IFC.com - Indie Eye

Pennan vs. Forks, towns made touristy by movies.

2009-11-20T19:55:00Z

Today, innumerable thousands of shrieking tweens (and older counterparts who really should know better) will descend on the nation's multiplexes, baying for "New Moon" blood.

The phenomenon isn't limited to theaters: Forks, Washington -- where Stephanie Meyer set her novel without ever visiting -- has seen tourism jump way up, from 18,000 visitors in 2008 to more than 64,000 this year alone. Twihards come in hoards, over 100 a day, desperate for a scrap of town memorabilia, stealing dropped library cards and offering cheerleaders cash for their uniforms. It's all very impressive and frightening, and undoubtedly good for a lumber town long suffering from the closure of mills and unemployment.

Meanwhile, consider Pennan, Scotland. In 1983, Pennan achieved cult fame as the setting of Bill Forsyth's "Local Hero," the very definition of a sleeper hit that's retained a loyal following over the year. It's a sweet movie (a little too sweet for me, actually) about an oil-company man coming to Pennan to snap it up, only to discover that the natives would be happy to sell for the right price and figuring out that he's the one becoming most attached to the village. Our hero keeps in touch with the office via a red phone booth; thanks to the movie, that booth gets more calls than any other in Scotland.

So the UK -- which guards its regional cultural touchstones jealousy -- gave full, multi-paper notice to the news that Pennan's endangered by mudslides and a crack in the cliffs. Pennan's actually remains a minor but solid tourist attraction 27 years after the film's release. Will future tweens make pilgrimage to Forks a generation hence, visiting Dr. Cullen's fake parking spot? Of course not: tween fandom erupts fast and then evaporates. So if you're sick of "Twilight"-mania, deep breath: in ten years, this'll just be a distant memory.

To add random hilarity to your day, click on the first link up top, which will take you to an Evangelical article on with the "Twilight" phenomenon that quotes one Bill Schnoebelen, an Iowa minister and "former Satanist who practiced vampirism for several years." He claims "hundreds of people drink blood as part of vampire cults." I, for one, would really like to meet these people. Were they at the midnight screenings last night?

[Photos: "Twilight" Points of Interest, from ForksWA.com; "Local Hero," Warner Bros., 1983]

Fellini: The Ride.

2009-11-20T11:00:04Z

Here in America, we have solid theme park rides based on movies that, for the most part, make sense, like Universal Studios' "E.T. Adventure," or the "Wayne's World" roller coaster "Hurler" (since sold and de-"Wayne"'d by Paramount, but still).

But in Rome, they're building a ride based on the Fellini film "City of Women." Yes, in an effort to shore up tourism in the city, Cinecittà Studios is going to give us Cinecittà World -- 400 acres of themed fun for the whole family, based on the many movies that have shot at the legendary studios over the year.

Since there's some 630 titles to choose from, there's certainly no shortage of inspiration. How about a "Cliffhanger" rock-climbing game? A "Gangs of New York" simulated gang-fight in virtual reality? An "Adventures of Baron Munchausen" ride where you rocket off to the moon? (Aren't all Terry Gilliam movies begging to be turned into rides anyway?)

Alas, judging by what Variety's reporting, that's the wrong thinking. Ladies and gentlemen: presenting the world's first arthouse theme park. A "Ben-Hur" ride I can handle -- chariots! -- but another "will feature the huge slide that Marcello Mastroianni travels down as his sexual history flashes by in Fellini's 'City of Women.' " Really? Wow.

It should be noted that production designer Dante Ferretti -- who worked on that and many other Fellini films -- will be in charge of art design. Here's hoping he'll dig into his catalogue and treat the world to a "Salo" cafeteria.

But seriously, I wonder what this says about European film culture. It's generally seemed to me an untrue stereotype that "Europeans" as some kind of monolithic entity are more fond of "serious" movies; its just that most sillier, trashier fare doesn't get imported here. But Rome appears to be serious about their plans to beef up tourism this way, which hopefully means they know what they're doing.

If Fellini theme park attractions really are a big pull for families, does that mean American arthouse devotees will have to begin making pilgrimages to the world's strangest, most seemingly niche theme park? More importantly, will there be YouTube videos chronicling these rides? I can't wait.

[Photos: "City of Women," New Yorker Films, 1981; "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom," Zebra, 1975]

Jeanne-Claude, 1935-2009.

2009-11-20T00:00:00Z

Jeanne-Claude -- Christo's collaborator and partner -- died today in Manhattan at the age of 74. It was fitting, in a way, not only because the artist pair have been residents of the city since 1964, but because their last big completed project was "The Gates," which turned Central Park's walkways into a series of orange vinyl doorways and drapes, portways of color livening up an especially dreary winter.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been shorthanded as the people who "wrap" things, which only goes so far. A bigger part of their projects was to rendering the familiar temporarily strange, whether by covering a bridge's familiar outlines in fabric or by transforming it into an ominous new bulk.

Six times, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's projects have been documented by Albert Maysles ("Gimme Shelter," "Grey Gardens") and, before his death, his brother David. Besides capturing some memorable, deliberately ephemeral artwork in their wind-breathing majesty, the movies made it very clear that the projects, which could take forever to get all the necessary permits for (26 years in the case of "The Gates"), were at least as much about documenting the daily business of bureaucracy and paperwork as the final project. Bureaucracy was something Christo, a refugee of communist Czechoslovakia, surely knows a bit about. In capturing that oft-tedious process, the Maysles were full collaborators on the projects, which were at least as much illuminations of modern government machines as anything.

I saw them speak once, as a freshman at NYU, a few months before "The Gates" was scheduled to be unveiled. As on film, Jeanne-Claude could be abrasive, dismissive, pushy and just a little unlikable; she was also, it was clear, fiercely protective of and indispensable to Christo, doing most of the talking and buffering he clearly didn't want to get sucked into. It was a pleasure and privilege to see such an iron-glued professional/personal partnership.

What was perhaps most remarkable about their seemingly esoteric projects were the levels of sheer glee they could inspire in civilians who would normally never give the time of day to anything remotely "arty" or "abstract." When I went to "The Gates" twice, I heard nary a cross word. That's another thing the Maysles documented.

Below is part one of 1974's "Christo's Valley Curtain," a 28-minute document of the process of setting up a, well, hanging curtain across Colorado's Valley Gap. When you have time, you really should sit down and watch all of it: as it goes on, it becomes an intensely intimate collaboration between Christo, Jeanne-Claude and a series of professional but at first deeply skeptical construction workers just there for the paycheck. When it's time to make it work and the curtain comes down, their ebullient cheers are unforgettable. That Christo and Jeanne-Claude got pretty much anyone to think differently about what art could do for them is one of their biggest achievements. R.I.P. Jeanne-Claude; it was one amazing collaboration.

[Photo: "The Gates," Lorber HT Digital, 2005]

Dissecting the Oscar doc shortlist.

2009-11-19T14:35:00Z

Bemoaning the failures of the Oscars in the Best Documentary department has become an annual ritual, like spazzing about filing your income taxes or dusting off stale jokes about March Madness obsessions. So the news that this year's doc shortlist of 15 potential nominees is full of omissions and small obscurities is not a surprise.

Many folks would've liked to have seen "Anvil! The Story Of Anvil," "Collapse," "Crude," "Tyson," "We Live In Public," "The September Issue" or "It Might Get Loud" on the list. So it goes. Some of those omissions are reasonable -- there's not much in "Tyson" you can't find on YouTube, and "Collapse" wasn't eligible -- others, not so much. But this category has a long history of leaving out prime picks. Not nominated in the past: "Grey Gardens," "Gimme Shelter," "Don't Look Back," "The Thin Blue Line," "Shoah," "Hoop Dreams," "Crumb." You know, the very bricks and mortar of a burgeoning appreciation of documentary film.

What's on the list is the usual hodgepodge. Delightful to see "The Beaches of Agnes" on there: Agnes Varda's essay on her life is twisty and Gondry-esque in all the right ways, even if it's barely a "documentary" in the traditional Academy sense. I'm pleased, too, that "The Cove" -- populist activism done right -- is there, and will probably win. (Right?)

I'd like to see "Burma VJ" and "Facing Ali," but much of the rest seems middling -- based on the Academy's track record, I feel reasonably safe in saying that. I walked out of "Garbage Dreams" after 15 minutes at SXSW: I never need to see another movie with wailing female vocals and sad-eyed children digging through trash. I get it, that's a bad thing. "Under Our Skin" is a reasonably dull documentary about how Lyme's Disease is probably one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse that'll kill us all. Gina Telaroli -- who watches more docs than anyone I know -- assures me "Which Way Home" is "more exploitative than informative" (and lazily jacks the score from "The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford" to boot), so there's more token liberal-guilt porn.

The big lesson here seems to be that the so-called documentary renaissance of 2002-06 -- when movies like "Bowling for Columbine," "Spellbound," "Super Size Me," "March of the Penguins" and "An Inconvenient Truth" took box-office prisoners and got nominations -- is definitely over. Of the 15 short-listees, only three made over $1 million. Two of those, "Valentino: The Last Emperor" (about the fashion designer) and "Every Little Step" (about "A Chorus Line") had built-in constituencies who would've seen them no matter what. (The other was "Food Inc.," which apparently is a cut above your usual activist doc.)

We may never know why the public decided, for five years, that they were actually okay with some (admittedly pretty slick) non-fiction movies, but that's done. So we're back to the status quo in more ways than one now, wondering about what does go on in that selection process? I'm not sure I'll ever be able to figure it out.

[Photo: Dropped -- "Anvil! The Story of Anvil," VH1, 2008. In -- "Facing Ali," Lionsgate, 2009]

The Werner Herzog, Jr. awards.

2009-11-19T11:00:00Z

"The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" open Friday, Werner Herzog's supposed latest exercise in unhinged lunacy. But as a colleague observed after a screening, "If you didn't know going in Herzog had made it, would you be able to tell?" I'd say probably not: there's none of his trademark stunning footage that was clearly dangerous to get. It's understandable that at 67, Herzog hasn't really endangered himself of late. But who are the filmmakers willing to take up his mantle of unusually arduous and potentially hazardous shooting? Some nominees:

Benjamin Gilmour ("Son of a Lion")

Gilmour's "Son of a Lion" -- currently in limited UK release -- was made after Gilmour had visited Pakistan in August 2001 and was dismayed by post-9/11 Islamophobia. So he did what any reasonable person would do: went to Pakistan to film a movie with no government permission, growing a beard and operating solely under the protection of local Pashtun tribes. Oh, and his lead actor was a former mujahadeen fighter who'd only watched one movie in his life, "Rocky III," which he saw when the CIA used it as a recruitment tour for fighting against the Soviets.

Sergey Dvortsevoy ("Tulpan")

A veteran documentary filmmaker before making 2007's "Tulpan," Dvortsevoy was perfectly willing to shoot for years, live like a nomad and subject himself to the same conditions as his Kazakh sheepherder subjects. "I think only crazy people can make this type of film" he said at the New York Film Festival last year before explaining how he filmed his lead actor helping a sheep give birth with no experience. With his inexplicably Teutonic accent and willingness to say things like "We just observed life and of course sometimes we were lucky enough that things happened -- for instance tornadoes," he's the clearest Herzog heir apparent. He was lucky to get close to a tornado; sure.

Sacha Baron Cohen ("Borat," "Brüno")

Speaking of Kazakhstan... Sacha Baron Cohen is not, technically, a director, and frankly I hope he's done with the mockumentary pranking. "Borat" was more of an event than an actually funny movie, and "Brüno" was pretty dire. Nonetheless, I must congratulate him on his impressive physical courage. In the '20s, the joke behind a lot of Buster Keaton stunts was in part precisely how physically dangerous what he was doing with inanimate objects was; in the aughts, the joke is how much Baron Cohen can get away with before real live people beat the stuffing out of him. It's a trick that's not nearly as politically loaded as he'd probably like, but still impressive.

Christian Poveda ("La Vida Loca")

Posthumous division: Poveda spent 16 months getting members of of El Salvador's Mara 18 gang to trust him enough for a documentary. For his pains, he was found shot through the head in his car, probably by his very subjects.

[Photos: Herzog in "Burden of Dreams," Criterion, 1982; "Tulpan," Zeitgeist, 2008]

Roadtrip/no roadtrip.

2009-11-18T19:50:00Z

Nothing says 1969 like "Easy Rider," the bad-trip Altamont to the ebullient celebration of the next year's "Woodstock." While the hippies were partying down, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson were discovering there was no place for them in America, either old or new. On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, Keith Phipps retraced the road trip taken by the gang.

The week-long series is halfway done on Slate, and it's a good read, tracing what's the same and what's different. The biggest difference, though, is the gap between the "Easy Rider" trio and Phipps, whose mode of travel is a "rented PT Cruiser -- a far cry from Wyatt and Billy's choppers" and who knows he's going home after he reaches New Orleans.

I dig the articles, but I kind of hate "Easy Rider." As Mike D'Angelo once put it, that "ain't my favorite film, man, and that's like an understatement, man, okay, man?" But then, there's always something inherently smug to me about Baby Boomers cultural artifacts, whether recent or of the moment. "Easy Rider" is despairing, yes, but in a way that congratulates the audience for sharing that despair.

A more enlightening eulogy for the death of '60s idealism is Robert Kramer's less celebrated 1975 brick of a movie, "Milestones." At three hours and change, it's not for the faint of heart; it can be grating, yes, but in a way that criticizes rather than embraces the reasons it's grating.

As the title immodestly suggests, this seemingly mundane procession of '60s acid casualties living their '70s lives is meant to suggest the transition of an entire generation. As Melissa Anderson puts it, it tracks "the painful process through which collective action gave way to the Me Decade's enraged narcissism," spelling out the rancid final destination "Easy Rider" can only glimpse through the combined fug of pot smoke and motorcycle exhaust fumes. The territory overlaps a bit -- commune time in "Easy Rider" is even longer in "Milestones," self-righteous nudists and all -- but their overall approaches to the same psychic terrain couldn't be more different.

What "Easy Rider" does is take the camera along with the characters, getting all subjective: the mobility is both the film's and its characters. "Milestones" reserves mobility only for the camera: its huge cast is spread out all over, mired in the traps they've set for themselves and unable to move.

Which is what makes it more authentic and rewarding than "Easy Rider," whose locations are iconic enough for Phipps to revisit and compare/contrast the past and present of. "Milestones" is the "real America": not the mythical nowhere and everywhere Dennis Hopper found, but anonymity, gloom and doom in run-down cities and the countryside you couldn't figure out where in the world they were if your life depended on it.

If "Easy Rider" says going everywhere ultimately takes you nowhere -- except in the iconic imagery it's not too proud to hypocritically take -- "Milestones" says nowhere is pretty much everywhere: a good lesson for the pervasive grunginess of the '70s. It's not on DVD, regrettably, but a new print was struck this year that's making its way around the country sporadically. If it comes near you, it's worth a look. Here's a clip:

[Photo: "Easy Rider," Sony, 1969; "Milestones," Robert Kramer and John Douglas, 1975]

Italian cinema on American shores.

2009-11-18T19:41:00Z

There's never been a better time to indulge in a little Italian cinema, at least if you live on the coasts. For New Yorkers, that's meant classics from the likes of Visconti, Rossellini and Pietro Germi at the Italian Neo-Realism series at the Lincoln Center, and a new 35mm print of Vittorio De Sica's "The Bicycle Thief" at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.

If you live on the west coast, mid-November means Cinema Italian Style in Los Angeles and New Italian Cinema in San Francisco and Seattle, where contemporary crime thrillers and comedies straight from Sicily have been the order of the day.

For some of these films, the latter three series will be the only times they'll screen in the U.S. I still remember seeing Michele Placido's spellbinding mafia saga "Romanzo Criminale" in 2006 and having to buy a crummy region-free, pan-and-scan Thai DVD for repeat viewings. So rare are the screenings that people at the Aero Theatre in Los Angeles applauded when it was announced that a screening of the recent Toronto hit "Giulia Doesn't Date at Night," a romantic dramedy starring Valeria Golino, was canceled because the film got a U.S. distribution deal.

Another film with a U.S. distribution deal, Marco Bellocchio's "Vincere" is the closing night for the just-concluding L.A. festival and will play San Francisco on November 22nd, well in advance of its March U.S. release date. It's the kind of grand, propulsive epic that justifies having its American title ("Win!") translated with an exclamation point. Of course, the exclamation point is also a reference to the mantra of Benito Mussolini, whose rise to power obscures and eventually obliterates the existence of his first wife Ida Dalser and their son, Benito Albino, in order to reshape his public image.

For Americans, the film will draw comparisons to Clint Eastwood's "Changeling," as Dalser begins the film as a wide-eyed revolutionary willing to sell all her belongings and quite literally, the clothes on her back to help fund Mussolini's newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia. She's rewarded for her devotion with a trip to the mental asylum, where she's separated from her young son and will introduce herself as the wife of "Il Duce" to anyone who will listen after all her official government records have been wiped out by the dictatorship. Giovanna Mezzogiorno is fearless in the role of Dalser, though her scheduled appearance in Los Angeles was cut because she fell ill, leaving her co-star Filippo Timi to pick up the slack, which he did ably with stories of cramped hotel rooms in Cannes and working with George Clooney on the upcoming Anton Corbijn thriller "The Assassin."

The other film to overlap between Los Angeles, San Francisco (where it will play on November 19th) and Seattle (where it will play November 21st) is "The Sicilian Girl," a credible potboiler from writer/director Marco Amenta, who adapted his own documentary into a thriller about Rita Atria. The 17-year-old daughter of a mafia don, Atria turns to the police after the murders of her father and brother to bring down the crime syndicate whose drug ring operations involve the local mayor. The film largely resembles a Hollywood B-picture of the 1940s, and lead Veronica d'Agostino does her best impression of Susan Hayward as the young woman facing incredible odds (even her mother tells her that she wanted to have an abortion), retaining only a clenched forehead as she moves from town to town as part of the witness protection program awaiting her chance to testify in court against the mob.

Even if you're not a Californian, Cinema Italian Style and New Italian Cinema schedules offer a worthwhile primer of some off-shore titles to keep an eye out for.

[Photos: "The Sicilian Girl," Roissy Films, 2009; "Vincere," IFC Films, 2009]

In defense of John Woo's American period.

2009-11-18T15:00:00Z

Friday sees the release of an abridged version of John Woo's new film, "Red Cliff," a two-part, five-hour epic condensed for American audiences into what's still an admittedly pretty entertaining regular-length feature.

As Glenn Kenny notes at The Auteurs while comparing the two versions, what's gone is a lot of character detail and poetic flourishes. What's left is one ridiculously over-the-top battle scene after another, which is definitely fun if you want to see, say, something called the "Turtle formation." It is, however, inescapably silly, and I enjoyed it much the same way I enjoyed "Mission: Impossible II" and "Paycheck."

The decade-plus Woo spent in Hollywood had its ups and downs. The ups included the peak violence of "Face/Off"; the downs, according to conventional wisdom, included practically everything else. "Hard Target" is fine for connoisseurs of Van Damme cheese (I dig it), but was not a dignified start to Woo's American career. "Broken Arrow" was a hit but not widely beloved. Throw in a Dolph Lundgren direct-to-video special and the final insult of directing a rejected pilot for a "Lost In Space" update before leaving, and you're sure not looking at the American equivalent of "Hard Boiled."

But it's possible to take equal amounts of pleasure in Woo's cheeseball notions as in his considerable prowess in organizing on-screen violence; they're just different kinds of pleasure, which is why I enjoy the war scenes just as much as I enjoy a big fake shot of a CGI dove flying endlessly over battlefields.

Those are the exact same pleasures animating the much-maligned "Mission: Impossible II" and "Paycheck." "MI:II" is indeed ridiculous; that's why it's fun. It's $125 million that's all on-screen: every shot looks not so much good as expensive -- it takes all that money and makes it ludicrous. It's a movie where "flirting" looks like Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton racing each other along a cliff and sending their cars in dreamy circles.

"Paycheck" -- widely despised and dismissed -- is more impersonal, but it's slyly self-mocking in every respect. Ben Affleck was peaking in terms of the flack he was taking and responds with a purposefully blank performance. Woo keeps things efficient, and the final appearance of an exceptionally artificial dove flying in slo-mo is his way of literally flipping the audience the bird. "You want a John Woo movie? Here. Here's a bird."

It's grand that Woo is working abroad again, treated with due reverence rather than as an expendable hired hand. It's worth remembering, though, that all the flaws and strengths of "Red Cliff" aren't the return of talents left lying dormant for an hour; they're the logical extension of what he was doing in Hollywood all along, even when it was looked down on.

[Photos: "Red Cliff," Magnolia, 2009; "Mission: Impossible II," Paramount Pictures, 2000]

Chris Columbus, protector of children.

2009-11-17T20:25:38Z

Some directors are automatic punchlines, their names synonyms for lousy. There's Adam Sandler cohort Steve Brill ("Without A Paddle," "Drillbit Taylor"), Eddie Murphy's favorite Brian Robbins ("Norbit," "Meet Dave") and of course Shawn Levy ("A Night At The Museum," "The Pink Panther," "Cheaper By The Dozen"), who pays the bills as perfunctorily as possible. The godfather of them all may well be Chris Columbus, a man so prone to alternating equally leaden bathos and comedy it's amazing he once had it together enough to write "Gremlins." His resume is one of shame: the first two "Home Alone"s (they're terrible, get over it), "Bicentennial Man," this year's ghastly "I Love You, Beth Cooper"... the list stretches on.

But even the hackiest director has redeeming qualities, though they might not be visible onscreen; as Geoff Boucher points out at the LA Times' "Hero Complex" blog, Columbus is good at launching and protecting child actors. Talking about the Harry Potter trio of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, Columbus said watching them grow up and take on more roles without flipping out into the usual child star problems gave him "the feeling of a proud parent."

He may be lousy behind the camera, but Columbus sounds sincere and deft when it comes to discussing how he cast the kids not just as actors but as people with secure families who could look after them. "I realized that we needed to start casting kids based on their families and the security that their families could give them at this particular time in their lives," he notes.

As it happens, Columbus has had an unusual amount of experience launching kid stars. It went wrong with Macaulay Culkin, whose '90s battles with his parents were one of the sadder tabloid spectacles of the decade. From that Columbus has apparently learned much: since then, he's given first big parts to Mara Wilson ("Mrs. Doubtfire"), Jena Malone ("Stepmom") and the Potter clan, all of whom have turned out well-adjusted and just fine, at least as far as we know. If we must have terrible "family" fare, it's good to have someone ethical in charge of them.

Speaking of Culkin, here's an insurance ad from the UK where he appears alongside Bruce Willis, Ringo Starr and Michelle Yeoh. Culkin comes on screen briefly and says "Remember me," which is oddly moving if you remember the '90s well:

[Photos: "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone," Warner Bros., 2001; "Home Alone," 20th Century Fox, 1990]

Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused" sequel bites the dust.

2009-11-17T16:00:00Z

"Dazed and Confused" is effectively beloved by everyone who's seen it -- including me -- so I got uber-excited about the prospect of Richard Linklater making a "spiritual sequel." And now it's dead on the ground.

It was apparently called "That's What I'm Talking About," in honor -- we presume -- of the kind of stoned logic of the original, where that phrase was the highest form of praise you could offer. But Linklater couldn't raise the $14 million necessary to get the project off the ground, at least not without casting already completed. Now it goes on the backburner, to be filed away for possible future re-excavation.

In terms of how a "Dazed" sequel might work, it doesn't make that much of a difference if it'll be resurrected now or later: 1980 is 1980 no matter when you film it, and no one from the original cast would be reappearing (aside from Matthew McConaughey, who can never truly age, apparently).

"Dazed" is a dorm-room staple -- one of the few that's also widely beloved on the critical side -- but it was pretty much a theatrical flop that only gained traction when people had it at home to sneak up on them. With the exception of "School of Rock," that's been true of all of Linklater's movies: they underperform theatrically, then -- at least in some cases -- take on new life later.

I suppose Linklater's work is too unassuming to really take viewers by storm in the theater, yet genial enough to stick later. In that respect, he's kind of like Wes Anderson, whose movies up til now have never done that well in theaters but find a healthy, less profitable afterlife. That probably wasn't Linklater's career plan, but that's kind of how his movies ended up -- and, for the moment, it appears he can no longer keep working that way. It's kind of moronic: surely there's a big enough audience for this kind of thing, even if "spiritual sequel" isn't the easiest marketing tagline.

But mostly this makes me wonder if Linklater's been cornered. Since "School of Rock," his movies have been financial underperformers (if, in the case of "A Scanner Darkly," probably another dorm-room wonder), except for an ESPN documentary called "Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach" no one seemed to know about. It's like his unofficial financial model has been discovered and found lacking. If Linklater got tagged -- unfairly -- as a slacker filmmaker, it has to be said his movies followed the same model financially. And now they're not allowed to wait years for a following.

[Photo: "Dazed and Confused," Gramercy Pictures, 1993]

The Catholic horror genre.

2009-11-16T23:09:00Z

Being unreasonably easy to scare, I'm a soft touch when it comes to horror movies and basically refuse to have anything to do with them at this point, but "The Exorcist" is one movie that's never bugged me. But it has scared the hell (heh) out of every Catholic I know; it's the rare horror movie (theoretically) deriving its scares from the potential of blasphemy instead of either creepy atmosphere or sudden jolts. So it's bemusing that William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin may go back to the well once more, rejiggering the original "Exorcist" as a miniseries.

This seems silly and pointless -- the "Exorcist" franchise has been revisited a ridiculous amount of times already, and pretty much every installment beside the original was a flop. The franchise returned $459 million on a total investment of $450 million. It's hard to see why a miniseries would make more sense.

There's a surprising number of Catholic-themed horror movies out there, but "The Exorcism" is singular for taking -- in its own trashy way -- Catholic values at face value. Most horror movies with religious elements tend to mix-and-match principles indiscriminately -- take the theologically incoherent "Stigmata" or this year's wretched "The Unborn" (a lobotomized mixture of Jewish mythology and Judeo-Christian joint exorcism) -- or use church ritual as just another genre trope, the same as the haunted house up the hill or the deserted lakeside cabin.

"The Exorcist" takes its religious elements seriously, which is why it scared its target audience so. It's also what made it super-controversial and raised hackles in a way that seems impossible to replicate: who'd really build a secular-ish horror movie now around the jolt of blasphemy? Even the recent "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" found it necessary to detour into the courtroom and try to arbitrate the "truth" of possession, a necessary move for an ever-more-skeptical age.

Also noted: these days, the evangelical market is not above incompetently trying to make its own religious "horror movies." Witness the majesty that is "C Me Dance":

[Photo: "The Exorcist," Warner Bros. Pictures, 1973]

Five reasons "Pirate Radio" flopped.

2009-11-16T13:54:00Z

As you're doubtless aware, the weekend saw "Precious" making $6.1 million from a measly 174 screens, doing well on its probable journey towards Best Picture; "Fantastic Mr. Fox" did well too, pulling roughly the same per-theater average as "The Darjeeling Limited" in its first weekend, which means Wes Anderson may or may not still be too cool for the mainstream. Less remarked upon was the crash-and-burn failure of "Pirate Radio," Richard Curtis' tepidly-awaited follow-up to "Love Actually."

Considering the latter is a dorm-room staple of deluded pseudo-romantic girls everywhere, why might this be? And no, "bad reviews" is not an acceptable answer -- the Metacritic score for "Pirate Radio" is actually slightly higher than that for "Love Actually". Here are five reasons for the film's failure, both conceptual and lifted from the terrible trailer:

1. No one cares about Richard Curtis in the US.

Richard Curtis did time on "BlackAdder" and "Mr. Bean." That means nothing in the US (sadly). He did, however, write the following romcom staples: "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Notting Hill," both Bridget Jones films, the aforementioned "Love Actually." HOW HARD IS THAT TO MENTION IN THE TRAILER? Pretty freakin' hard, apparently: we get a voice-over informing us that this is from "the creator of 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' and 'Love Actually.'" Two mistakes there: assuming your target audience is old enough to remember "Four Weddings" (doubtful) and using the ever-nebulous "from the creator of" formula, which wary audiences are smart enough to distrust. Just say "From the writer of every romantic comedy you love" early on with a full resume count -- not in a perfunctory voice-over over a minute-and-a-half into the trailer, by which points the young romantic girls are all like "Old dudes! Ew!" and have tuned out. Speaking of which:

2. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Bill Nighy are not stars.

We love them and all, but: clear enough. So don't foreground them in your marketing! It's all about that romcom hook -- and no, it doesn't matter that the movie isn't actually a romcom. Cut it so it looks upbeat and heartwarming -- there's a whole father-son thing going on -- and foreground Curtis' bio. It's not hard to sell mush. These are just two of many things wrong with the trailer. Conceptually, though:

3. People are tired of self-congratulatory baby boomers.

Remember when "Taking Woodstock" tanked earlier this year and Ang Lee was all like "I am very confused by the failure of my movie"? Let us note, now and forever, that audiences under fifty -- i.e., much of the prime moviegoing public -- are sick and tired of hearing about how the baby boomers changed the world, saved rock 'n roll et al. I know this is a cliché, but that's because it's true. So stop making movies about it.

4. The soundtrack.

At the end of the trailer come these exciting words: "Soundtrack featuring music by The Who/The Kinks/Cream/The Rolling Stones." OMG NEW RARITIES? Oh wait, no, you're inviting me to see the aural equivalent of a classic rock station? Why would anyone want to see that? Are you actually using "Won't Get Fooled Again" in the trailer?

5. Bonus reason: it already showed on Air Canada.

No, really, it was screened in its original, longer British cut -- called "The Boat That Rocked" -- in the "avant garde" section. (Lulz, etc.) There goes the precious Canadian business traveler market!

[Photos: "Pirate Radio," Focus Features, 2009]

If you Tweeted #indiefilmcliche, #killurself.

2009-11-13T20:27:20Z

I work at home, so I love Twitter: it's a great way to break up the monotony of one room, one laptop and eight hours. If you're a user, you know that on the right-hand side of the page there's a list of "Trending Topics" -- frequently used phrases, frequently marked with a hash-tag -- that changes depending on how often they're used. Last night, #indiefilmcliche reared its ugly little head, with lots of comments about whiny youth, quirky families and vintage clothing. Twitter-friendly filmmakers got in on the act: Jason Reitman weighed in with "Adorable soundtrack that begins to drive you crazy," which I hope and pray was a self-mocking reference to "Juno"; Richard Kelly blew the whole thing up with "Menacing rabbit figure haunts disturbed teen." Har har.

I'm just going to state the obvious here: to the extent that the vast American public is aware of the "indie film" (many aren't), it's represented by the unholy trilogy of "Garden State," "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Juno." (Sub in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" if you like.) That's it. That's all we have; that's what was reconfirmed on Twitter. This is all kinds of sad and regressive: it's actually a step back from 1996, when four out of the five Oscar Best Picture nominees were "indies" of sorts ("The English Patient," "Fargo," "Secrets & Lies," "Shine") -- all accessibly made films and hardly the broadest spectrum of "independent film," but still were produced independently from the studio system. The pundits who regularly whine about how movies aren't made for "adults" anymore (do most of the adults in this country qualify? I kind of doubt it) could make that claim with double justification for the films that are marketed as "indies."

The whole Twitter shoot-out isn't an event, just a symptom of serious public consensus that what's being marketed as the "indie" is as calcified and formulaic as a Michael Bay blow-'em-up or slasher remake. I don't believe that if you actually brought Abbas Kiarostami to the multiplex that it would change anything, but it has to be said that the public -- as always -- is not quite as dumb as the increasingly cynical mini-majors think. Right now, the year's biggest "indie" is "Paranormal Activity," which you'd think Paramount -- if they wanted to start rebranding the genre, thereby opening up a potential new source of revenue -- might tell people. There is room for expansion here; in order to combat the really tiresome cliché that indie movies are just Zooey Deschanel trying on different pairs of vintage headphones, the burden of proof rests with the distributors to change it up a bit. We've had this stupid paradigm for almost seven years now (since "Garden State"); try something new. Anything. As long as it's relatively accessible and has performances that are easily identifiable as "good," people will still come.

[Photo: "Juno," Fox Searchlight, 2007.]

Brother vs. brother: Zucker fight.

2009-11-13T17:24:08Z

Greenpeace is a good organization that's kind of itchily annoying, the same way a college activist getting you to sign a worthy petition is -- a point driven home quite literally when Bruce Willis was whacking activists with golf balls from his oil rig in "Armageddon." That image might be a good one to keep in mind when reading the news that arch-hack Jon Turteltaub ("National Treasure," "Phenomenon," "Cool Runnings," "3 Ninjas" -- a résumé to set your heart a-flutter) is all set to go on a biopic of the nascent Greenpeace movement of the '70s and early '80s: get ready for heart-pounding hilarity and adventure as seal and whale hunters meet their match in a scrappy, ragtag team of "pacifists, ecologists, musicians, teachers, sailors, and scientists." Wacky!

More notable, though, is who's producing: Jerry Zucker and wife Janet. Zucker is, of course, part of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team that was responsible for the much-loved "Naked Gun" and "Airplane!" movies; after the partnership dissolved, everyone went their own ways. The most "serious" of the bunch, Jerry made "Ghost" and the little-loved King Arthur movie "First Knight" (Richard Gere as Lancelot!). Brother David, meanwhile, became a 9/11 conservative, stemming his lifelong liberalism to channel his concern for national patriotism into films like "An American Carol" -- a stillborn satire rewriting "A Christmas Carol" with a Michael Moore figure in the role of Scrooge who discovers he doesn't want to destroy America after all. It's, um, "special."

So you could view Jerry Zucker's entering the politicized filmmaking arena as kind of a rebuke to his brother's politics. His wife and producer Janet Zucker is quoted as saying, "We've found that the best way to reach people's hearts and minds is through entertainment," which is certainly what David tried -- and failed -- to do. But when I interviewed David Zucker about "Carol" (which was like interviewing talking points, really), he said he'd switched parties "without surrendering my environmentalist beliefs." So this might be the one political point of détente between the brothers and former filmmaking partners.

If you've never seen "An American Carol" -- somehow, most people didn't -- it's pretty staggering. Here's the trailer. The movie itself is far more offensive. I've included the O'Reilly intro because, you know, it fits:

[Photo: Warriors for Greenpeace? Nah, "3 Ninjas," Touchstone, 1992.]

The brothers who brought you "Bad Lieutenant."

2009-11-13T12:00:00Z

Alan Polsky wanted to tell me a story about how Werner Herzog held a gun to his head and shattered his brother Gabe's eye socket with the butt of the pistol in the middle of shooting "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," but that was just wishful thinking. "We wanted things to go crazy so that we could tell great on-set stories like [the ones] in Herzog's history," Alan said. "But unfortunately, we don't have any ones like that."

If true, the actual production would be the dullest part of "Bad Lieutenant," one of the weirdest and most indelible films of the year. (My review from Toronto is here.) And the smooth sailing would be a tribute to the Polsky brothers, two first-time producers in their 30s who saw the potential in updating Abel Ferrara's 1992 cult classic into a surreal and shockingly funny character study with Nicolas Cage as a crackpipe-carrying cop.

The sons of Chicago art dealer Maya Polsky, Alan and Gabe have quite the slate of heady projects in the works, including adaptations of "Flowers for Algernon" (rumored to star Will Smith) and the western "Butcher's Crossing" with Sam Mendes attached to direct, but they've already made waves with their first project, which proved to be an unexpected hit with critics and audiences alike during its recent festival run, and which hits theaters next week.

How did you get involved in the project, and how did Herzog?

Alan Polsky: [Producer] Ed Pressman had made the original and was looking to remake it or do a television show. Gabe and I really liked the original movie, so we said look, let us develop a screenplay based on this character, kind of like James Bond.

Gabe Polsky: We wanted to make something that we were going to be proud of. "Bad Lieutenant" has become a cult classic and we really wanted to reinvent this whole thing and turn it on its head. Everyone was trying to think outside of the box [for] different kinds of filmmakers -- I was a fan of [Herzog's]. In his past, he's dealt with a lot of demented and strange characters that are unforgettable on the screen, and "Bad Lieutenant" is one of these characters. I thought his voice would totally reinvent this and he's the Bad Lieutenant of filmmakers.

Did you guys ever reach out to Abel Ferrara?

AP: We actually did reach out to Abel originally. We tried to get him on the phone with a couple of writers, it didn't go anywhere and we just wanted to move forward. It's unfortunate, because I know that Werner would've loved to have cast Abel in the movie. He wouldn't have cast Harvey [Keitel], but he would've loved to cast Abel, but Abel was really not cool with what was going on.

The Abel-Werner tiff was part of what drove interest during the summer, but there was also the leak of the international trailer that became an online sensation. Were you happy that became public?

AP: Gabe and I are mixed. I personally liked it and thought it captured great things in the movie.

GP: I just don't know if it was put together in the most exciting way. I felt it wasn't necessarily the best thing we could put out there. However, it seemed like people absolutely loved it. I heard a lot of people describe it as batshit crazy. The original one shows more that this is an insane comedy type of thing and the trailer we have now is a little ambiguous whether it's a thriller or [not]. But that's part of the movie -- you're not quite sure exactly what kind of movie it is, which is the beauty of it.

AP: What genre. even, it is -- that was an argument we were having at the studio for a while. When Herzog came out of the editing room, he was talking about how funny it was.

GP: The most interesting thing for us is probably how we first saw the movie in our office and did not know at all how audiences would respond.

AP: When we saw it with an audience in Venice, we realized that people would definitely get the dark comedy and the subtlety of it -- because that was a concern. Nic is on the edge -- he plays it straight and that's why it works so well.

Since First Look is owned by "Bad Lieutenant"'s co-producer Millennium Films, you knew the film would get distribution, but after the positive response on the festival circuit, were you disappointed that a deal with one of the major distributors didn't manifest?

GP: It's a good example of the industry right now, because we did have a major star, we had a director with a pretty big following. We have a great title, we had good critical response and with all those things, it still was extremely difficult.

Do you have any Werner anecdotes?

AP: A few days before we started shooting, in order to get to know Herzog a bit more, we took him on an alligator tour through the bayou, also to get a better feel for New Orleans. So we're feeding alligators marshmallows -- who knows if the idea for the alligators and iguanas [in the film] came from there? It was fun.

"Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" opens in limited release on November 20th.

[Photos: Alvin "Xzibit" Joiner and Nicolas Cage; Werner Herzog, Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes on the set of "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," First Look Studios, 2009]