from Francis Ford Coppola that was cited on CinemaTech this week, where the director predicted that the advent of video would enable “some little fat girl in Ohio” to become “the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father’s camera. For once, this whole professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever and it will become an art form.”
As I wrote in my review, Emily Hagins, the 12-year-old star of Zombie Girl: The Movie, might not qualify as the next Mozart—but I do think her ability to make a feature-length movie with the cheap technology at her disposal illustrates some aspect of what Coppola was talking about. Read the review and check out Emily’s site, which contains a well-cut trailer for her next project, The Retelling.
A couple of my buddies run a nifty online literary journal called The New York Moon, which often contains remarkably unique multimedia features. They generally favor creative innovation over practical application (their “Twitter radio” idea left me scratching my head), but the current issue’s Film Festival for the Blind is something of a revelation: Music for non-existent movies.
I’m especially enamored of Diego Stocco’s dramatic score for a “Lynchian saga” called A Festival of Death, although Wesley Harris’s trippy techno riffs for Mirror, Mirror, an imaginary entry in the “Abyssinian space romance genre,” kinda blew my mind (and continues to haunt my head). Meanwhile, Zack Sultan’s gorgeous poster art rivals anything Criterion has to offer. Check it out here.
Does this concept have any practical application? If applied to modern crowdsourcing dynamics, absolutely. Imagine what might happen if another group took cues from the music and the poster art to write a screenplay, while others worked on special effects…well, you can probably see where this is headed.
I would love to hear someone elaborate on this topic at the next DIY Days, which takes place in Philadelphia at the beginning of next month. I’ll be there.
SnagFilms celebrates its first anniversary today with a freshly designed website and a slew of announcements pertaining to upcoming releases and new partnerships. Here’s my indieWIRE report.
Speaking of indieWIRE: Happy thirteenth birthday, guys! I am happy to be a contributing member of the team, and remain in awe of your ongoing success in the digital age, not to mention the pedigree you’ve cultivated over the years.
Finally, I would like to highlight two particularly interesting smaller releases in theaters this weekend. Both deal with immature males obsessing over impossible romantic fixations. The difference between these characters is that one of them should be immature — that would be Tomo (Thomas Turgoose), the adolescent star of Shane Meadows’s appropriately cutesy Somers Town — and the other one, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the heartbroken lead of Marc Webb’s breezily enjoyable (500) Days of Summer, just needs to grow up. Here’s my (500) review from Sundance.
Take my word on Somers Town, which doesn’t outdo Meadows’s flat-out masterpieceThis is England, but still marches to a delightful little rhythm that you simply can’t dismiss. (500) does that, too, but it starts to get grating after awhile. Take my word for that, too.
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