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.
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.
Having seen District 9, I can attest that this one truly does live up to the hype, which means if you’re looking for a playfully allegorical movie about oppressed aliens in South Africa that both mirrors apartheid and delivers the sci-fi/action goods, this one’s for you. Here’s my review for Moving Pictures.
But I’d like to take up a small amount of this space to point out that the alternate reality game (ARG) designed to build buzz for the movie over the last several months is almost as interesting as its actual plot. Take a look at this Wiki page outlining the complex network of websites set up to reflect various facets of the District 9 universe. This sly online marketing technique has been employed at least since Blair Witch (although you can find traces of it in earlier instances), and The Matrix movies took it to an extreme that alienated casual viewers, but the approach has nevertheless gradually developed into an art form in its own right. Last year, The Dark Knight had a fascinating cross-media promotional scheme that stretched its plot across various media; District 9 seems to have followed in Batman’s footsteps. I am still waiting to see this kind of transmedia experience applied to a non-genre movie, something with plenty of drama but closer to real life. Documentaries have done this quite well, but a naturalistic work of fiction (such as The Hurt Locker) stands to benefit tremendously from such an approach.
It’s not an impossible task, but somebody will have to actually care about the process of extending the story to these outer limits. As Scott Kirsner recently pointed out, audiences responsive to web content don’t like insincere promotional campaigns.
Needless to say, District 9, a reasonably low budget movie with a built-in genre-loving audience, has nothing to worry about.
These guys are incredible. Why not apply their skills to a feature-length remix narrative? It would be like a next generation Trapped in the Closet, and a generation hasn’t even passed since Trapped in the Closet. That’s how progressive this is.
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.
Syndicate this site