Steady Diet of Film

Watch the Gits documentary online

The Gits, Kerri O'Kane's documentary about the life and murder of punk singer Mia Zapata, is streaming ad-free for two more days as part of Pitchfork Media's One Week Only series.

The film started at a time when Zapata's murder was still unsolved, through the course of production a suspect was apprehended, tried and convicted. O'Kane focuses the most attention on the Gits' creative process and the impact Zapata's death (specifically the investigation) had on the Seattle music scene in the mid-90s.

RIYL: The Times of Harvey Milk, Hype! (from which the film borrows live material), Kurt Cobain: About a Son, the Staircase.

Review: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

After directing nineteen feature films ranging from the microbudget indies (Chan is Missing, Smoke) to G-rated family fare (Because of Winn-Dixie, Anywhere But Here) to star vehicles (Maid in Manhattan, the Last Holiday) director Wayne Wang is trying something new. He's wiped his own slate clean and made what feels like (in the best and worst ways) a debut into middle age.

In keeping with this new sense of adventure, in the coming weeks Wang will unveil two new features: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Princess of Nebraska. A new hybrid theatrical/online strategy, these projects are part of an experiment spearheaded by Magnolia Films, YouTube, Landmark Cinemas and Cinetic Media.

Both films are based on short stories by Yiyun Li, whose work often focuses on generational and culture clashes in Asian families sharing many themes with the films of Yasujiro Ozu, a clear inspiration to Wang.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers opens with Yilan, a young woman picking up her father (only identified as Mr. Shi) at the airport his first visit to the States from China. Their greeting is polite but chilly, after a 12-year estrangement following his infidelity they're virtual strangers for whom the other has become a distant obligation. She's recently divorced and her father's arrival only serves to remind her of what she has not accomplished at this stage of her life. Mr. Shi, an avowed supporter of Mao Zedong is looking back on his own choices to provide for his family and work on China's first rocket program as going wholly unappreciated by his increasingly Americanized daughter.

Rather than taking the more traditional Sundance-ish route and focusing on how their dysfunction has affected the younger family member, the film centers on the aging father who mixes weary regret with boundless curiosity for the suburban wasteland his daughter resides in. His adventures, snooping and friendships make up the bulk of the film's lean 83-minute runtime. Embracing a Wes Anderson aesthetic and shot on location in Spokane, Washington; the town is portrayed as being like the conformity planet from "A Wrinkle in Time". Inhabited by quirky (if not somewhat shifty) white people and punctuated by meticulously landscaped parks. It's a place where the 1950s, the present and the future all muddle together and having recently returned from a high school reunion in Spokane, it seems like a good fit.

The film is quietly sympathetic to both father and daughter, even as they do passive aggressive and mean-spirited things to each other. Henry O. (who fans of the West Wing will recall an appearance he made in an episode poignantly titled "Shibboleth") makes Mr. Shi resonate as a studious and endearing figure in a film with very little dialogue or plot.

RIYL: Broken Flowers, Persepolis, the Straight Story, the Namesake, the Squid and the Whale.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers opens September 26th at the Clay Theaters in San Francisco. See the trailer here.

IMDB was a UGC before you was a UGC.

A story that's being reported with a sweeping sense of exasperation: the Internet Movie Database has finally entered Web 2.0 and will now be streaming full-length tv shows, movies, short films and movie trailers largely hosted by Hulu.

But this vexed coverage fails to take into account that imdb.com has been a user-generated content site since before the term "user generated content" even existed. Since 2002 the site's 17 million registered users (monitored by a staff of about 20) have created a site that has become as much a professional resource for producers, casting directors and writers as well as a popular destination site for movie discussion. And really, if the word "database" appears in your company's title, web trendiness probably isn't be a top priority.

However, today's launch was an extremely necessary upgrade in the arena of movie trailers. Whereas before imdb.com relied on a series of partnerships with sketchy third party video sites (that often didn't even direct to the right footage), the site will now host more trailers on their own site with a 15-second advertising pre-roll. 

Fifteen seconds of ads for two minutes of content might feel like a bit of overkill now, but with Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently declaring 2009 to be the year YouTube becomes profitable, inline advertising will undoubtedly become standard soon enough.

The imdb.com video deal also includes a yet to be defined partnership with Sony Pictures Television and CBS.

Billion dollar titan of industry defends himself against ruthless indie film-maker

When I read statements from the MPAA I'm reminded of what Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman: "Everything she writes is a lie, including the words 'and' and 'the'". But Freakonomics author Stephen J. Dubner recently put his readers' questions to Jack Valenti-successor Dan Glickman and the claims of movie industry losses to piracy, his affinity for the NC-17 rating and of course chastising the expose-documentary of his organization This Film Is Not Yet Rated begs response.

First, he throws down:

Q: How has the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated changed how movies are rated?

A: It hasn’t changed the way we rate films. The one thing it did do, however, is help us realize that there was a lot of misunderstanding about the rating system.

I think the most relevant thing that’s changed since the film is that we have made a significant effort to be more transparent and educate both filmmakers and parents about the process. We’ve also, I think, spent more time getting out into the independent film community, walking through the process, really letting in more sunshine, and demystifying the process.

To be clear, Kirby Dick’s movie was a one-sided and inaccurate view of the system and it should by no means be considered a credible source on the topic.

Meow meow. But here's a more interesting nugget:

Q: What is the long-term vision of the movie business? Will hundred-seater cinemas still play a central role?

A: We ask moviegoers of all ages about the many ways they enjoy movies. Across every category, they say going to the movies with your friends is the best way to see a film.

Ultimately, audiences make these decisions, but my fervent belief and hope is that there’s room for everyone. Another interesting fact: We asked people who wire their living rooms with plasma TV’s, digital video recorders, HDTV, and all the rest about going to the movies.

What we found is somewhat counterintuitive to what you might expect: The more elaborate the their home theaters, the more they are going to the movies — about 50 percent more each year for the die-hard home theater folks. It’s not the either/or choice people often assume it is.

It is profoundly inappropriate that a (privately-owned but wholly accepted) regulatory agency would also be conducting market research. If memory serves, This Film is Not Yet Rated had equal concern about censorship and the lack of transparency (and for a documentary that Glickman claims had no credibility, it sure did inspire a lot of reform) but also the far-reaching but largely unknown influence the MPAA has over exhibitors.

Glickman, a former Congressman who held a cabinet-level position in the Clinton administration, later goes on to discuss his lobbying efforts in Washington DC to strengthen intellectual property and copyright laws. He also makes a point of championing local tax incentive programs with an unverified statistic that cities who play host to film productions see a 54% increase in tourism.  

For someone who seizes every opportunity to mention how inaccurate he finds the documentary made about his organization, Glickman does very little to dispell the notion that the Motion Picture Association of America is little more than a political action committee cloaked in moral authority because they spend their weekends determining how much of Natasha Lyonne's O-face is too much.

Methinks it might be time for a sequel, Mr. Dick.    

Review: the Last Winter

The Last Winter
Rating (out of 5): ****

With rueful pleas for corporate regulation, doomsday global warming scenarios, references to Alaskan corruption and even an off the cuff remark about how fuel efficiency can be improved by adjusting tire pressure, The Last Winter is a supernatural horror film that provides us yet another lens to examine our national political conscious. Pitting blue state against red state in the form of male sexual jealousy it's to writer/director Larry Fessenden's great credit that he seems largely indifferent to humanity's unity or survival. Or, at the very least, takes great pleasure in ripping it to shreds (as any good horror director would).

The film opens with a jubilant internal corporate video (voiced by Patricia Clarkson) championing the success of opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling as a monumental human achievement. An only modestly exaggerated wink that none of this would be possible without a troubling intertwining of corporate greed and governmental corruption.

Read the rest at Greencine.

Summer angst in "dumb" Antarctica

While struggling to write a review of a horror movie on a painfully rare sunny day in San Francisco, I was delighted to stumble on this love note to director/writer/composer John Carpenter from Benjamin Strong for the Moving Image Source four day tribute to the B-movie auteur:    

Halloween (1978), the indie $400,000 ur-slasher classic that established Carpenter in Hollywood (and launched Jamie Lee Curtis’s stint as a virginal scream queen) was so coolly efficient in per capita goose bump production—it also grossed $47 million stateside—that even the disapproving Pauline Kael had to admit that “maybe when a horror film is stripped of everything but nightmarish dumb scariness and sudden shocks it satisfies part of the audience in a more basic, childish way than sophisticated horror pictures do.”

Her sneering aside, Kael’s “stripped” and “basic” are apt for Carpenter’s minimalist, unapologetically pop style. His movies almost always run between 90 and 100 minutes. They are heavy on atmosphere, but the spaces depicted are typically empty (Carpenter’s murky, underfurnished sets are the prototypes for Inland Empire’s interiors). Even the synthesizer scores, many of them written and performed by the director himself, are spartan. And yet for all their apparent simplicity and directness, the genre pictures Carpenter made during the 1980s are among the most radical readings we have of morning in America, as evidenced by BAMcinématek’s four-picture retrospective.

Though I was a little disappointed to see Carpenter's amazing Assault on Precinct 13 only mentioned in the context of Jean-François Richet's unfortunate 2005 re-make, it's great to see a journeyman film-maker whose work can be read as both a "smuggling" (as prescribed by Martin Scorsese) and wildly entertaining be celebrated in the last few weeks of summer.