Turtleneck Films

Son of a DVD

2011-12-12T15:51:00.001-05:00

No, seriously, the new Son of a Seahorse DVD will be available very soon. Like, mid-January (probably).

Angry Wishlist

2011-09-28T13:47:00.007-04:00

Like everyone else on the planet, I like Angry Birds. But after the first fifty or sixty levels or so, I started to hit a wall where my frustration with the game overwhelmed my desire to play it. Ragequits became quite common.

Granted, how many games can you say that about-- that the ragequit wall comes after the first fifty or sixty levels? A lot of games-- especially physics puzzles-- hit that wall a lot sooner.

But it's got me thinking about which features I'd like to see in a sequel:

Guidelines. I don't think it would do the game irrepable harm if the game told me where a bird would hit given its current angle and the tug of the rubber-band. You don't need to tell me how hard it's going to hit, what kind of damage it's going to do, or give me lines for blue splitters and yellow dashers-- just let me know where I'm aiming. Because too often I think I have something lined up the same way, and it ends up completely different. Make it less about my dexterity/precision and more about my brain.

Have stars unlock levels, rather than beating the level before it. Circumvents the ragequit wall.

Level Editor. Because UGC is all the rage these days.

Creative Mode. Give me a mode where I'm assigned the birds, yes, but I can choose the order in which they strike.

Divided Republic

2011-09-22T22:29:00.003-04:00

In the past, I've been something of a vocal Kickstarter party-pooper, though it was less that I was anti-kickstarter, per se, so much as I didn't have the money to even chip in a few bucks here or there for this guy or that one, and I kinda resented the idea that if I didn't chip in said bucks, I was anti-indie-film or something. People pointed out that if I gave to so many films, people might give to our films, but we never intend to kickstart our films, for the simple reason that we've seen our films, and we certainly wouldn't give us money to make them.

And I still don't have the cash, though I recently broke my long-standing Kickstarter abstinence for Alex Bagosy's board game, Divided Republic. Partially, this is because I have a better sense of what I'm going to get out of it. With a film, so many things can and often do go wrong, and before push comes to shove you're out x amount of money for a DVD copy of and T-shirt for a film that never got finished, or a film that maybe shouldn't have been finished. With a board game, you pretty much know what you're going to get: you can read the rules to grasp the mechanics, sometimes even print-and-play the game beforehand. It's less of a, "Sure, I'll give you this money and cross my fingers" and more of a, "I am for all intents and purposes pre-ordering this game, and in doing so, I am helping it get published."

There's no print-and-play available of Divided Republic, but there is this video,

and this gorgeous board:

It's in a sorta desperate situation; it has ten days left to raise over $9000. If kickstarting is your kinda thing, or board games about the 1860 Presidential election, well, you know what to do.

Disclaimer: The game's publisher, Numbskull Games, is also publishing my game Prepotent.

An Actual Conversation Between Two Middle-Aged Men, Heard In Passing.

2011-09-06T12:02:00.002-04:00

"So, I just stayed home and watched Two and a Half Men. I could watch that all day long. Doesn't matter how many times I've seen it, I just laugh and laugh."

"Charlie Sheen was funny."

"I don't know how he screwed that up."

"How could he?"

Chicken and Moose.

2011-08-31T23:24:00.003-04:00

Disclosure one: Our friend Jamie Maurer made this.
Disclosure two: It's really a ploy to make you buy metal sculptures from Metal Imagination.

In my opinion, that doesn't make them any less worth while. They exhibit the same humor and sensibility that's such a wonderful part of the Needs More Gay series that Jamie hosts as Rantasmo.

On the Popularity of Angry Birds

2011-08-31T16:36:00.002-04:00

I don't think Angry Birds is popular because of its gameplay. Physics puzzles are a dime a dozen. I think it is popular because there's a profound and inexorable sadness at the heart of the game.

Because, look at those pigs. They've no limbs, and probably suffer from developmental disabilities-- certainly, their facial features exhibit some kind of congenital defect. They took the birds' eggs, but I don't think they understood that they were doing anything wrong; they were just hungry.

The birds swingshot themselves to death attemping to murder these crippled, developmentally-disabled pigs as a form of ultimately pointless and morally ambiguous vengeance. The yellow bird is graphically battered when it collides; the black bird explodes; the white bird drops an egg-- the very reason for their titular emotional state-- as a weapon.

It's not a deep game by any means; it is a bizarre one, though, and one that's very much a product of its time.

Tartar Sauce

2011-08-15T11:47:00.003-04:00

Mix the following, more-or-less in order, in a bowl.

Enough lemon zest to lightly dust the bottom of the mixing bowl

The same amount of green onion, very finely diced

x scoops of mayonaisse (do not use Miracle Whip, it is the devil)

x-1 scoops of relish

Enough Spicey Brown Mustard to give it a slight brown color while mixing

A liberal amount of freshly-ground pepper, until the mixture is clearly speckled

And sometimes diced bacon, if that's your thing

My Name On A Box.

2011-07-16T18:59:00.006-04:00

Look, it's my name on a box!

I'm proud to announce that my board game Prepotent is an anticipated Winter 2011 release from Numbskull Games.

It's a really weird feeling, having someone say "Yes." In my twenty-nine years, with one magical exception (hi Mary!), it has, to this point, always been "No", or some variation thereof. No, we don't like your movie. No, we don't want to play your shmup. No, I don't like your music. No, I don't want to publish an awesome novel about homeless superheroes doing wheelies in people's faces on unicycles and taking to snails. No, we don't want you to be Mayor of Dearborn. Which, frankly, I can't blame them on that last one. But, anyway.

I wouldn't say I was bad at any of those things-- I was quite good at some of them-- but I was never successful at them, financially, critically, what-have-you. And I felt that, and my own limitations, acutely; I enjoyed making films, writing fiction, being generally weird, but it never got my anywhere, and I was always searching for That Something, that one thing that I was good at. I never felt like Tom Russell, Filmmaker or Tom Russell, Novelist; I was always Tom Russell, Wearer Of Many Hats, None Of Which Especially Suit His Unusual Head-Shape.

Until last year, when I discovered board games, almost by accident, and I discovered-- while recovering from an infection that nearly killed me-- that I have something of a knack for them. I discovered that I was Tom Russell, Board Game Designer, and threw myself into it with abandon.

At first, it seemed like it would be more of the same: publisher-after-publisher, game-after-game, it was "No." And I got some of the same naysaying that had dogged me whenever I announced a new creative endeavor, amplified by a general ignorance of how board games have changed in the years since, say, Monopoly. I must admit, I was starting to get discouraged.

But the funny thing is, no matter how many "No's" you stack up over a life time, all it really takes is one "Yes" to wipe 'em out. Mr. Stevens, the publisher of Numbskull, said "Yes."

Like I said up top, it's a weird feeling. I still don't quite know how to process it, other to occasionally jump up and down in giddy laughter. I'm sure that sensation will quiet down eventually, and that I'll stop annoying my friends by marveling at my reversal of fortune. What won't go away, though, is the feeling that at long last, after decades of searching, I know who I am.

Tzirallum.

2011-04-30T17:12:00.004-04:00

A solitaire card game utilizing a standard 52-card deck.

Some of you probably are aware by now that, while we're still working on films (and long-overdue DVDs of films), Tom has embraced a new vocation: board game design. This morning, I had a dream about a solitaire card game and when I woke, I recreated it. Like many ideas one gets in a dream, it wasn't very good or compelling. But it made me think of another idea, and that idea, in turn, became Tzirallum. Let me know how/if you enjoy it.

Be sure to heed the last bit of advice at the bottom of the instructions, especially with the low-numbered cards. It really does make a lot of difference. Also, don't be too hasty about eliminating the "pivot" spots in the tableau that, by a few tricky switches and builds, might move an otherwise stranded card from one row to another by way of the column.

Policy Change.

2011-03-31T00:08:00.001-04:00

This site no longer accepts anonymous comments. Comments may still be left with google accounts, Open ID, etc.

Because I Haven't Said It In A While...

2011-03-30T00:24:00.001-04:00

... you should totally buy a copy of Jolt City.

An Open Letter to That Guy In the WHALE Comments, Because the Meshugana Blogger Won't Post it as a Comment.

2011-03-29T23:48:00.003-04:00

Okay, I'll bite.

First-- apropos the "only conclusion" you can reach, that there's some kind of quid-pro-quo at work here. Well: habeas corpus. I wrote this review, what, two years ago, a year-and-a-half? If I was supposed to have gotten something in return, I'd have received it by now, yes?

Second-- and this is assuming the same person has been responsible for all these recent comments, and if I'm incorrect in that assumption, mea culpa-- it's claimed that there's no "story, plot, conflict, or purpose". I'd say that it's true that the version I saw-- and I must stress that I saw a cut the filmmaker made two years ago, and that the new cut, according to that filmmaker, is different in many ways-- was not overly concerned with "plot", telling a story, or resolving conflicts.

But, you know, I *like* a lot of movies that could be termed "plotless". One of my favourite movies, INTO GREAT SILENCE, is literally 2 and a half hours of monks praying, feeding cats, making wine, and sewing. It's about as far from plot and structure as one can get, and I love it; the film absorbs me into the world of the monastery in which it takes place. And I'd wager that you'd find that film "boring", or that you'd say it was just a worthless bunch of assembled (film) clips.

Motlagh's film *does* have conflict: conflict between the son and his father, the constant sense of the protagonist being outside-looking-in and isolated from the other characters. Isolation that is emphasized not only by the way the film is structured, but by scenes in which he's absent from his own diary-style film. And this is something I really dug about the film, is that he made choices-- experimenting with form and structure to produce different, desired, and on-purpose effects. Like I said in my review-- and, again, I don't know how much this has been altered by the film's newest cut-- I don't think all these choices necessarily work or do all the things Motlagh wants them to do.

But he *doesn't* just shoot a bunch of footage of his friends shooting the shit and slap it on the screen; he *doesn't* just fall into the easy, lazy trap of naturalism; he *doesn't* fetishize verite as the film he made is inherently-- sometimes off-puttingly-- stylized. So, to my mind, just labeling the film a "worthless bunch of assembled video clips", implying that they're haphazardly slapped together with no rhyme, reason, or thought is beyond disingenuous.

Speaking of disingenuous-- I'm sorry, but I have to ask: do you really want to have a conversation/debate/what-have-you about this? Because it's one thing to say, "I didn't like this film," or "I disagree with the reviewer", or "I didn't like the choices the director made," or, "This is why I feel the film was not very good." That's the kind of discussion I'd be very much interested in having.

But when you come around to these parts with a chip on your shoulder-- just decrying how BAD and WORTHLESS it is, and putting the word movie into quotation marks (which, F.Y.I., is a surefire way to make your host lose his temper, and I think I've done an admirable job of not losing that temper during this thread)-- well, it makes me think that you're not really interested in talking about the film, or about the pitfalls of independent films that are too personal to connect with audiences, or whatever. It makes me think you just want to be a Negative Nancy and make jokes about the title of the film and sling the same-old same-old "indie film is an incestuous circle-jerk" bullpuckey.

And, as to that, again: habeas corpus, because our own films, for the most part, still languish in obscurity and have never so much as played a festival.

Now, I could be wrong about this; maybe you do honestly want to have a honest-to-goodness conversation, and if I've misread you, then I apologize.

If you seriously want to talk about Motlagh's film, then I'd ask that-- as civilly and respectfully as possible-- you detail your problems with the film. "Worthless" and "pointless" are not "problems"; they're invective. They themselves are worthless and pointless, because there's nowhere a conversation can go, nothing for an understanding to be built on, no place for anyone to respond.

And if you're not interested in having a conversation, then that's fine; I just won't respond again.

Because I'm a Midwesterner, and as a general rule, I can't see why two human beings can't be polite, respectful, and civil to one another. Whether the discussion is art, politics, or religion-- can't we all just get along?

Personal Reminder

2011-03-29T01:10:00.001-04:00

Don't feed the trolls, don't feed the trolls, don't feed the trolls.

Two New Seahorse Reviews

2011-03-17T12:28:00.003-04:00

A long time ago, Matt Barry, writing over at Rogue Cinema, had some nice words to say about our film:

I was intrigued by the Russells’ decision to let several scenes play out in one long, uninterrupted take, which is well-suited to dialogue-driven character comedy such as this. ...

Son of a Seahorse works as a quirky, off-beat indie comedy, sometimes raunchy but often good-natured.

And while we're keeping the phrase "quirky, off-beat indie comedy" as far away from the DVD cover as possible, we did appreciate his review.

Simon Abrams-- who, as he discloses at the top of his consideration, is a friend of ours (though we've never met)-- also had some kind words to say about the film, over at Extended Cut, claiming to be

impressed by the way that writing/directing duo Tom and Mary Russell used such a broad style of acting to make a movie filled with jokes consistently uncomfortable. David Schonscheck plays up Nick Kilpatrick's mercurial attitude by constantly over-acting. In any other context, this would be grating but the longer the film goes on, the more apparent it becomes that the Russells are trying to alienate you. If anyone needed proof that a character study doesn't need to follow a sympathetic character in order to be ingratiating or even just satisfying, this is the film. A worthy descendant of King of Comedy.

What I think emerges from these two reviews, and the three (two negative, one positive) that have preceded it, is that the film is one that can be looked at in different ways. A. A. Dowd said that

The Russells are [not] cut from any shape or variety of traditional Hollywood cloth. These two are loud and proud indie guerillas. They favor marathon takes and lengthy digressions, long shots and longer conversations. It's tempting to lump them into the mumblecore camp, except their sense of humor is somehow both drier and broader, with an affinity for garish caricatures and bizarro non-sequitors. ...

Son of a Seahorse is all over the map. It sets up Nick as a kind of perpetual straight man, and then subjects him to the judgments, scolds, rants and taunts of various weirdos and walk-ins. Schonscheck has a certain hangdog charisma, but he's also inconsistent. His performance seems to fluctuate in proportion to his co-stars, who range from accomplished improvisers to transparent amateurs. The first scene, for example, works like gangbusters, mostly because Schonscheck is evenly matched by Swanberg. A later encounter with a raving lunatic (Tom Russell himself, moonlighting as an authentically unhinged cameo player) establishes the lead as a skilled comic foil. He's undone, alas, by some faulty support– from lisping cartoon bit actors to deer-in-headlights non-professionals. (I definitely could have done without the tired There Will Be Blood parody, too.) ...

If Son of a Seahorse often seems like a different movie scene to scene, its saving grace is its uniting principle: that marriage is the most rewarding pain in the ass you'll ever willfully subject yourself to. It's hard not to have a certain affection for any film that deals with married life in a way that's neither cloying nor rigorously cynical. The Russells, husband and wife filmmakers with a word or two to share on the subject, invest their hit-or-miss comic enterprise with an endearing breadth of genuine feeling.

Nick Rombes (author of Cinema in the Digital Age) gave the film its shortest but possibly most complimentary public review, over on twitter, where he called it "a hilarious, terrifying film."

And then there's the Filmrogue (not to be confused with the above-linked Rogue Cinema) podcast review, which basically accuses us not only of incompetence but, I guess somewhat amusingly, fraud. (The link that pops up in a google search is, perhaps thankfully, broken.)

Like I said: diverse opinions. Hopefully this will translate into more interest in the film when the DVD is re-released in the next few months.

Tom's Tomato-Feta-Mushroom Thingy.

2011-02-10T14:56:00.005-05:00

Mary's the one that cooks; Tom doesn't do much more than burn things and make them unpalatable. Still, the one thing he can prepare adequately is served as a complement to Mary's culinary masterworks two or three nights a week in Russellville.

Ingredients.

1 tomato.
Several mushrooms, roughly equal to said tomato.
3-4 green onions.
Feta to taste.
Pepper.

Preparation.

I take all the ingredients out of the fridge about twenty to forty minutes before hand, to give 'em a chance to get up to room temperature. That's not really necessary-- it can be served and enjoyed cold-- but my teeth are painfully sensitive to anything colder than room temperature.

Dice the tomato, sprinkle with pepper. Put the tomato in a mixing bowl.

Dice the mushrooms. Put them in the mixing bowl.

Dice the green onion. Put it in the mixing bowl.

Cover with crumbled feta. I usually use two or three ounces, but YMMV.

Now, mix! Ideally, there should be tomato, mushroom, feta, and a hint of green onion in every bite. Nice little side dish or appetizer, and it takes maybe five minutes to throw it together.

Serves two or three people, depending on how much they eat.

Please Note

2010-12-13T11:34:00.001-05:00

Our computer is broke. We lost most of our files and no longer have home internet access.

Posting will, of course, be quite light for the foreseeable future.

Four Riveting Legislative Procedurals

2010-11-17T15:23:00.001-05:00

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Capra, 1939

A fantasy and an allegory, to be sure, but that's what Capra was best at. The film ripples with the masculine, hardball atmosphere of the Senate. Control of the media equals control of the message, and thus public opinion, and thus and finally, the work of government itself. Also worth seeing, but mostly as a curiosity, is Tom Laughlin's remake, Billy Jack Goes to Washington. Capra's film is, per the blog post title, simply riveting, whereas Laughlin's is rather limpidly-paced; Laughlin's Billy Jack is hardly the guiltless, guileless innocent that makes Capra's allegory work so well; Laughlin also unwisely injects a lot of real-world politics (and, as he does in seemingly every film, the ghastly spectre of sexual violence) into a story that's frankly not built to support them.

Advise and Consent, Preminger, 1962

Pretty much everyone in this scandalicious film is trying to hide a secret, and pretty much everyone is "guilty" of whatever they're accused of/blackmailed for. But I don't think the thrust of the film is that all politicians are dirty-- just that they're all human. The one-time communist isn't some insidious, unamerican threat to our democracy-- he's a man that made some mistakes. The homosexual-turned-self-righteous-family-man isn't a hypocrite or pervert, but a tortured soul that's afforded a high degree of tragic, moving sympathy. Like the next film on my little list, but in a very different way, it emphasizes that politics is a very personal business, driven and shaped by an individual's history and personality.

1776, Hunt, 1972

There's a twenty-five minute stretch in this musical where there's no music, in which the "obnoxious and disliked" John Adams vigorously argues in favour of American independence. More than any other film, it really captures the drama of political debate and oratory. The film also provides an in-depth look at the necessity of compromising a principle in favour of getting something accomplished: a Declaration of Independence without any mention of slavery might be a flawed document, but it's one that's going to be signed. It puts an incredible emphasis on how personalities-- a wish to stay anonymous, a desire to be well-liked, arrogance, and a sense of honour and duty-- impact political decisions more than static talking points. (Or they did, at any rate.) It communicates a sense of real fragility and danger that's been lost by the time we get to Trumbull, and it deeply humanizes its founders with more than a little salty humour. And, yes, it does all this with some really great songs.

Amazing Grace, Apted, 2006

The odd man out in our quartet, Amazing Grace is not a great film. It's still a fairly good one, in that veddy British tradition-of-quality costume-drama kind of way: it's well-mounted but doesn't have the verve of, say, The Young Victoria; the performances are strong but nothing idiosyncratic or particularly remarkable; the story is uplifting in the most generic way possible but there's no pressing need for it to be told. It sounds like I'm slagging it, but I'm not; I have a taste for the genre and style, and you probably know if you share it. If you do, you'll find some decent, arguably riveting, if slightly castrated, parliamentary manoeuvring, culminating in a bit of underhanded legislating, albeit for a good cause.

PLAYING HEXTOK.

2010-11-02T19:23:00.000-04:00

Watch OPEN FIVE free starting October 21.

2010-10-13T13:53:00.002-04:00

Kentucker Audley's Open Five-- which I wrote about briefly, along with Audley's breezy, delightful Team Picture and prickly, challenging Holy Land, here-- will be available online for free and for a limited time over at his website starting October 21. Like all his features, it's slender and poetic and hard-to-put-into-words and worth your time.

Memento mori.

2010-10-07T23:19:00.002-04:00

I've always had bad teeth. I had juvenile periodontitis growing up, and as an adult my teeth have become so sensitive to cold and sweets that I simply can't have ice cream, fudge, or chocolate; I prefer to drink soda beverages and water at room temperature, because otherwise it hurts like the second coming of bejesus. For better or worse, I'm used to my mouth being in some kind of pain or discomfort, and I've changed my lifestyle to minimize that pain as much as possible.

That's why I didn't think much of the occasional pain in my right wisdom tooth. Most of it had rotted away a year or two ago. I was careful not to use it when masticating, and I grinned and bared through whatever pain it gave me.

In May of this year, it started acting up more than usual-- a constant pain that inflamed the gums surrounding it. At the same time, I developed a mind-splitting ear ache. It turned out that the two things weren't unrelated; the abscess in the tooth had become infected, and it had spread to my ear. The next day, it spread to my entire lower jaw. I was quickly put on medication, which quelled the pain and eliminated the infection.

The days that followed were pretty agonizing. The physical pain was immense, and I can neither adequately describe it nor overemphasize this point: it was the most pain I've ever been in in my life, and I never want to feel that kind of pain again, ever. Beyond that, however, the infection robbed me of "me".

I'm a talker, but it hurt too much to open my mouth to talk. I love to eat-- possibly the sense I derive the most pleasure from is taste-- but I couldn't do more than slurp apple sauce. And even that hurt so much and tasted so terrible-- the infection not only preventing me from chewing, but from tasting food properly-- that I couldn't stomach more than a few bites. Which meant that I went several days with hardly any food. I was weak and exhausted, unable to stand on my own. I just spent all that time lying on the couch in my pajamas, and while I'm not the most physically active sort, the lack of mobility really ground me down. The pain was so distracting that I couldn't read any books, watch any movies, or play any video games.

And all this made me rather cranky, ill-tempered, and difficult to deal with. So, like I said: it robbed me of my "me"-ness, prevented me from adhering to the behaviours, pleasures, and attitudes that collectively spell out "Tom". Pain, as one of the Mantle brothers so memorably put it, causes character distortion, and I was glad when I came out the other side of it. According to my dentist and my GP, if I had waited a few more days before seeing the doctor-- not that I'd have been able to handle the pain for that long, so that's a big "if"-- it would have spread to my heart. It would have killed me.

Which is a sobering thought. I've always been intensely, perhaps morbidly, definitely neurotically, concerned with the decay of my own flesh and my impending demise. It's something I contemplate daily, much to my Mary's chagrin. My father died at the age of thirty-eight, and somehow that's been built up in my brain as a number of Significance-- ingrained somehow is the feeling that I won't live to be older than thirty-eight. A big part of the reason why I'm so prolifically creative-- making movies with Mary, designing video and board games by myself, writing novels and stories, composing music, even running for political office in a weird way-- is because I frantically wanted to make what time I feel I have left count. It's not quite the same as wanting to become immortal through art; it's more that I want to do as much as I can and leave something behind. And since it's unlikely that we'll ever have children, art is about the only thing I have left to leave.

But now that I've actually been close to death-- not at its door, sure, but closer than I've ever been-- strangely, I don't feel that same fire under my ass to "make my time count". And that thirty-eight year deadline-- which I've always known, intellectually, to be silly, even as it held sway over me superstitiously-- doesn't seem to loom quite so large. I'm less concerned with leaving something behind, and more concerned with just plain enjoying myself; less concerned with making use of the time, and more concerned with using the time.

That's not to say I'm going to stop creating-- creating is one of those ways that I just plain enjoy myself-- or that I'm less prone to mood swings, suicidal depression, self-loathing, and moments of sudden unexplainable terror (yep, all that fun stuff is still present and accounted for). I'm still very much Tom, for better or worse, but my slight brush with death makes me want to be a happier Tom than I've been in the past. And I think I am, if only a little bit.

You Might Not Know This...

2010-09-23T12:22:00.001-04:00

... but, with what will soon be alarming regularity, Tom Draws Stuff With Captions.

THE ADVENTURES OF SIR LANCELOT.

2010-09-13T01:58:00.009-04:00

Some years ago, we were in the dollar store and we picked up a couple of those cheap-o DVDs, the sort with the ultra-thin cases with the bad center teeth that almost always result in the disc rattling around inside. Japanese monster movies, obscure action films, and fifties television seem to be what dominates the rack, and having something of an interest in all three, we have on occasion plonked down a buck. A lot of them we haven't even seen.

Such was the case with The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956-57). It wasn't until we were going through our DVDs three or four weeks ago that we came across it on our shelf and finally popped the sucker in our player. We were expecting something that, if not bad, at the very least hadn't aged very well. To put it mildly, we were wrong; it's an absolutely terrific piece of television, and we were so impressed with the four episodes on the fly-by-nighter that we actually purchased a box set containing the entire series. Said box will set you back fifteen dollars and two quarters, and it's well worth that paltry investment, as you get all thirty episodes (sixteen in black-and-white, fourteen in colour) in reasonably attractive packaging with some nice digital restoration work (for the most part; some of the colour elements have faded beyond the point of repair). The fly-by-nighter, which presents four episodes that had been in colour in black-and-white, with a lot of artifacts and freeze-frames, is not recommended.

The show presents a realistic yet romantic (in the classical sense) slant on Arthurian legend. It's a world without Magic-- all sea serpents, enchanted blades, and wizards (including Merlin) are thoroughly but cheekily debunked-- but with plenty of magic: strange adventures, black-hearted villains, and daring rescues of damsels in various states of distress abound. The writing is pretty damn sharp most of the time, utilizing a lot of humour that's still pretty rib-tickling over fifty years later without undercutting the sense of simple honest adventure at the heart of the program.

There's a fair amount of nuance to be found, too. The first episode, The Knight of the Red Plume, is a good example of what I mean. All but a few of Arthur's knights have been slaughtered in battle with another king's forces, many by the hand of the titular knight. Sir Gawain's brother is among those slain, and possessing a piece that was broken off of the Red Plume's sword, he swears vengeance. Lancelot (William Russell) shows up, wishing to join the Round Table. He only asks that he be judged for his actions henceforth. It's soon made clear why: Lancelot's sword and Gawain's shard are a perfect match.

First episode of a new TV series, and you have the untrusted new arrival blamed for scores of deaths. Think of the ways this could go, the ways it would go in so many other series: Lancelot didn't do it after all and he proves himself, slowly gaining their trust. Or, Lancelot did do it, but he wants to redeem himself, slowly gaining their trust. What the series gives us, instead, is: Lancelot did it, he was indeed the Knight of the Red Plume. He killed all those other knights, sure, including Gawain's brother, but it was in honourable combat. He didn't do anything wrong, so he damn well isn't going to apologize. Just because someone is on the other side of the battle doesn't mean they're evil.

Lancelot always conducts himself with honour, hewing impeccably to the code of chivalry, and is always presented as being exemplary in all things: moral, intellectual, physical. He's the sort that gets to express outrage at a wrong that needs righting and make the occasional high-minded speech about the true nature of chivalry. Which could be really insufferable if it wasn't leavened by a whole lot of charm on Russell's part. When he takes the piss out of Merlin's "magic"-- and it's something he does quite a bit-- it's always with a smile, with a sense of bemusement. His interactions with his squire and the various damsels-of-the-week have a similar playfulness that goes a long way towards preventing Lancelot from being some kind of stuffed shirt.

There's also the way Russell conducts himself in the swashbuckling scenes. Almost without exception, whenever he crosses swords with a villain, no matter how foul, and no matter how dire the consequences, he does so with the biggest, goofiest, most wonderful and infectious grin you've ever seen: a big open mouth of pure soundless-squealing joy as he hacks away at someone's shield. It gives the fight scenes an incredible energy that sustains them despite some pretty bad staging (said staging being the only part of the show that really hasn't aged very well).

Equally appealing is Lancelot's squire, Brian, played by Robert Scroggins. Scroggins excels at wringing laughs from looking slightly bewildered, put-upon, and clueless. He also gets a lot of the show's best lines, often exploring a tension between his gallantry and cowardice. Usually, a juvenile lead in this sort of show exists merely for viewers to roll eyes at; Scroggins makes Brian's appearances a surprising delight.

Also surprisingly delightful are the aforementioned damsels-of-the-week. Each is given a distinct personality, from the sniffling girl of The Ugly Duckling to the captive who doesn't much feel like being rescued thank you very much in Roman Wall. It's rare for a damsel-of-the-week to have much of a personality today; 'twas even more-so in 1956.

The show does have a few mis-steps (avoid Theft of Excalibur and Lancelot's Banishment if you can, as they turn on the characters acting like gibbering asshats all of the sudden and for so discernible reason), but on the whole it's excellent entertainment; when it's at its best-- Caledon and The Outcast on the more serious side of things, along with slyly comic concoctions like The Black Castle, Sir Crustabread, Ferocious Fathers, and The Ugly Duckling-- it's really quite exemplary stuff.

We Were On the News.

2010-09-05T22:46:00.003-04:00

The question is never, will the news distort the truth in pursuit of an easily-digestible narrative, but how they're going to do it. That's both a knock and not a knock at the same time; if you've got twenty-two minutes to impart to the viewer a general interest digest of local and national happenings, you're going to have to shape your footage into something with a direct thorough-line. This is something that, having been in politics, I was acutely aware of-- a nuanced statement or position reduced to something that got me into hot water, because when everything has to be timed down to the second, there's just not a whole lot of time for nuance.

I remember when the Kilpatrick scandal hit the national news, and on that level it simply became about Kwame Kilpatrick being caught sending some naughty text messages. But it was never really about that-- it was really about, on a specific level, the men he fired to prevent his sexual history from coming to light and the taxpayer money he spent to fight their unlawful termination lawsuits and, eventually, to pay them off; on a more general level, it was about a level of hubris of almost Greek proportions. Saying it was a sex scandal really missed the point of the story.

I wouldn't say that this story about us precisely "missed the point" of us, and we're not exactly offering our commentary on this news story in the above video to necessarily "take them to task" or "set the record straight". It's more about highlighting a process, to take a short glance at the methods used to shape that particular narrative.

"So, What Have You Been Doing For The Last Two Years?"

2010-09-02T10:31:00.002-04:00

Every time I look at that sidebar and see SON OF A SEAHORSE (2008), I cringe. Not because I think it's a bad film; I think it's a great film, actually, especially now that we've shorn ten minutes off to transform it into something meaner and leaner, something that really lets the bleak despair shine through. Which is, of course, the most important feature of any comedy.

No, I cringe, because this is 2010, and soon it will be 2011, and 2008 seems awfully far away. What have we, the scrappy, keep-our-overhead-low, hand-made mom-and-pop-eration filmmakers been doing, exactly, with the last two years?

Well, we tried to make a film-- that would be Olivia Forever!!-- that we stopped making for the time being. Partially this was due to soul-sucking production delays-- everyone seemed to have something go terribly wrong in their personal life as soon as someone else had theirs in order-- and partially it was because of an inability for Tom and Mary to see eye-to-eye on things. And since we're making films together, with equal partnership being the stated goal, seeing eye-to-eye is immeasurably important, more important than just soldiering through and hoping to figure it out in the editing. Close collaboration has its advantages and its disadvantages. We are, however, much closer to seeing eye-to-eye, and after we've tidied the script up to our satisfaction, we're planning on doing the whole thing over again from scratch.

In the wake of Olivia's implosion, we announced another project, The Scottish Play, adapting the work of the bard about a certain thane. The plan is to do Shakespeare, to use his words-- why else would you do Shakespeare?-- while providing our own peculiar reading of those words, a reading that errs more on the side of comedy than tragedy (not "classically", in terms of structure, but practically, in terms of laffs) and recasts the thane-- actually without much difficulty!-- as a milquetoast neurotic. We're very early in pre-production, a term which here means that we're making sure we're seeing everything eye-to-eye before we start cramming Shakespeare down our actors' throats and trying to fill all the parts.

There's another script we're working on, one that has its origins in a nightmare. It's something that, if it sticks, we can shoot much quicker than Olivia Forever!! or The Scottish Play-- and that would, of course, go a long way towards correcting that cringe whenever I see the (2008).

And since life isn't just about making films, we've been doing other things. Like, for one, working on the DVD for Seahorse. Tom's been hard at work on some game design-- both video games and tabletop-- but of course, you knew that already, having no doubt bookmarked Second Party Games a long time ago. We've started a D&D campaign, and while we're trying to get our current films jump-started, it's been a fair replacement for the social element of filmmaking that-- as homebodies and squares-- we've been missing in the interim. We've made a concerted effort to try and plow through some of the various screeners for review we've received, and to write about them-- and other films-- with some semblance of intelligence. Also, Tom almost died, but then he got better.

So, we've been keeping busy, and we'll be busier still in the months to come, and my hope is that all that busy will result in some new and shiny additions to our sidebar.

Steven Wilson's NOODLES ON MY BACK.

2010-09-01T21:11:00.004-04:00

Invasion Creations

For me, this little film is pure joy: like watching Fred Astaire dancing on ashtray sand. It's so charming, so simple, so effortless, and so gosh-darn warm and friendly. With the exception of a flippant "what-the-hell"-- and even that isn't so bad-- it's the rare surrealist piece of web cinema that doesn't traffic in violence, sex, cruelty, and bodily functions.

Not that, mind you, I have much of a problem with any of those; it's just nice to come across something that's gently demented instead of demented demented. The non-sequiturs and bits of nonsense-- from the titular noodles, to his love of hopping and soda beverages, to the appearance of his doppelhippo-- are just delightful.

The film alternates the quick cuts and fast rhythm of each verse with long wide tracking shots that emphasize the repetitive, delightfully stupid chorus. This contrast is what really makes the film, I think, and there's something almost formally elegant about that first tracking shot, which gives us the hippo, adds the whistling ape, and then the humming, hovering bird. Each animal gets its own sound, its own layer added to the mix; in this way, the shot functions also as a foregrounding of the very process of audio mixing.

And no appreciation would be complete without mentioning Roy, the squeaky-voiced pig with the tiny legs and the giant head, and the delightful duet he sings with the hippo. Roy is not just another animal, not just back-up, but a secondary lead making his debut over halfway through this 113 second opus; note how the other animals momentarily disappear when Roy appears, only returning for the chorus, thus focusing our attention on the two leads and their relationship.

That relationship can be read, without much difficulty, as an imbalanced one. It's all there in the final exchange of dialogue, as Roy, a bit too earnestly, tells Hippo he hopes to see him again soon; Hippo starts to make a hasty-if-lumbering exit, which Roy awkwardly mimics, probably wishing he hadn't spoiled the moment.

I'm not (necessarily) implying that Roy's crush on Hippo is sexual in nature, because I think the world of Noodles On My Back is a profoundly asexual one. But if you've ever been the nervous, socially-awkward one who sometimes desperately sought the attention of someone cool (meaning, in this case, both superlative and relaxed), and, having received it, said something a little too earnest and true, you know what the rest of Roy's evening is going to feel like.

The film, then, has a twinge, if only a twinge, of sadness-- just a little drop of agony in its bright blue boundless ocean of joy. That little drop is enough, I think, to deepen its hue, to make it more than a piece of mere electronic ephemera.

(Plus, it's just lots of good, clean fun.)

Disney's SLEEPING BEAUTY.

2010-08-25T02:18:00.013-04:00

(Many, many, many thanks to Tony Dayoub for the screen captures.)

I've often expressed my admiration for Sleeping Beauty, extolling it as one of the greatest animated films of all time, and certainly the greatest thing that Walt Disney's studio ever produced. This is an opinion that's often been met with befuddlement: people don't "get" my "Sleeping Beauty thing", and they wonder how on Earth could anyone champion this film above all others? Frankly, I'm about as befuddled: I can't imagine anyone not liking it. It is animation, and thus cinema, at its pinnacle.

To start with, there's the aspect ratio: 2.55:1, wider than wide. Every composition emphasizes the very horizontal-ness of the frame, whether it's tracking movement from left to right--

-- or creating moods both romantic and gloomy via the use of negative space--

-- or staging some of the most thrilling action sequences to ever be animated.

Notice how Maleficent and her flames move diagonally across the frame, pushing Prince Philip into one corner or the other. It's still very much a horizontal composition, but the injection of the vertical adds a sense of danger. Vertical movement in the film's widescreen world is upsetting and tumultuous; it's no coincidence that this frame of the post-spindle Briar Rose, intended to shock, is fundamentally vertical:

Whereas this more peaceful frame finds her horizontal:

Horizontal, but also somewhat flat. It is, to my eye, an appealing flatness, one that reoccurs through-out the film and gives it the stylized, illuminated manuscript vibe that I also find incredibly, breathtakingly, astonishingly beautiful.

And there are some who will grant me the film's formal pleasures, even go as far as to admit that it's eye-popping, but that the film lacks for "heart" or that's it is pretty but lifeless, empty. Not up to par, they say, with the True Classics. And, again, I can't really see what they're talking about; this is a film that's absolutely bursting with life.

This, after all, is the only Disney film with a charming prince who had any kind of identifiable personality. Watch the scene with Phillip and Samson again and tell me that he's just another handsome, stuffed-shirt cipher like the rest. Maleficent, for her part, is a villain with real teeth, tall and black and imperious, dripping with sadistic sarcasm and cruel menace. The climax is the liveliest that Disney's got, and also the scariest-- "Now you shall deal with me, oh prince, and all the powers of Hell!" is a line that still gives me chills down my spine.

The three fairies do their part to provide comic relief, though for me the real chuckles come from the two kings, a servant, and a bottle of wine. That scene is as loose and gangly and joyous as the hand-washing and "The Silly Song" sequences in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (classic Disney at its best always having ample room for long digressions where nothing much actually happens). And like the best of the Disney canon, the story unfolds not in bite-sized little montages and unit-like scenes but in longer sequences that possess a real sense of flow and that allow the characters to interact with one another. The illusion of life, in this case perfected with a formal elegance and stylistic flavour that none of the other Disney films ever attempted to match. That's not to slag the other great Disney films-- count me as an ardent fan of the studio's earliest features-- but rather to point out that they all have a certain look, a certain feel, in common, yet there's nothing that looks or feels like Sleeping Beauty.

It's funny, thrilling, sad, dark, stylized, daring, slender, austere, loose, and gorgeous. A masterpiece of cinema both in terms of visual splendor and storytelling. The last truly great Disney film, the absolute peak of American hand-drawn animation.

Weebl's CAT FACE.

2010-08-24T19:13:00.005-04:00

Cat Face, he's got a big cat face. He's got the face of a cat and the body of a cat. He flies through the air, because he has a cat's face, it's Cat Face.

There's a lot of random, surreal stuff on the internet, much of it interchangeable. Very little of it really lasts or is deserving of more than a brief moment of being the meme supreme. How Is Babby Formed? does not really reward repeated viewings; Badger, Badger, Badger stops being funny pretty quickly.

But Cat Face-- from the some mind that gave us Badger, Badger, Badger-- is different. Cat Face, I keep coming back to. What sets it apart, besides the precision of the title character's stilted syntax and the enormous range of its pop culture references, is that its hero is very much a cat, and acts very much like a cat. Too many cartoon animals are really people in disguise, with a human's thought processes, desires, and actions. Cat Face does not act like a cat-shaped person, but rather possesses a cat's innate selfishness, instinctual behaviours, and peculiar sense of logic. The series gets a lot of mileage out of its protagonist's very specific way of looking at and dealing with the world.

And, interestingly, he's also the straight man at the center of it all, surrounded by a cast of loonies and archetypes: Old Lady, a geriatric pensioner who he abducts off the street; Posh Tom, who is always ROOT-ing through his garbage; Face Cat, a surreal (and seriously creepy yet also kind of endearing) doppelganger; Box Cat, who embodies a very particular part of the feline experience; and, um, Mr. So-Called Gordon Ramsay. Yes, that Gordon Ramsay.

So, it's that sort of show. The quality can sometimes get a bit uneven-- I couldn't stop cringing through the makeover episode, for one-- but at its prime, it's head-and-shoulders above pretty much every other Flash-animated series on the internet. I think it's very much worth your time, especially if you've any affection for felis catus.

Watch it here.

Erik Mauck's STRAIGHT TO THE BONE.

2010-08-22T14:51:00.007-04:00

(Disclosure: I became a "Facebook Friend" of Mr. Mauck's shortly after seeing his picture.)

Straight To the Bone is one of the most satisfying pictures, indie or studio, American or foreign, that I've seen this year. It bears some formal similarities to the casual shaky-cam oh-my-god-look-how-real-it-is school that's started to metastasize in American independent films, but it's more patient with its characters and their moment-to-moment interactions without getting lazy or dull, because it is also more attentive. The dialogue and plot, while very much improvised, is at the same time tremendously focused and direct: people don't waste a lot of time talking around things in Straight To the Bone, but rather discuss them frankly, openly, honestly, articulately, perhaps even didactically, but always in an adult way, cutting-- well, straight to the bone.

If the great thematic burden of many independent films is post-collegiate apprehension about the future, Straight To the Bone registers the profound disappoint that sets in when you realize you haven't made the life you wanted for yourself. In this way, the film-- despite some amusing moments-- is not a comedy. It's not a bauble or a trifle; it does not indulge the antics of the arrestedly-developed and well-intentioned but rather insists that actions (and inactions) have consequences. It's a heavy film, weighty, serious-minded, as thick and densely-packed as other American indies are light and loose.

It is a major work, and I suggest you see it as soon as you are able.

Carter poster.

2010-08-08T14:20:00.002-04:00

I made this poster for Ryan Balas's film Carter.

In Case There Was Any Doubt...

2010-07-26T18:52:00.003-04:00

I, Tom Russell, the sole author and copyright holder of the stories collected in Seven Romances, on this 26th day of July, 2010, hereby reiterate and for all time bequeath and declare that certain specific rights to these works to the public domain, these being the non-exclusive rights for any individual anywhere to adapt any or all of those works into the cinematic medium, taking any form their adapters desire-- feature or short, video or film, silent or sound, faithful or loose, for profit or not, asking only in return that the credit "adapted from Seven Romances by Tom Russell" appear in the onscreen credits (opening or closing).

Love.

2010-07-23T03:31:00.003-04:00

As filmmakers and film bloggers, we tend to shy away from rambling on about what's going on in our lives; first of all, who really cares?, and secondly, isn't that what twitter is for? That said, I hope you'll forgive me a few paragraphs while I talk about my grandfather. He died this past Sunday, at the age of seventy-two.

He was a difficult man. He was stubborn and ornery, and for a good many years, he subsided on a diet of cigarettes, beer, and ice cream. I'm not exaggerating very much; sometimes, sure, he'd ask my grandmother to make him something or run to the store. Let's say, for example, that he asked for some fish from Arthur Treacher's. She'd buy him the fish, he would take two or three bites, and then throw the rest out-- much to her chagrin. Other than that, he wouldn't eat, save for a bowl of ice cream.

He smoked a carton of cigarettes on most days; the dark wooden ashtray he kept next to his blue-cushioned rocking chair would be stacked with butts. The very sight of it would make me nauseous. And as for the beer, he'd go through three or four cases a week. While I have memories of my grandfather, while I don't have a shortage for personal anecdotes-- some remembered, some that I've forgotten but that have since become one of those family myths that get retold precisely when it's the most embarrassing time to do so-- the thing I remember most is the continuity of his regimen. The visual image that comes to mind when I think of my grandfather is always of him sitting in his stained blue chair, wearing two or three heavy flannel shirts even in the summer, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in another, the ashtray heaping full, watching the Travel Channel. Always, always, always watching the Travel Channel.

As he drank more heavily, he gave my grandmother more hell, and to make a long story shorter, they made the Lockhorns look like Romeo and his Juliet. Not that my grandfather was ever physically violent. He was intractable in his opinions, even and especially if they had no basis in fact; he would crank up the heat in the middle of the summer, complaining of phantom chills; he would insult her, call her names, yell at her; he seldom bathed; he was seldom sober and thus very seldom was he lucid.

And then, one day, he stopped drinking (and smoking). It wasn't too long after Mary and I got married that he was admitted to the hospital and the doctors told him, if you don't stop now, you're going to die and soon. And so he stopped. That old wooden ashtray was removed and he got a nicotine inhaler, which he gnawed on almost constantly. The lack of beer made him more talkative, more aware, more lucid, but only slightly: he was stone-cold sober when he told us how he and his brother escaped Nazi Germany by hiding in caves and outrunning a tornado, this despite the fact that he was born in 1938 in Michigan.

I had hoped, when he had stopped drinking, that he would soften; somewhere in my brain, I had the idea that those qualities that made him hard to get along with weren't really his qualities, that they were the fault of the bottle. I think part of it is the romantic notion that there was no way my grandmother would have fallen for such an ornery son-of-a-gun. So, I was slightly dismayed when all those unpleasant traits and behaviours become much worse in those last few years of his life: he became more stubborn, neglected his hygiene more drastically, was prone to more outbursts of temper. And his poor health and dietary habits made him at once more helpless and more demanding, and thus more exasperating.

As I said before, a difficult man. Never very easy to get along with. And I'd love to tell you about the time he cut a leech off of my foot with his pocket-knife, to show you those moments of tender kindness that might redeem him in your eyes, that might convince you to love him as we loved him. But I'm not going to do that. We loved him, but it wasn't in spite of him; it wasn't all due to some tiny moment or memory of a time when he was acting out-of-character.

This reminds me of a teacher I had in high school who said his wife often asked him why he loved her, and he always replied that he couldn't give her a reason. For if his love was contingent on some quality she possessed, what would happen to his love when she possessed it no longer? If he loved her for her beauty, what happens when it fades? If he loved her for her intellect, what happens when she slid into senility. For it to really be love, he said, it couldn't be love for a reason. (A year or two after my graduation, I heard that she divorced him; it absolutely wrecked him.)

I don't know about that, exactly, as it makes love sound kind of mystical and far-away. I think we choose to love people; I think we invest ourselves in them emotionally, that we choose to forgive or exaggerate their faults or their assets. At the same time, I can't tell you the reason I chose to love my grandfather; I can't tell you why, as he got more difficult to get along with, I did not allow his place in my heart to be overcome with the sort of vicious apathy that resides where my love for my mother once did. I can't say why I loved my grandfather, only that the same qualities that made me so angry with him must also, perversely, be the same qualities that inspired my affection and, as of late, my grieving.

The way he died inspired the same mixture of feelings. His nose began bleeding and would not stop. My grandmother told him to go to the hospital, to get it cauterized. He refused. No matter how many times she asked, no matter how stringently she insisted, he remained as stubborn as ever, and he continued bleeding for the next twenty-four hours. At any time, he could have went to the hospital to get it taken care of. By the time he finally came around and allowed himself to be admitted for treatment, he had lost over four pints of blood. It was too late to save him.

My grandfather, who had somehow survived enough lung and kidney damage to fill an entire cancer ward, bled to death out of sheer stubbornness. That was the kind of man he was.

I miss him.

SEVEN ROMANCES is going OUT OF PRINT!

2010-07-22T22:56:00.002-04:00

Tom's book Seven Romances-- a collection of less than eight but more than six love stories-- is going out-of-print August 1. It is not likely to go back in print any time soon-- if at all. If you want a copy, now's the time to buy it. It's $10 for 99 pages of bitterness, despair, and kinky Amish lesbian sex.

Filmmakers might be interested to know that they can adapt any or all of the seven romances into any film, short or feature, without paying a single cent. Well, that is, a single cent in royalties or adaptation rights. You would, after all, have to have a copy of the book, and the only way to get your hands on that is to buy one before August 1.

Rantasmo's NEEDS MORE GAY.

2010-07-15T01:19:00.004-04:00

Our real-life friend Jamie Maurer, alias Rantasmo, is doing a very entertaining yet characteristically thoughtful series of media and pop-cultural analysis video essays, Needs More Gay, at After Elton. They are, as the kids say, NSFW.

The most recent episode is about Gregg Araki's Teenage Apocalypse trilogy:

Previous episodes have covered drag queen movies and Japanese culture.

There's a new video every Wednesday. Check 'em out.

2010-07-14T18:03:00.002-04:00

A while back, I mentioned that Lucas McNelly is seeking crowd-funding for his new film Up Country.

Now, again, as I've said before, I've always been kind of wary of crowd-funding, but (as I also said before) if ever I had the moolah to give, I'd want to give it to McNelly: a passionate, smart, effective filmmaker who doesn't just talk about the independent film community, but has done his damnedest to make it happen. This is the bloke who programmed the Indies-For-Indies screening series, an ultimately quixotic but none-the-less heroic effort to bring truly independent films to Pittsburgh, with the filmmakers in question getting a cut of the ticket sales.

A real gentleman, this McNelly, and he's eight hundred dollars short of his fund-raising goal with fifty hours left to go. The way this Kickstarter thing works is, if they don't hit their goal, they don't get a single cent. So, if you have some spare change, and you want to help this very interesting filmmaker make his second feature, here's the link.

THE SCOTTISH PLAY: Getting Ready To Boogie.

2010-07-08T00:04:00.001-04:00

Those of you who know us/have been following our filmmaking misadventures for a while know that we've spent most of the last two years trying to make a film called Olivia Forever!!, a film that, for a number of reasons, never quite came together and that we finally decided to abandon for the time being (we plan to return to it down the road). That decision left us (not to mention our rather peevish actors) in a bit of lurch as we cast about for a new project.

And, to make a long story short, we've found it: a very Russellian take on William Shakespeare's play concerning a certain thane of Scotland. We won't reveal too much about said take at this stage in the game, except to say that, no, it won't be one of those stupid "Ooh, look, there's a motorcycle in this Shakespeare adaption" bull-crap-a-thons, nor will we be setting certain monologues in a video store. It's a film version that will not abide disrespecting Shakespeare, even if we have no qualms about adding a few sight gags and pratfalls into what is already conventionally regarded as the bard's most knee-slappingly hilarious play.

We're very early in pre-production-- still haven't cast a single role, though we have some inklings-- but we're very excited and hoping to shoot in the autumn.

Three Galvanic Films.

2010-07-01T17:42:00.006-04:00

There are films you like, films you love obsessively, films that you come back to again and again-- and then there are the films that make you feel like John Keats when he took that first look at Chapman's Homer. These galvanic films are immeasurably important on a deeply personal level, and I wrote a bit about one of those films, Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, yesterday.

In that spirit, I thought it might be nice to tell you about three other films, of the select and elite few, that resonated with Tom deeply as both a viewer and an artist. Here, then, in roughly the order I discovered them, is a personal look at my galvanic films.
As I wrote over at Hammer To Nail last year, Tom Laughlin's Billy Jack was, for better or worse, the film that made me want to be a filmmaker. More than that, it was the first film in which I was intensely aware of the director, of cinema being a potentially personal and idiosyncratic art form. This awareness didn't come out of any profound appreciation of his style, but of the sheer messiness of the film, the way, as I said in that Hammer To Nail piece, you can almost see the slightly-smudged tape holding the film strip together. There was something appealing and charming about its hand-made-ness, about its lack of polish, and it's that same vibe we try to capture with the deliberately "doubled-up" noisy sound of Son of a Seahorse, and that same film's hand-made animatronics (by Steampunk Legend Jake Hildebrandt).

Before I saw Olivier's Henry V, I had little use for pageantry in films. I was one of those twits who went into a film looking for the "meaning"-- that is, a neatly-encapsulate theme or thesis-- and disdained any digression therefrom. There was no film, I was convinced, that couldn't be twenty minutes shorter. What an idiot I was!

After Henry V held me in its spell, I was able to appreciate aesthetic beauty in its own right, art for its own sake, able to enjoy films moment-to-moment as an experience rather than hovering over it like it was some kind of exercise. While this aesthetic sense-- so vital to appreciating film as an art, and art, period!-- is one that was developed more exquisitely by other films, particularly those of Powell & Pressburger, this is the film that first showed me what I had been missing in all the intervening years.

I feel so much pity for those poor souls (several of them film critics) who never had a film that did to them what Henry V did to me.
Ivan Passer's Born To Win, with its whiplash tonal shifts, loose clothesline of a plot, and unique structure (more on that in just a moment) feels like it's just barely being held together by George Segal's dynamo of a performance. But that's just the point: Segal's world is coming apart at the seams, and his scheming hairdresser junkie is acutely aware that he's living on borrowed time.

Structurally, the film unfolds in movements-- ten or twenty minute blocks of scenes dealing with this aspect, than that one, rather than the intercut-all-the-various-characters-and-threads school that's long been the norm. It's something that I like a lot about Passer's film, something that we've very consciously done in our own work.

The Feminism of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.

2010-06-30T20:42:00.005-04:00

I've seen Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West about, oh, a dozen times now, most recently two days before my birthday in the company of nine friends who had never seen it before. Of those nine, five liked it and four were, well, not quite so enamored, likely turned off by its eccentric structure and length.

Anyone who's seen Son of a Seahorse can no doubt attest to that's picture peculiar structure and sense of time, and I'm not being pretentious when I say that our little character comedy was deeply influenced by Leone's film. Indeed, it's one of those films that changed my entire perspective on cinema, changed my conception of what films are and can be. Understand, I'm not saying that it was merely a good or even great film, but that I'm talking about something more galvanic: it fundamentally changed me as a human being, and I can only think of about a dozen or so films that have done that.

And because it's such an important film for me, and because its treatment of time, space, and story structure is something I find consistently astonishing, I sometimes forget that one of the other things that sets it apart from Leone's other westerns is that it is in many ways a feminist film.

This will surprise those who argue that spaghetti westerns are inherently misogynistic: But wait, they say, what about, oh, the aborted half-rape scene with Charles Bronson? What about the skeezy sex scene with Henry Fonda? What about the way she's forced into selling her home, the way in which she's completely dependent on and victimized by these men of violence? Cardinale's character is in many ways a pawn, bandied about and caught in the middle.

The film depicts a world in which women had few options and no power; isn't that, then, the very thing feminism seeks to correct? It registers with great empathy her desperation to stay alive; it shares in her frustrated impotence. The film, through her eyes, shows us what is terrible and frightening about violence. Compare this to Leone's earlier westerns. They might not make the always-named man-with-no-name a hero, but because he is, by dint of his sheer awesome bad-assery, the character to which our sympathies are most aligned, his violence isn't particularly scary.

Compare this with Bronson-- the closest thing to an Eastwood character the film has. The character has two moments of absolute brutality: the aforementioned stripping and almost-rape of Cardinale and the savage torture-- much tsk-tsk'd by Alex Cox in his, er, idiosyncratic spaghetti western book 1,000 Ways To Die-- of the dude in suspenders.

If the Eastwood characters of the Dollars trilogy had committed actions like these, it would have killed our sympathies for the character. He would cease to be a bad-ass and start to be a truly reprehensible monster (a slippery slope that I'm finding to be explored quite interestingly, by-the-by, in the PS3 game God of War III). And that would have killed those films. Not that, to be clear, I need or prefer the lollipop of likability in my protagonists, but because the Dollars films in particular (unlike the more meditative Once Upon a Time) are entertainments, dealing in delightful and exquisite surface pleasures first and substance second.

If Once Upon a Time in the West is more substantial, it's because our sympathies, our point-of-view, are most closely aligned with Cardinale. It's really her film, and we regard the men in it, from Fonda to Bronson, through her eyes; we view their violence through her eyes. Just as the male gaze is often present in films even when there isn't a male present to do the gazing, this female gaze-- terrified, trapped, bristling against her place in life and wanting better-- is present even in scenes, like the family massacre or the torture of the man in suspenders, when Cardinale is nowhere to be seen.

Cardinale's presence in the film is what allows the violence to hit us harder and deeper, and what allows us to experience a kind of emotional journey that Leone's earlier epic cartoons-- no matter how pleasurable and iconic those assured masterpieces are-- just weren't capable of.

Three Films By Kentucker Audley

2010-06-27T23:55:00.001-04:00

I find it difficult to write about Kentucker Audley's films,
not because I have nothing to say,
but because I don't have words for it.

These slender sixty-minute features
feel strangely timeless,
languid and elliptical in the same breath,
making no points, but simply observing,
simply observing.

These three films are distinct:
Team Picture, a comedy,
Open Five, thick with Memphis,
Holy Land, as prickly as its "hero",
experimental and profane and smoking too much
and yet and yes, holy.

But all three also blend together.
But all three also are Audley's.

They remind me of the only poet worth a damn,
they remind me of William Carlos Williams
and his wheelbarrow of rain water
and his so sweet and so cold plums.

Concrete, brief, bold, naive, fresh, true:
image and sound, voice and body,
time and moment,
without addition
without imposition
yet also not without author:
the films are very much his,
the films are very much him.

For a filmmaker like myself
who analyzes and argues,
(and overanalyzes and overargues)
it's a magic trick I can't untangle
one I can't break down into wires and handkerchiefs
one I regard with burning envy.

McNelly and Motlagh and Bears, Oh My!

2010-06-19T16:19:00.002-04:00

Well, no bears, actually. Sorry.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly, whose first feature Blanc De Blanc I found so impressive, is trying to raise funding for his second, Up Country, via Kickstarter. I've always been kinda dubious when it comes to filmmakers asking strangers to donate money, but if ever I was going to chip in on one of these things, it'd be for McNelly's film: his first one is that good, and for an all-too-brief stretch of time he programmed an ambitious but poorly-attended series of independent films, Indies For Indies. This is a guy who's actually given back to the independent community that is so often so callously invoked by people trying to guilt you into funding their film. He's the real deal, and if you've got a few bucks to spare, you might want to consider chipping in.

Amir Motlagh, whose film whale was the subject of one of my early reviews, recently announced via twitter that his film is going to be available via IndieFlix starting June 22, on YouTube Rentals starting July 6, and then on Netflix later in the year. It's really exciting that his film, which is undeniably personal, idiosyncratic, and experimental, is going to be readily available to a wider audience. I highly recommend seeing it.

SON OF A SEAHORSE reviewed.

2010-06-15T10:42:00.002-04:00

A.A. Dowd, a critic we respect as much for his biting prose as his discerning taste, wrote a review of Son of a Seahorse. And, to be sure, it ain't a rave; the notice is mixed with a definite lean towards the negative. And while of course we have a different opinion about the film's success or worth, we still really dug the review because he gets us, he understands where we're coming from, and it does give a prospective viewer a pretty good idea of what the film is like and whether or not they think they're going to dig it.

The Russells are [not] cut from any shape or variety of traditional Hollywood cloth. These two are loud and proud indie guerillas. They favor marathon takes and lengthy digressions, long shots and longer conversations. It's tempting to lump them into the mumblecore camp, except their sense of humor is somehow both drier and broader, with an affinity for garish caricatures and bizarro non-sequitors.

...

If Son of a Seahorse often seems like a different movie scene to scene, its saving grace is its uniting principle: that marriage is the most rewarding pain in the ass you'll ever willfully subject yourself to. It's hard not to have a certain affection for any film that deals with married life in a way that's neither cloying nor rigorously cynical. The Russells, husband and wife filmmakers with a word or two to share on the subject, invest their hit-or-miss comic enterprise with an endearing breadth of genuine feeling.

Read more here.

The new DVD will be coming soonish, double-pinkie-swear promise.

Murdering is funnier than killing.

2010-05-18T21:07:00.000-04:00

A good low-budget director is above all able to adapt (and aptly) to whichever circumstances should arise. For example: in The Man Who Loved, there was a scene that featured pretty much every member of the cast, and it took us a lot of hoop-jumping to find a day that worked for everyone. And so imagine our dismay when almost everyone showed up-- that is, everyone but one, who was to be something of a major focus in the scene. There was no way we could reschedule the scene, and so we redistributed her dialogue to other characters and lamp-shaded her absence. And doing so actually helped us focus on what the scene was actually about.

Similarly, we're more than happy to rewrite lines for an actor, to make it flow more naturally for them, to let them put their own spin (and thus their own selves) into it. At the same time, our writing aims to be flavourful and precise, and thus somewhat immutable: you might be able to preserve the meaning of the words and the underlying emotion, but changing the words changes the feel of the words, the rhythm, the timbre, and-- when writing comedy-- the funny.

There's a line in Olivia Forever!! in which Olivia refers to her Halloween costume from "the two years previous"; Adrienne often flipped the word order to "the two previous years". Now, both versions mean the same thing, but "the two years previous" has a slightly dry or academic feel that communicates something about the character and her personal style. "The two previous years" communicates nothing but the facts; all the flavour is lost. And, this being a film about the hazards of idiosyncrasy, and Olivia being a character who derives a great deal of pleasure from verbiage, it was important that we preserve that flavour, and so this was one case in which we couldn't let it be rephrased. The punchline to all this? We ended up cutting the entire scene-- including the line-- anyway.

Not that, again, our scripts are considered holy and untouchable. We're constantly cutting and revising, looking for ways to punch it up, to be more precise, more flavourful. Recently, we were going over the following dialogue in rehearsal:

RODNEY: And you weren't planning on killing me?
OLIVIA: It hadn't occurred to me.
RODNEY (mishearing): It had?
OLIVIA (louder, clearer): Hadn't.

And it occurred to us that the word "killing" got the meaning across, but didn't have much flavour.

"Let's change that to murdering," we said: "'murdering' is a funnier word than 'killing'."

We crossed it out and they read it over again: it did, indeed, seem funnier. The word was more precise, communicating more of a sense of deliberate violence, which will hopefully stand in stronger and more comedic contrast to the polite, friendly tenor of the conversation. And it's a more flavourful word: "killing" starts strong but quickly becomes a slippery mush of l-sounds that mumble their way into "ing"; "murdering", by contrast, consists of three distinct syllables, the first two of which rhyme and are expelled forcefully outward: nothing soft, lilting, or indistinct about it.

It is, in our estimating, just the right word.

The Best Sentence Ever.

2010-05-04T03:14:00.007-04:00

John Adams finished off his inaugural address with a truly epic sentence. It can be summed up as "If all these things are qualifications for the job, then I'll be President and I'll do my best." But, as in most things, summing it up takes the beauty out of it. Take your time, don't skim, and enjoy the ride:

"On this subject it might become me better to be silent or to speak with diffidence; but as something may be expected, the occasion, I hope, will be admitted as an apology if I venture to say that if a preference, upon principle, of a free republican government, formed upon long and serious reflection, after a diligent and impartial inquiry after truth; if an attachment to the Constitution of the United States, and a conscientious determination to support it until it shall be altered by the judgments and wishes of the people, expressed in the mode prescribed in it; if a respectful attention to the constitutions of the individual States and a constant caution and delicacy toward the State governments; if an equal and impartial regard to the rights, interest, honor, and happiness of all the States in the Union, without preference or regard to a northern or southern, an eastern or western, position, their various political opinions on unessential points or their personal attachments; if a love of virtuous men of all parties and denominations; if a love of science and letters and a wish to patronize every rational effort to encourage schools, colleges, universities, academies, and every institution for propagating knowledge, virtue, and religion among all classes of the people, not only for their benign influence on the happiness of life in all its stages and classes, and of society in all its forms, but as the only means of preserving our Constitution from its natural enemies, the spirit of sophistry, the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, the profligacy of corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments; if a love of equal laws, of justice, and humanity in the interior administration; if an inclination to improve agriculture, commerce, and manufacturers for necessity, convenience, and defense; if a spirit of equity and humanity toward the aboriginal nations of America, and a disposition to meliorate their condition by inclining them to be more friendly to us, and our citizens to be more friendly to them; if an inflexible determination to maintain peace and inviolable faith with all nations, and that system of neutrality and impartiality among the belligerent powers of Europe which has been adopted by this Government and so solemnly sanctioned by both Houses of Congress and applauded by the legislatures of the States and the public opinion, until it shall be otherwise ordained by Congress; if a personal esteem for the French nation, formed in a residence of seven years chiefly among them, and a sincere desire to preserve the friendship which has been so much for the honor and interest of both nations; if, while the conscious honor and integrity of the people of America and the internal sentiment of their own power and energies must be preserved, an earnest endeavor to investigate every just cause and remove every colorable pretense of complaint; if an intention to pursue by amicable negotiation a reparation for the injuries that have been committed on the commerce of our fellow-citizens by whatever nation, and if success can not be obtained, to lay the facts before the Legislature, that they may consider what further measures the honor and interest of the Government and its constituents demand; if a resolution to do justice as far as may depend upon me, at all times and to all nations, and maintain peace, friendship, and benevolence with all the world; if an unshaken confidence in the honor, spirit, and resources of the American people, on which I have so often hazarded my all and never been deceived; if elevated ideas of the high destinies of this country and of my own duties toward it, founded on a knowledge of the moral principles and intellectual improvements of the people deeply engraven on my mind in early life, and not obscured but exalted by experience and age; and, with humble reverence, I feel it to be my duty to add, if a veneration for the religion of a people who profess and call themselves Christians, and a fixed resolution to consider a decent respect for Christianity among the best recommendations for the public service, can enable me in any degree to comply with your wishes, it shall be my strenuous endeavor that this sagacious injunction of the two Houses shall not be without effect."

TURTLENECK # 1: THE MAN WHO LOVED (2007, the Russells)

2010-05-01T13:46:00.009-04:00

There's something wrong with Sarah. Something inside her that she doesn't quite understand. Her husband, George, hopes it'll just go away on its own. But his passivity only seems to make things worse.

A tense yet delicate portrait of a marriage in crisis, The Man Who Loved is directed by wife-and-husband filmmakers Mary and Tom Russell with verve, humour, honesty, and an eye for everyday beauty.

SPECIAL FEATURES:
+ Directors' commentary.
+ Trailers for future Turtleneck releases Son of a Seahorse (# 2) and Olivia Forever!!
+ Cinema du Kitteh: a collection of three 2006 shorts (Cat Singles, Cat-astrophe, and The Invaders From Above) created by the Russells and starring the feline thespians of The Man Who Loved.

You can purchase this film either through CreateSpace or Amazon. The cost to you is the same either way, $15, but CreateSpace gives us a significantly larger royalty-- $7.80 per disc, as opposed to Amazon's $3.30.

OLIVIA FOREVER!!: The IMMORTAL DEFENSE Shoot.

2010-04-29T00:33:00.001-04:00

This film is a period piece, taking place in 2004, and we've been pretty stringent about avoiding anachronisms, with one exception. That exception is the presence of Immortal Defense, Paul Eres's astonishing 2007 tower defense game (it's definitely worth the $9.99, but if you're unsure, download the free demo-- it's over thirty levels). With Paul's kind permission, we wrote his game into our script. Today we shot that scene.

Sometimes, the appearance of one work of art nestled within another makes perfect sense. Look at, for example, Reign Over Me; Shadow of the Colossus, and its motifs/imagery of collapsing giants, fits perfectly within the context of Sandler's 9/11 trauma.

Olivia Forever!! and Immortal Defense don't quite fit in that way; thematically, our little bauble and Paul's philosophical/metaphysical science fiction are miles apart. But in the scene itself, a comparison is made between Olivia and the game. It's not a particularly deep comparison-- it doesn't reveal anything new about the character-- but it carries tremendous significance for the character making the comparison, becomes a cherished memory, a part of their story, a token of love.

There's been some fresh hullabaloo about whether or not games are art. And while that's never been a question for me, while I've always come down squarely on the Art side of the argument, I can say that one characteristic of art is that it is potentially transformative: it can transform us, or be transformed by us, given a significance in our lives that even its creators might not have intended. Mary and Tom first met, first spoke, first bonded over a mutual appreciation of Taxi Driver-- hardly a romantic film, but one that is forever tied to our story and our lives, just as Immortal Defense will always be part of Tedward's and Olivia's, a totem to a time and a feeling, lush and sensuous, bursting with colour and light and possibility.

OLIVIA FOREVER!!: The Halloween Party.

2010-04-27T00:32:00.000-04:00

On Friday, we got another twenty seconds in the can. If that doesn't sound particularly promising, well, it is and it isn't.

The shoot in question was for a cut-away gag. The movie's going along, a scene's in progress, someone mentions something that gets us into this scene, scene does it's thing (ha!), and we're back to the original scene. We have a couple of these sorts of gags planned, one of which involves a Sasquatch we're still in the process of trying to acquire without spending too much money.

That's a tricky thing, actually: part of how we can justify making films of perhaps limited commercial appeal is that we make it out of our own pocket, and part of how we can justify making films out of our own pocket when we don't have that much in our pocket to begin with is that we make our films cheaply and quickly. We pride ourselves on being the scrappy low-budget filmmakers. Our most expensive film to date cost under five hundred dollars. And so we can't in good conscience justify spending almost as much for a Sasquatch costume that's going to have at most thirty seconds of screen-time, even if perhaps those thirty seconds would be worth it.

The shoot we had on Friday, this cut-away gag Halloween Party shoot, hardly cost us anything in terms of dough (which, of course, we like) but did take a lot of preparation and planning and coordinating of schedules. Our actors aren't getting paid for their work and have day jobs; finding a day that two actors have in common for a rehearsal and shoot is sometimes a chore. Finding a day when a third can join them can be nearly impossible. Having learned this lesson in the past, we like to write around "guest stars"-- limiting most actors to one really good scene. See, for example, Son of a Seahorse, where we did this extensively.

But this film, and this scene, aren't really amenable to that approach. For the Halloween Party to be convincing, we needed it to look like a party. And so, in addition to our two leads, we had planned on seven background characters. I'm not going to call them "extras", because it's vaguely dehumanizing. And, having worked on a few horror sets as an extra, I can vouch that most directors treated me and my fellow extras like cattle, flesh-and-blood cogs in place to realize their vision. And if I ever treat a fellow human being like that, I hope someone punches me in the God-damn face.

So: background characters. Seven of them. We even had a bio in mind for each, what their relationships were with one another, et cetera. Not because the viewer would pick any of that up-- it is, again, only a twenty second shot, with the focus squarely on the two leads-- but because it would give the actors something to do rather than stand there bored out of their wits.

I confirmed the day before the shoot with some of them and the day of the shoot with the others. One I saw in person less than two hours before the shoot. You can probably see where this is going: of the seven, only two showed up. We were so disheartened that we didn't give our two background actors their bios, as it's a little hard to explain a web of relationships between just two people.

We, of course, made due, as that's what you have to do when you're the scrappy low-budget filmmaker. We even put Tom in the shot, his face obscured by a Virtual Boy, so that we'd have a third background character. Because we're a two person crew, this necessitated balancing the boom mike rather precariously on a light-stand. We shot about a dozen takes in about as many minutes, turned out the shop-lights and watched one of those aforementioned horror movies in which the lowly extras were treated so poorly. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and when we were done, we had twenty seconds of footage.

And over the weekend, we were faced with that fact-- we had expended a lot of time and energy for twenty seconds of footage. We have a shoot coming up on Wednesday that might net us another thirty, maybe forty. We're lucky if we get a shoot a week-- usually something comes up with one actor or another and we have a week or two with nothing. And so getting these tiny little fragments for a feature-length film, well, it's a little maddening, no doubt about it. It's a long ways from Seahorse, where we'd typically shoot ten or fifteen minutes at a time.

At the same time, we're kinda consciously trying to shoot all this small stuff now so that it makes it into the film. We've been working on this film for so long that we just want to be done with it; if we shot all the major (i.e., long) scenes, we might just declare the film done before we've shot the little piecemeal stuff. We'll say, "Well, we don't really need it", and maybe we really don't. I mean, you don't really need anything-- there's always a way to make it work, and one should always be flexible.

We don't need a Halloween party cut-away gag, and we don't need a Sasquatch, but at the same time they add something to the film, and they're things that we want. By shooting them now, with all these other, bigger, more necessary scenes still ahead of us, we ensure that they don't get lost in our eventual frustration and apathy.

At the same time, we want to cut down on that frustration and apathy, and so we're aiming to alternate some of these little shoots with some bigger ones. And maybe even doing two shoots a week, if we can.

Four Things I Noticed About HATARI!

2010-04-19T00:13:00.005-04:00

Somehow, Tom had gone his entire life without ever seeing Hatari!, the 1962 Howard Hawks film, something which his Mary, who had seen the film several times, remedied this evening. It's a remarkable film, one that I look forward to seeing many, many times in the future. But four things stuck out during this first viewing, those being:

-- How episodic the film is. While each scene and sequence definitely exists in the context of the others, you don't get the sense of some arbitrary over-arching thing or some sort of threat; there's no headlong rush towards some kind of final confrontation. The film ends when the hunting season ends. There's a lot of attention to process, and I wonder how many procedurals, police and otherwise, would benefit from a more episodic structure.

-- Also, how languid the film is. It's two-and-a-half hours, takes its time, is unhurried. It reminds me of something Capra once said about It Happened One Night, which had opened as a flop both critically and commercially before slowly building word-of-mouth: "People found the film longer than usual and, surprise, funnier, much funnier than usual. But, biggest surprise of all, they could remember in detail a good deal of what went on in the film and they found that everybody else did and that it was great fun talking about this and that scene. And let's go see it again and take the Johnsons." I think films that are longer than usual are funnier, more exciting, and more memorable than usual because they are long. The extra time gives you more of a sense of the characters, of the setting, gives you a greater feel for the work.

-- That said, there are some characters that I'd like to have a little less time with. After the first ninety minutes or so, Red Buttons start to wear awfully thin.

-- And somewhere around the ninety minute mark, the film transforms from lots-of-manly-action plus comedy to lots-of-comedy plus manly action, and, the gratingness of Red Buttons aside, I had no problem with this shift. In fact, it felt right, and part of that I think has to do with qualities number one and two-- how episodic and long the film is. Those qualities give the film the freedom to shift gears, to build in another direction. It's not merely a matter of "mixing" genres, of shoehorning one into another, but of shifting them smoothly, of creating enough room for something else.

Stumbling Towards "Brand".

2010-04-16T20:03:00.010-04:00

Like a lot of filmmakers who got into this crazy, quixotic enterprise with art, as opposed to commerce, in mind, we've struggled with the m-word. No, not that m-word. The other m-word. Marketing.

And though one of us recently affixed his name to what some could term an anti-marketing screed, it must be said that we've never really been against marketing. It's an important tool, a means to an end, that end being, butts in the seats or, more accurately, DVDs in players.

Last year, we released two of our films on DVD. The Great Russell Self-Distribution Experiment of 2009 was, in no uncertain terms, a disaster. We weren't expecting to turn a profit, or even frankly to break even-- at a three dollar royalty per disc, we'd have to have sold a lot of discs to even come close. For us, success was designated as, getting the films out there to people instead of continuing to create in a vacuum. Creating in a vacuum is the most frustrating, most alienating thing, and we wanted to break out of that. Having sold less than a dozen discs between two films in the space of a year, I would say that we're still in that vacuum.

A big part of this, I think, was a failure of marketing. There are a lot of indie filmmakers out there, like us, toiling away in obscurity, like us, pestering critics and bloggers to watch their films, like us, having nothing to show for it, like us. And they're using Createspace, just like we are, and sending everyone the more "legitimate" Amazon link, just like we did, and hoping that they'll plop down "X" number of dollars on an unknown entity.

And, being on twitter and frequenting various indie blogs, I've been on the other side of this-- I've followed the link to that Amazon page, read the description, glanced at the cover, and said, "Maybe" instead of "Yes." And to be honest with ourselves, if we had no knowledge of our films, if we were just following a link and looking at the cover, we would have "maybe'd" ourselves.

And so, the first goal of The Great Russell Self-Distribution Experiment, 2010 Edition, is to correct that. We want to remove "maybe" from the equation. We might not get "yes"-- after all, this isn't exactly a booming economy we're living in-- but we'll settle for "I'm adding this to my list".

Part of this involves getting some reviewers to pay attention to our stuff-- something we're getting slightly (if only slightly!) better at. Part involves making sure the marketing materials are eye-catching, distinctive, attractive, and memorable-- something which, as you're about to see, I think we have gotten better at. And part of it involves creating/defining our "brand"-- and, yes, I did throw up in my mouth a little just typing that, and, yes, we feel queasy talking about ourselves as some kind of commodity someone's about to synergize through an aggressive new media paradigm. But if we're going to be successful at all this time around-- not necessarily financially successful, as even at our most optimistic I don't see us turning a profit from filmmaking in the near future, but in terms of introducing eyeballs to films-- it's going to be through promoting not individual films but a body of work by two idiosyncratic but capable artisans.

We hope/feel that our new approach will encompass all of these aspects, and, acting according to the theory that seeing all the wires makes the trick charming and true instead of irritating and false, we'd like to explain point-by-point how we're trying to address these goals through our DVD cover design for the new editions of The Man Who Loved and Son of a Seahorse, which should be releasing in May and June, respectively.

A. The Front Cover Image. Our biggest mistake the first time around was that our front cover images were not particularly compelling.

Look at the front cover for the old Man Who Loved DVD: it's just a close-up of Adrienne Patterson's face. And, don't get us wrong, it's a nice face (hi Adrienne!), even when contorted into such an awful expression, but it doesn't really catch your eye.

Generally speaking, close-ups of faces are a mistake in DVD cover and poster design. It works for studios because studios don't have faces, they have stars. Take a picture of Johnny Depp wearing a hat and you can guarantee "x" number of butts-in-seats, because people will come out to see Johnny Depp (brand loyalty). Johnny Depp is a marketable commodity. Adrienne Patterson and David Schonscheck are, at this time, not. Putting their face and only their face on a DVD isn't going to interest anyone, and we know this because last year we put their faces and only their faces on our DVDs. It makes the whole thing look cheap and kinda fly-by-night: not the sort of vibe you want a potential viewer to have. So if there's one thing we want our fellow indie filmmakers to take away from this piece, it's that.

Our new front covers, on the other hand, are dominated by a strong visual element. One that, hopefully, gives you some feeling for the film and makes you want to see it. Said visual element also doubles as a typographical element, with the hand and the seahorse each bearing the title of the film. Without the title, the image falls apart, becomes less striking, less dynamic.

B. The Name. Turtleneck Films, right in the upper right hand corner. We considered putting the full website address on the front cover, but it definitely detracted, looked too messy. And I think just "Turtleneck Films" does the trick about as well-- the first thing you're going to find if you google those two words next to each other is this website. So, if A is intended to catch the eye and stop you from dismissing us, B is intended to give you somewhere to go to learn more.

Now, if someone is browsing Amazon or Createspace or wherever, this is all they're going to see before deciding whether or not they want to buy it. All they give you is the front cover. So, if the front cover is intended to persuade would-be buyers, while the rest is intended to make you repeat customers, to keep checking out our stuff.

C. The Spine Number. Probably the smartest thing Criterion ever did, marketing-wise, was putting a number on a spine. The best boutique labels, from Benten to Dragon Dynasty, all employ the spine number to lend a certain amount of prestige-- which, being us, we're careful to undercut with our cute little cartoon turtle.

You'll notice that said turtle's neck wraps around to the front cover. This is to intended to emphasize the spine number. You've just bought the DVD, you look at the front cover, see the neck, follow it to the spine, see the number. This is also why we moved the spine number from its traditional location-- the bottom-- to the top. We want you to see that spine, to see that # 2 so that you look into # 1 and look forward to # 3. More than a mark of prestige, a spine number is a canny form of advertising.

D. The Personal Touch. In many ways, we need this to try and balance out the pretension and impersonality inherent in utilizing a spine number. We are two people, and only two people, bereft even of interns to abuse, shooting these films in our home, using the computer in our rather drafty back-room to design the cover art, create the menus, beg and plead with the software when it decides inexplicably to stop working. We do pretty much everything ourselves, and we're well aware that emphasizing this fact-- the mom-and-pop, cottage-industry, folk-art and craft-show vibe-- will endear us to some.

E. Added Value. If you ask someone to spend $15-20 on a bare-bones DVD of a low-budget self-distributed film that they haven't heard much of anything about, let's face it, they're not going to bite. But if you give them some bonus materials, they might be more willing. Commentary tracks and shorts indicate that you've taken time, and thus helps to combat that nasty "thrown-together fly-by-night" image some people get of independent filmmakers. This might be the little something extra that makes the decision for a potential viewer-- movie + commentary track + shorts is definitely worth $15-20-- which is why we're going to list all the extra features as part of the summary on that Amazon page, and why we're going to emphasize them every chance we get on our own website (which our Potential Viewer found thanks to item B). And if you have more than a few Criterions or Bentens, you're well aware of how supplements can both deepen your appreciation of the film and make you a repeat customer.

A feature you don't find in boutique label releases are trailers, as they detract rather crassly from the whole film-as-art-object vibe. We use them on our DVDs though because (1), it's the best way to get that repeat customer to repeat, and (2) it's not a DVD Company pushing its wares but Tom and Mary, Husband and Wife Filmmakers pointing you in the direction of their other work-- which means that we can get away with it. Apropos (1), I suppose the ideal solution would be Criterion's canny catalogue liner insert/list of titles in numerical order, but our current distribution model doesn't allow for inserts of any kind-- not even a chapter list.

To wrap this up: as filmmakers working outside the festival system, dependent on critics' reviews that, for the most part, haven't been forthcoming, we realized we needed to step up our game. It'd be great if we could just make these films and then send them to a distributor who falls in love with the films and gives us oodles of money so that their boy geniuses can take care of the rest. Graphic design and DVD authoring are time-consuming, not entirely satisfying forms of expression, forms that definitely lack compared to the filmmaking which they exist to support. They're not a necessary "evil"-- they're just necessary.

Hopefully, some of the above will resonate with and be of assistance to other filmmakers who find themselves better-suited to making films than promoting them.

Princeton Holt's COOKIES AND CREAM.

2010-04-14T19:05:00.000-04:00

Princeton Holt, a New-York-based director with whom I am acquainted via twitter, recently announced that his debut feature, Cookies and Cream, has been picked up by Celebrity Video Distribution. It'll be hitting DVD this July, and you might want to consider picking it up; a few words follow to try and sway you in that direction.

According to its synopsis, the film is about " a racially-mixed single mother who maintains an adult entertainment gig to take care of her daughter and herself", which sounds pretty salacious. What's most remarkable about the film is that it exhibits a tremendous amount of distance and restraint. By this, I'm not merely referring to the lack of nudity, sex scenes, and (for the most part) dirty talk-- though those decisions are interesting, commendable, and greatly undercut any nascent hints of tabloid sensationalism. What I'm talking about instead is formal distance and directorial restraint.

Holt seldom strives for effect or tries to punch it up. It's mock-verite/gonzo porn opening aside, there's thankfully very little of the deliberately ugly shaky-cam aesthetic that's infested the current American independent cinema. As I've written elsewhere, the shaky-cam approach is a schizoid one because it untethers its subjects from the everyday reality it so desperately wants to capture, presenting us not with people and bodies moving through time and space but with fractions of faces, headless slivers jittering about.

Cookies and Cream, in contrast, presents us with people, often head-to-toe, listening to and observing them patiently. Holt is so patient, in fact, and so confident that his characters will reward the viewer's patience, that he sometimes apes one of Woody Allen's best tricks by staging parts of his dialogue scenes with the actors out of the camera's range. Consider two frames from this minutes-long shot:

In the second frame you can see the two characters, but in the first, it seems empty, like one of Ozu's pillow shots (which were, of course, never truly empty). The two characters are in fact in the tunnel under the bridge, and as they talk with one another, they slowly worm their way out of it, slowly come into view, dots turning into people. Another director would have cut it much closer. A bad director might have framed the same shot but not given us characters worth looking for or dialogue worth listening to.

Holt's method suits his character. Carmen is played by Jace Nicole with a business-like distance and icy remove. She didn't fall into this career, I don't think, but rather planned on it with mercenary objectivity, counted out exactly how many days and how much money she'd need to do in order to create the life she wants for her daughter. This daughter, tellingly, is not on screen until almost the last scene in the picture. While you can pick up on Carmen's motivation fairly early on, by withholding the daughter's presence the film keeps us at the proper distance, keeps us interested in Carmen instead of merely rooting for her.

Because we never see her in any kind of sex act, there's really nothing carnal about this porn star: we don't get the mask, the persona. Or, rather, we get a different sort of mask and persona, as Carmen is always guarded, always wary of other people. There's a telling, painful moment in which she flinches when the man she's dating touches her face: gentle, intimate, warm. These aren't qualities she responds to. Even when she's talking to her daughter, when she explains to her that everything that she's doing is for her, it's presented logically, as an argument, as something intellectual instead of something emotional.

That last phrase could be used to describe the film as a whole, but with the caveat that there's a certain sadness that the film can register even if Carmen can't. And if this sounds like your cup of tea-- and I would say for the most part that it was mine-- you might want to keep an eye out for it this July. That's not to say that it's a perfect film-- for one thing, every time a character utters the film's tagline ("the show must go on") it manages to carry less resonance-- but it's an interesting and a promising one, a deliberately thoughtful film from a deliberately thoughtful director.

OLIVIA FOREVER!!: Story of a ring.

2010-04-12T20:17:00.001-04:00

Early into Olivia Forever!!, and by early we mean less than a couple minutes in, Tedward (played by David Schonscheck) proposes to Olivia (Adrienne Patterson). Well, sort of.

We intended it to be slightly ambiguous-- he asks, but does so in such a way that if she says no, he can pretend that he was kidding. Which is, not to spoil anything, more-or-less what happens. We wanted to add to this by having Tedward reach behind him for a hidden ring. He starts to ask, his arm goes behind the television set, she says no, his hand comes back, empty.

And we agreed early on that we should really leave it at that. Keep it subtle, underplayed, make it something that adds to the scene if you pick up on it but doesn't harm it if you don't. We didn't want to do the obvious thing and cut into the box, and see him put it back. Too schmaltzy, said us.

But it became clear as we were cutting the scene together that, no matter the take or the angle, it was too subtle. He's doing something with his arm, but it's nothing that anyone would really pay attention to. No one would ever pick up on it but us. And so, we decided we needed an insert shot of the ring.

But how to do it so that it wasn't schmaltzy, obvious, and boring? Everyone else would cut to the box in his hand, so how could we add something to that? How could we make that moment, that shot, into something special instead of something merely ordinary?

Our simple, hopefully elegant solution was to start outside the box-- an old box, its felt entangled with wisps of dust-- and to dissolve inside of it, to see the ring itself. It's the sort of little cinematic touch that we love to see in films-- watch how much aching emotional resonance Scorsese gets out of the trick in his Age of Innocence-- and the sort of thing that might ever-so-slightly set us apart from the cult of realism that often plagues American independent films.

Don't be afraid to be obvious-- better something be obvious than to be nonexistent. And don't be afraid to be stylish. What both things have in common-- obviousness and style-- is that both are the tools of the bold, of the confident, of the ballsy, and low-budget films are in need of balls.

FINAL TRAILER FOR SON OF A SEAHORSE.

2010-04-11T16:16:00.001-04:00

So, About That Manifesto...

2010-04-10T21:43:00.003-04:00

Filmmaker and critic Michael Tully recently drafted a "manifesto", which you can read here. In brief, he says that the film you make is more important than how you make it, that the behind-the-scenes story is irrelevant, he doesn't want to fund your film, and that he's tired of the endless panels about new media, internet marketing, raising finances, et cetera.

It's prompted a lot of criticism, especially from social-network-y filmmakers; his manifesto over-states his case, as both manifestos and Tullys often do. I signed it because I agree with it generally, in broad strokes, if not exactly 1:1. For example:

There's a story Akira Kurosawa told about a particularly expensive and arduous scene he shot for one of his films. It was such an absolute bear of a shoot that when he realized in editing he didn't need the scene, part of him fought the process. In the end, the scene hit the cutting room floor, because it didn't work for the film: all that matters is the end product. (Which reminds me somewhat of something Mike D'Angelo wrote about tricky single-take shots.)

So, yeah, I agree with that point. But at the same time, a film's back story can be compelling; Children of Paradise, a three-hour epic costume drama, was made in secret in Nazi-Occupied France. It's a great film in its own right, but the sheer audacity of its making does indeed deepen your appreciation of it. So, while I can definitely say "your back story doesn't matter if it's not there on the screen" at the same time, I can't come out and say, "I don't want to hear anything about how you made your film".

In fact, I do want to hear it. And I want to talk about it. That's why we blog about each of our shoots. That's why our new DVDs are including commentary tracks and supplemental features. Part of it is to provide more information to you, the viewer, and part of it is frankly and obviously to market us. Not just the film, but the people who made it: a married couple, financing the films with our pocket change, paying our actors in pizza, making the films we want to make the way we want to make them.

It's an image, one that's both carefully constructed and completely true. We play up our humbleness, the mom-and-pop-ness. We do it together and with equal billing both because we enjoy doing it together and because it'll get us farther ahead than either of us separately: Tom is, after all, yet another white guy in his twenties, and Mary is the woman filmmaker, less common than Tom but not a novelty. The married couple with equal billing? Bam!

But that image would be nothing if there weren't films attached to them. There are a lot of filmmakers who never actually make films, instead spending their time networking and attending seminars and learning buzzwords. The kind of people fuck-faced morons like Dov Simens appeal to. Not artists, but rather the prey for bullshit artists.

Social networking and marketing are useful and necessary tools, but only when used to actually do something. With a film, you'd be an idiot to not use them. Otherwise, it's just annoying-- just a simulacrum.

That, I think, is what Tully is really rallying against-- the marketing-of-marketing, the buzzword-thicket of nothing-actually-done. It's in opposition to that simulacrum which prompted my own signing.

New SON OF A SEAHORSE poster and snake oil.

2010-03-25T18:41:00.000-04:00

SON OF A SEAHORSE is a dispatch from a personal hell with punchlines. It's the story of Nick: angry for good reasons and no reasons, self-destructive, self-loathing, slippery, brought to larger-than-life by DAVID SCHONSCHECK.

He's aided and abetted by a collection of stylized performances that run the gamut from gleefully over-the-top to deliciously deadpan, all marshaled by directors MARY & TOM RUSSELL in service of a SHARP and DEFIANT THROAT-PUNCH of DIY COMEDY.

Olivia Forever!!, Poster.

2010-03-24T22:24:00.001-04:00

Olivia Forever!!, Fifth Shoot.

2010-03-24T22:21:00.003-04:00

We shot with Steampunk Legend Jake Hildebrandt (pictured above) on Saturday. Tom's uncle, Mike Brennan, was kind enough to let us shoot at his collision shop, B & K Collision. Dearbornites might recall that B & K has sponsored the annual homecoming ceremonies and fireworks several times over the last few years.

So it wasn't completely surprising to us when Mayor Jack O'Reilly showed up. I mean, it was still totally random-- one minute we're shooting, the next minute we look out at the parking lot and there's the Mayor on his cell phone.

Between takes, Mary went out to chat with him-- they had been neighbors growing up, and of course, since Tom ran against Mayor O'Reilly in the 2007 Special Election, he knew who we were.

Because both Steampunk Legend Jake Hildebrandt and Tom are employed as part-time civil servants, and because the local newspaper recently printed some rather troubling remarks about the future of our department that someone is purported to have overheard the Mayor say at a rotary club, Jake suggested we "Michael Moore" the Mayor and ask him to set the record straight on camera. Tom declined.

During one the takes, the Mayor and Uncle Mike stood outside the building, chatting indistinctly, occasionally laughing boisterously, no doubt unaware that our mike could pick them up as background noise. Amusingly, a number of technical errors resulted in only one usable take-- which was, you guessed it, the one guest-starring Mayor Jack O'Reilly and Mike Brennan as Background Laughing Guy Numbers One and Two, respectively.

Now, we had promised some screen-grabs from our January shoot, and intending not to disappoint, here they are. This was the scene that introduced David Schonscheck's character.

Olivia Forever!!, Fourth Shoot.

2010-03-20T02:08:00.001-04:00

So, it's been awhile. From technical issues to personal issues to scheduling conflicts, we haven't shot a lick since January. We have, however, been preparing-- trying to firm up some actors, locations, props and effects, revising portions of the script, lots of stuff. We've been busy but we haven't felt particularly busy, and as two people who need to keep busy to ward off bouts of moodiness and depression, it's been a hell.

But! On Friday, we had a shoot and a rehearsal. In less than twelve hours, we'll be shooting another scene, one that functions as a sort of experiment in comedy, using obscenely long pauses between each character's lines of dialogue as our main joke. We've been looking forward to this one for a while.

We cut together today's shoot shortly thereafter. Running under the opening credits, it's an audio-only sex scene. The first cut of it ran about a minute and twelve seconds, the last cut under a minute. Usually, we're the sort that's shameless about extending a moment, drawing it out-- we are, after all, the people who made Son of a Seahorse, which starts with a 22 minute phone conversation-- but this particular sequence needed to be compact and tight.

We're getting better at this, better at making these kind of precise decisions, more confident in our abilities as filmmakers, more comfortable with making comedies and entertainments instead of genre-less drama-comedy-slice-of-life stuff. Experimental in some aspects, yes, highly personal and idiosyncratic, certainly, but still comedies, still unafraid to embrace punchlines, sight gags, and surprises.

Read This.

2010-03-19T00:34:00.003-04:00

We're not usually "read this" type bloggers, but, hey, read this. It's a fascinating piece by The Siren on Merle Oberon. Thoughtful stuff; follow it up with a amusing anecdote about the making of Wuthering Heights.

Heck, follow it up with her whole site. There's a reason she's one of the ten blogs we list over on that sidebar.

DVDs You Should Buy (Besides Ours)

2010-03-12T23:24:00.002-05:00

The second-most-asked question I've gotten since I've started reviewing indie and self-distributed films (the first being, would you review mine?*) is "How do I see it?" And the answer pretty much varies from film-to-film, though folks in Pittsburgh might want to check out Indies for Indies, a weekly screening series curated by Lucas McNelly that kicked off last week with Amir Motlagh's whale.

I reviewed an earlier cut of whale, one which its director says has been improved upon by at least "44%" in its final version, last year. It's now available for purchase in various formats ranging in price from $4 to $14.

I reviewed Ryan Andrew Balas's film Carter, and interviewed the director. The film is again available to view for free online, and a DVD edition is available for $10.

I loved Josh Bernhard's The Lionshare and it made my best of the decade list. It, too, is available online and for purchase.

[*-- And the answer is, yes, of course! Send me an e-mail at milos_parker at yahoo dot com. However, I'm currently working my way through a backlog of screeners and I always view a film at least twice before writing a review. So bear in mind it's going to take awhile-- probably two or three months in most cases. And, yes, as someone who's more-or-less in the same boat with our own films, I know exactly how frustrating that can be. Sorry.]

Lucas McNelly's BLANC DE BLANC

2010-02-24T19:18:00.009-05:00

There's a scene fairly early in Lucas McNelly's Blanc de Blanc, in which one character makes dinner for another. The chef goes by the name of David and is a stranger to the diner, Jude. He ended up crashing on her couch the night before, was still there when she went for work, and is still there when she returns home. Still there, in her house, and cooking her dinner. It's an invasion of her space and her person that's at once creepy but well-meaning (he felt bad about crashing), a dichotomy of which David is simultaneously ignorant but also acutely, painfully (self)-aware. It's within the fuzzy spaces between these seeming opposites-- creepy and well-intentioned, ignorant and aware, dangerous and romantic-- that the film's central mystery lies: can this man be trusted? Who is he, really?

The film gives us theories and possibilities: David is an innocent amnesiac, or David is on the run from his past and wants a fresh start, or David is actually perpetrating a cruel and manipulative game on Jude, though we don't know why or to what end. None of these really takes precedence over the other, none of these are ever officially denied or validated in the film, though a careful second viewing will reveal what I think is a pivotal clue in the film's first few minutes, one that's led me to formulate my own theory. The mystery is never definitely answered to the audience's satisfaction, which is part of what makes the film so very satisfying.

It is, in short, a true mystery film, the same way that Turn of the Screw is a truer mystery story than, say, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The only reason to come back to Ackroyd after the first reading has exhausted its novelty is to see the clues pointing to its famous twist; the same is true of a lot of so-called mystery films. I shudder to think of anyone watching Orphan once, let alone a second or third time. But by denying catharsis and explanation, by hinting at a twist that's never revealed, Blanc de Blanc constructs a mystery with real staying power.

It's also a lot of fun, playing jazz with various genre elements. There's a locked box, a golden macguffin without a key. Or consider the bald smoking man who follows Jude around and insists that David is in fact a man named Archie. He's almost a caricature of menace, ever-so-slightly-fey, always accompanied by musical cues that would feel at home in a more conventional thriller but here creates a sense of comic danger, of riffing. The music intrudes on the film, and underlines his intrusion into their lives.

It's helped in that regard by the film's smart, bifurcated structure. Roughly the first half-hour could be described as a sort of deconstruction of romcoms, which have always gotten their traction from the notion that obsessive, stalker-like behaviour is romantic. The creepiness is underlined but often in a comedic way: Jude horrified as one of her friends insists that this total stranger crash on her sofa, Jude surprised to find David cooking her dinner.

When Jude texts her brother, asking him to check up on her, it's not done with furtive shaky close-ups of a cell phone screen but, in a snazzy little bit of style that also appeared in Joe Swanberg's LOL, with subtitles, distancing us from the danger.

The scene with the brother that follows is also comic in tone, with said brother serving as a sort of mouth-piece to the audience's own desire to throttle the passive Jude for letting herself get into this situation. The tone of these performances and dashes of style don't push the potential creepiness from our minds, but it does neuter it for awhile, making Jude and David's eventual hook-up believable and a more than a little sweet.

Their love scene is filmed in a long take and done in silhouettes, and the music McNelly uses is lover's-languid and rhythmic, purposefully slowing time down to a crawl and giving us time to reflect. It's a stylish, smart, and perfect use of music.

I can't say that, however, for all the music in the film, as I personally think there's a little too much of it. Almost every scene has music underneath it or uses music as a transition. Many filmmakers think that music will liven up a dead scene or speed up the "feel" of the film; neither are true. In fact, music slows a film down, especially in dialogue scenes, because its rhythm is at odds with the rhythm of the film-- the cutting, the dialogue, the emotion.

McNelly's film doesn't have any bad scenes or dead weight, doesn't need to be "sped up" and thus slowed down; I think if he had less music, it would make those stylish uses of music-- the opening, the love scene, the scenes with the smoking man-- much more effective. He's a good enough filmmaker that the film doesn't need the crutch of a wall-to-wall score.

Good enough, in fact, that the film is still very, very good, perhaps even great; good enough that the film still works and the transition from romance to thriller is at once acutely noticed and seamless. It's stylish, fun, mysterious-- and, above all, highly recommended.

Rohmer: Suzanne's Career

2010-02-06T15:55:00.001-05:00

Let me come right out and say it: the two men at the center of Suzanne's Career, Guillaume and Bertrand, are extremely unpleasant people. Guillaume seduces Suzanne, not through any subtle charms but by way of ugly bullying, manipulation, and insults. His philosophy is that women like to be forced. Later, he and Bertrand spend a few weeks living off of Suzanne's money; she treats them to movies and dinners and other entertainments until she's flat broke. And this isn't unintentional. It's Guillaume's stated purpose to bankrupt her.

Why on earth does Suzanne let this happen? Why, after he's insulted her so crudely and she's decided to leave, does she settle back down on the couch beside him? Partially, she is a product of her times-- as the otherwise execrable Mad Men evinces so well, many women were raised to think themselves inferior to men. And partially, it's a matter of her personality, a personality that is better understood through Bertrand, who shares it.

The Guillaume-Suzanne and Guillaume-Bertrand relationships mirror each other pretty acutely; both Suzanne and Bertrand are the recipient of Guillaume's abuse and insults. He bullies both of them, and both of them, in turn, react passively. Through out the film's fifty-odd minutes, Guillaume will ask Bertrand to come out and do something, often to play some kind of role in one of his debauched schemes; Bertrand will say no; Guillaume will ask again, more forcefully; Bertrand will immediately say yes. Just as Suzanne immediately recants her desire to leave, Bertrand puts up no fight. He likes to be forced.

Not to get all homoerotic-subtext-y here, but I think Bertrand is as much in love with Guillaume as Suzanne is. He says he is particular about the women he pursues, but the putative object of his desires, Sophie, never really commands his focus as much as Guillaume does. And in the scene where Guillaume cruelly asks each of his women, both Suzanne and Bertrand, what they would do if the one made a pass at the other or vice-versa, he's abusing both of them in the same way, treating both of them like objects, conquests, ancillary to his ego. If he pulls back the curtain slightly for Bertrand, explaining his stratagems, it is not because his feelings towards Bertrand are any different than his feelings towards Suzanne, but because Bertrand is biologically male.

It is Suzanne, though, who breaks the cycle. Suzanne is engaged to be married, and by taking that massive step towards adulthood, she exacts, as the narration so memorably puts it, her "revenge". She's matured to some degree, whereas Bertrand remains the same.

We didn't enjoy Suzanne's Career as much as the first Moral Tale-- for one thing, Bakery Girl was extremely funny even as its male lead was unpleasant, and for another, the pace was kinda draggy and had us sleepy-eyed by the end-- but neither did we hate it. As much as we might despise Guillaume and alternatively feel both pity towards and frustration with his two willing victims, we found it a complex and somewhat rewarding piece of cinema. Not necessarily something that we really dig, or that we want to see again, but we can already start to see what some of our friends see in the late director.

DIY Pet Peeves

2010-02-02T18:15:00.006-05:00

There are some things in a lot of independent films that irk us, take us out of the experience, occasionally enrage us, and just plain turn us off. Here's a few of 'em.

Films about filmmakers and/or artists, making films and/or art, especially from a debut filmmaker. Also, any endeavor, creative or otherwise, that once undertaken by the character serves as a complex metaphor for the filmmaking process.

Films that have no concept of money. I was going to say, "films about people in abject poverty who nonetheless have spacious apartments with breathtaking views", but found "no concept of money" not only more succinct but also farther-reaching, as it also encompasses those films in which money and the damning pressure it exerts over everyday lives seemingly does not exist. This is not, by the way, any attempt to condemn films about rich people-- only those films about rich people that don't know they're about rich people.

(Which reminds me of a story about a relative of mine, who has done quite well for himself financially, who wondered if we were still doing this whole filmmaking thing, and, in an attempt to persuade us away from it, mentioned that he had a friend who was an actor; said friend, he said, had been doing it for years, had even been in some fairly high-profile films, but he had yet to make a living at it. In a good year, he said, his friend still only made $250,000, and in a bad year, he made as little as $30,000. We tried to hide our disbelief; Tom makes just under $10,000 a year and we wish we could have a year as bad as his friend's.)

Films where romance is the most important thing in the world. Rom-coms are, by their very nature, excused. But there are more important things than dating, romance, and sexual attraction, for example: failure, ambition, self-destruction, self-invention, discovery, pain, joy, anger. And love. Love is the most important thing of all, and something quite different than romance.

Nose hairs. For reasons documented over here.

Wall-to-wall music. Music is not cinema. Music is rhythm and film is rhythm, and music can be used in cinematic ways, both to set an atmosphere and to manipulate the viewer one note at a time. But music-rhythm disrupts cinema-rhythm. When it's used to "speed up" every dialogue scene, it only succeeds in slowing it down.

Verbal placeholders. I know we're, like, improvising and stuff, and so, like, yeah, you know, we're, um, doing that, but it makes me want to reach into the screen and strangle them.

Mockumentaries. To be brief, they are both aesthetically and morally just plain wrong.

All that being said------ there are plenty of films, both low-budget and studio-funded, that are guilty of one (or two [or five]) of these pet peeves that we still really dig. Good filmmaking trumps everything. For example, some films about artists/filmmakers and the artistic process that we dig include Stardust Memories, The Lionshare, Mutual Appreciation, Boogie Nights, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Hollywood Ending, LOL, and the television show Home Movies. There are some nose-hair-a-riffic films that we still find entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking. Verbal placeholders are used elegantly by Andrew Bujalski, who scripts every syllable; there's a bravura monologue in Aaron Katz's Quiet City that uses "like" to build a rhythm instead of halting it. District 9, which we found to be a great science fiction film, takes the form of a mockumentary but does so not in some lame attempt to make it more "real" but to world-build.

It is, in the end, more about how you use something than what you use.

Gone Baby Gone

2010-02-01T22:06:00.002-05:00

DVDs for Son of a Seahorse and The Man Who Loved are now out-of-print. Shiny new fancy-pants editions are coming soonish-- probably late spring for the first, and summer for the second. This new editions have a number of new supplemental materials, including commentary tracks, as well as remixed/optimized audio. All of this, like everything that came before, is being done completely by our own hand.

More information about the new DVDs, as well as online viewing, will be made available as soon as we have more to reveal.

Critics and bloggers who would like screeners to review can send us an e-mail at milos_parker at yahoo dot com.

If you'd like to support our work financially in the interim, you can always buy a copy of Tom's novel Jolt City through Amazon.com for $20 (we'll get $3.34 of the transaction).

ONE WEEK LEFT TO BUY OUR DVDS!

2010-01-23T16:30:00.002-05:00

Just a friendly reminder: our DVD editions of The Man Who Loved and Son of a Seahorse are going out of print at the end of this month. Newer, bells-and-whistles-ier versions (commentary tracks, behind-the-scenes, supplemental shorts) will be released later this year-- we're looking at late Spring and early Summer at the moment. But if you want to get your hot little hands on them now, for the low price of $15 each, NOW IS THE TIME TO DO IT.

Olivia Forever!!: Third Shoot.

2010-01-16T17:09:00.001-05:00

Had our third shoot last night-- the first since way back in November. There was some delay in getting the equipment we needed, and by the time we got it, the holidays were upon us.

Here is where we'd usually put a few screen-shots from the shoot, grabbed during the late night video capturing session that usually follows a day of shooting. Today, we would be editing said footage, and thinking of the humorous anecdotes we would share with you in this space.

But, due to some technical issues-- amusing enough, issues that arise out of a recent (and generous) hardware upgrade that is going to result in the new and improved DVD releases of our prior efforts-- we can't actually connect camera to computer, which is the most pivotal step in this whole digital filmmaking thing. We have no way of knowing, in fact, if the footage looks or sounds as good as it did the night before, and we likely won't until at least next month when our upgrade gets an upgrade to restore that previous functionality.

If our last film, Son of a Seahorse, was remarkable for how smoothly it all went-- written, shot, and edited with sure-footed speed-- Olivia Forever!! is quickly becoming one of those films where there's always another problem, always another roadblock. Already we've been living with this film since November of 2008. We were supposed to be done with it by the end of last year, and we've hardly gotten started.

Why and How I Saw Pearl Harbor

2010-01-14T00:55:00.003-05:00

It was recently revealed on Twitter, to my everlasting shame, that I paid full price to see Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor. Let me explain. First off, gym teachers are to blame.

As the Woodman once said in his infinite wisdom, those who can't teach, teach gym. Often held in ridicule by both the studentry and faculty, the gym teacher was given, at least in my school system, a special power to compensate for the complete lack of respect afforded to him or her: "the zero for the day". Often given as punishment for forgetting one's sweatpants, the Zero for the Day adds an empty grade each time it is given.

Say, for example, that the gym teacher gives twelve grades through-out the semester, each one worth ten points. Your final grade for said semester is arrived at by dividing your total-- let's say you're some sort of athlete and you got all 120 points-- to reach your percentage. 120 divided by 120 is 1 or 100%, an A+.

But let's say you forgot your sweatpants or swim trunks or what-not: you've got two zeroes for the day. So your 120 points is divided not by 120 but by 140 (ten for each empty grade) and your final grade is 85%-- a B.

But at some point in the history of this twisted saga, the other teachers got jealous of this sexy status symbol and soon they, too, were given the power to award empty grades, thus regulating gym teachers back to their sad existences of disrespect and alcoholism. These academic empty grades (as opposed to their athletic counterparts) are up to a teacher's discretion, and can be awarded for any number of reasons-- tardiness, smarting off, et cetera.

And in my final year of high school, my history teacher had this astonishing power at her disposal. My history teacher also had a pretty lousy grasp of history, often saying things that, well, weren't true. And when I corrected her on areas that were up for debate, she gave me a zero for the day. When I corrected her on areas of fact, she gave me a zero for a day. When I brought in evidence to support my assertions, well, you can see where this story is going.

I think I accumulated something like 160 empty grades, which basically ensured failure no matter how highly I scored on anything. There is a lesson to be learned here about the value of keeping one's tongue, et cetera et cetera, and the necessity of compromise to get along with others, et cetera et cetera, but I was eighteen or nineteen years old and was renting a room in Detroit instead of living at home and thought I was smarter than everyone, et cetera et cetera. While I still get furious when I think of history teachers disseminating lies as facts, I also think I made some very bad decisions. Probably 160 of them.

Since I did want to graduate from High School, I asked my teacher if, in all honesty, there was anything I could do to salvage my grade. Some kind of extra credit that could somehow bump me up from an E to a barely-passing D-. And there was. Since I liked pointing out factual errors so much, she suggested I see both Tora! Tora! Tora! and the newly-released Pearl Harbor and do a compare-contrast.

And that's why I went to see Pearl Harbor. But that's not why I'm telling you this story. I'm only telling you this story so I can share this one with you.

So, I go to see Pearl Harbor. And there's this guy in the theater, a veteran of World War II. Old dude, wearing the little pointy hat and uniform, with a walker. And for whatever reason he decides to sit in the top row; it's one of those big slanted theaters. And during the big bombing of Pearl Harbor sequence, this little old dude says at the top of his voice, so everybody can hear: "This is bullshit."

Then he slowly, arduously walks down the aisle and makes his exit. I did the same, bullshitted my way through my compare-contrast, and ended up with a D-.

Rohmer: The Bakery Girl of Monceau

2010-01-13T23:17:00.003-05:00

A number of our friends are mourning the passing of director Eric Rohmer. Some people hold his work in reverence, others dismiss it as being too talky and lacking in le department du visuals. For a long time, I've been in the latter camp; Rohmer is one of those filmmakers I just didn't "get".

The only exception was his film Perceval, which I adore; it's a wondrous work of stunning, breathtaking artifice-- a far cry from the naturalistic mileau that's often associated with his work. Maybe my problem was that it was my first exposure; if you go into Claire's Knee expecting something like Perceval, you're going to be really disappointed. At least I was.

But to clarify, while I didn't "click" with Rohmer, I didn't out-and-out dismiss him, either; it was more of a "I don't see what you see, Person X, but I'll watch his films again someday and hope that I will". And, moved by the grief of others and intrigued by the articulate appreciations they have offered in the late director's defense, I've decided that today is that someday when I give Rohmer and his work another go, beginning with the first of his Six Moral Tales, The Bakery Girl of Monceau.

Mary and I had seen this film before a few years back-- shortly after the Criterion release. We were not impressed: we hated the male lead, finding him smug and a bit thuggish in his dealings with the titular bakery girl. But as such luminaries as Gregarious Glenn Kenny and Cataclysmic C. Mason Wells have pointed out in various corners of the internet, acting as if Rohmer is unaware of his characters' dipshittiness, or that he buys into it or endorses it, is missing the point.

This second time, we got a lot more traction out of the film's final ironies-- his assertion that he acted morally contrasting sharply with the way he bullies and practically strangles the bakery girl into agreeing on a date, or the way he won over Sylvie. We also found it pretty funny, especially the progression of pastry purchases. (This may have been helped by Barbet Schroeder's slight resemblance to Jeff Daniels.) The first time through, we didn't find it funny and thought it dragged; this time, it moved quickly, smoothly, sprightly: entertaining and thought-provoking.

As we tackle each new Rohmer film, I'll take a moment, as above, to construct two or three quick paragraphs and post them-- longer than a tweet, shorter than an essay. My hope is that the entries, taken together, will form this minister's favourite kind of narrative: one of conversion.

Bluth Blogging: The Land Before Time

2010-01-12T01:32:00.002-05:00

I have vivid memories of The Land Before Time scaring the shit out of me when I was six years old. The vicious Sharp Tooth (his flaring nostrils and hideous eye), the quakes that split the earth down its seams, the darkened sky, the deathly tar-pits, the just-plain-desolation of the dry, leafless landscape, the threat of starvation, the fragility of childhood friendship, and, finally, Littlefoot's aching loneliness. All scary, heady, and ultimately invigorating stuff when you're six years old.

It was easily the most foreboding animated film of my childhood, and growing up through the years I was beyond disgusted by the twelve insipidly happy-go-lucky musical sequels that followed it. I quickly discovered that Don Bluth had nothing to do with those films, of course, but I had to wonder: did the people responsible for those unholy twelve have any idea what made the original tick? Well, no, of course not.

What's surprising, though, is that the original's two producers, Spielberg and Lucas, might not have understood it, either. Deep cuts were made in both production and post (which helps to explain the film's abbreviated 65 minute run-time). The T-Rex attack scenes were truncated because they were too frightening; some sequences that put the young dinosaurs in peril were eliminated; screams that were too scary were changed to "more suitable" ones.

In fact, Spielberg and Lucas almost removed the death of Littlefoot's mother. This is the inciting incident, the death that not only starts the plot moving but out-and-out defines Littlefoot's character. Without the scene, there is no movie. Indeed, Littlefoot spends so much time mourning his mother that cutting both her death and his tears would probably leave about thirty or forty minutes of film.

It also makes the threat of Sharp Tooth toothless; he's scary because he kills Littlefoot's mother, not because he's a T-Rex (for, as any six year old would tell you, all dinosaurs, but especially a T-Rex, are not scary but "awesome"). The triumph of Littlefoot and company over their carnivorous foe is a triumph because Littlefoot is avenging the death of his mother. And we feel his pain not because she simply died, as Bambi's mother did, but because she died saving his life, rushing into battle with a foe over which she knew she could not win. She died because she loved him; in his mind and in many ways, that makes it his fault. His guilt and pain is palpable.

And though my twenty-seven year old self thinks that there are perhaps too many shots of Littlefoot with tears spilling out of his big ol' emo eyes, I still found the film to be frightening and his mother's martyrdom to be moving. And the fact that those aspects still work despite the best efforts of Spielberg and Lucas is a testament to both Bluth's artistic skill and tenacity.

There are parts that don't work as well for me; at a certain point, the moodiness and awe give way to a lot of annoying supporting character schtick, the sort of "zany" material that the creators of Rufio and Jar Jar no doubt wish there had been more of (and that the creators of The Land Before Time numbers two through thirteen made up for that perceived deficiency in droves). And yet those three comic relief characters (Petrie, Ducky, and Spike) are used pretty well in charting the dynamics of the group and the struggle between Littlefoot and Cera for leadership. The scene in which these three begin the night snuggled next to Cera but slowly migrate to Littlefoot, leaving Cera shivering and alone, until she, too, nudges her way into the pile effectively captures the insecurities and smug satisfactions of childhood.

Looking at the film now, I can feel the compromises Bluth had to make rather acutely; it doesn't have the same sense of flow, mastery, and answered ambition that The Secret of NIMH had. NIMH, in Bluth's own estimation, was the film where there was the least interference. While Spielberg might not have micro-managed as much when it came to An American Tail, the story was also the sort of harmless pap for children that Spielberg was interested in making. Trying to tell this particular story with those particular benefactors was perhaps doomed from the start.

Still, because the film doesn't quite "come together" as a whole, the film's ability to plug into the myriad and deep, unnamable fears of childhood has a smuggled-out, outsider-art sort of quality. And though it's no NIMH, neither is it any of its blasted sequels, nor Hook. Pyrrhic though it may be, I think Bluth was the victor in his battle with his producers.

It would, however, be his last until 1997's Anastasia. The five films he made in the interim were box office disappointments and received decidedly mixed (if not out-and-out terrible) reviews. The first of these, All Dogs Go To Heaven, is also the subject of the final (and most disappointing) installment of this series. See you then.

OLD DVDS WILL BE GOING OUT OF PRINT!

2010-01-08T01:33:00.004-05:00

With some considerable new tools at our disposal, Tom and Mary Russell are proud to announce new-and-improved but every-bit-as-scrappy DVD releases of our films The Man Who Loved (2007) and Son of a Seahorse (2008), coming in 2010. Not only will each disc be given a spiffy packaging redesign, but each film is getting a new sound mix and a host of bonus features, including, yes, that holiest of holies, Directors' Commentary Tracks.

More details (sneak peaks of the new packaging, lists of bonus features, and release dates) will become available in the next few months. But as a consequence of this shift, the previous DVD editions will no longer be available for purchase as of January 30, 2010.

Now, if you want to wait and buy the new ultra-spiffy editions later in the year, that's cool and the gang. But if you can't wait to get your hands on some ultra-indie self-distributed goodness and want to buy the cheaper and (comparatively) bare bonesier editions we put out last year, now is the time to do it.

Each of these old editions retail for $15 and are eligible for Amazon's Free Super-Saver Shipping. But remember, these editions of The Man Who Loved and Son of a Seahorse will no longer be available as of January 30.

Bluth Blogging: An American Tail

2010-01-02T01:04:00.004-05:00

Don Bluth and his team left Disney because the mouse had stopped taking risks, becoming stagnant and content to churn out one uninspired, safe, friendly, marketable, instantly forgettable feature after another. As we discussed in our last exciting episode, The Secret of NIMH was in many ways a direct challenge to what Disney animation had become; NIMH was idiosyncratic, intelligent, dark, unafraid to scare (and thrill) with its moody atmosphere and exciting set pieces. As an artistic achievement, it still holds up nearly thirty years later.

It was also barely-released, resulting in a less than stellar box office return. But it attracted the attention of Steven Spielberg, who produced Bluth's next film and ensured it got the distribution (and the box office) it deserved. That film was An American Tail, and while there were elements that were comparatively risky-- the film is, after all, a picaresque journey through nineteenth-century New York, centering on the travails of the very Jewish Mousekewitz family-- it lacks the ambition, atmosphere, and artistic achievement of its predecessor. In many ways, from its basic lost-child-looking-for-parents plot to its reliance on musical numbers in lieu of personalities, it plays it very, very safe. In this viewer's opinion, it is (and it really hurts to say this) not very far from the sort of animated film that Bluth was trying to get away from.

Compare the comic relief characters played by the inimitable Dom Deluise in The Secret of NIMH and An American Tail: NIMH's Jeremy the crow is a clumsy, helpful, would-be ladies man, whereas Tail's mouse-friendly cat Tiger is a more-than-blatant imitation of Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion, a road that was already well-trodden by Snagglepuss. NIMH gives Jeremy the time to develop his unique and charming personality over the course of the film; Tiger's screen time is extremely brief.

And that would not be a problem if Tiger was intended to be just another part of Fievel Mousekewitz's journey, like the Boss Tweed-like Honest John or the wealthy Gussie Mausheimer. But Tiger becomes integral to the film's plot, freeing Fievel from his cage (mere moments after they've been introduced) and assisting the other mice in their later search for him; Tiger is intended to be Fievel's bosom buddy, a fact that is rather unconvincingly lampshaded in one of the film's musical numbers. Listen carefully to the opening musical cue, which apes one of the cues from a Bert Lahr number in The Wizard of Oz:

Now, I'm not going to grouse here or be overwhelmingly negative; the song is certainly catchy, and indeed, all the songs are (the songs in, say, All Dogs Go To Heaven, which we'll be discussing in our fourth installment, eh, not so much). And I certainly have to give Bluth and company props for allowing the child characters to sing in slightly-faltering child voices, a choice that's even more apparent (and moving) in the film's famous "Somewhere Out There" number.

It's smart, artistic choices like that that elevate the film above and beyond its contemporary competition. And it's not every film that comments obliquely on the loss of identity inherent in the immigrant experience, made most explicit in the way Fievel is renamed Filly and his sister Tanya, Tillie. For what it is, the film certainly works, but that thing that it is is awfully ordinary when compared to the more idiosyncratic Secret of NIMH.

As I detailed in some, er, detail last time, NIMH was able to sustain suspense and terror for extended and often breathtaking sequences. There are moments in An American Tail that flirt with that terror-- consider, for example, Fievel finding himself working in a sweatshop. Here is a sequence that is positively ripe with phantasmagorical possibilities, possibilities that are denied when the film cuts immediately from the sweatshop's introduction to Fievel making good his escape. All the cats in this film put together can't equal the dread inspired by NIMH's old cat Dragon, he who made a widow of Mrs. Brisby; these cats have already been neutered (or spayed) by a musical number.

And, sure, it's a damn catchy number! (Me and the missus, being both of us ailurophiles, also consider it a form of hate speech, but that's neither here nor there.) But by making the death-by-feline "fun", it also makes them no real threat at all, simply a cartoonish plot device to be swatted aside by another cartoonish plot device. The film does not threaten or confuse, but assures us through-out, with each chorus or zany character, that everything's going to be just fine, that there's really nothing at stake.

It's the sort of thing that entertains children but is frankly slow-going for adults, and I'm sure some of you are saying, well, then what are you complaining about? But I keep coming back to C. S. Lewis and his essay "On Three Ways of Writing For Children". The whole of it is well worth reading and serves as a nice all-purpose debunker of those who think children's entertainments should be less than those of adults. But specifically there is this:

Those who say that children must not be frightened may mean two things. They may mean (1) that we must not do anything likely to give the child those haunting, disabling, pathological fears against which ordinary courage is helpless: in fact, phobias. His mind must, if possible, be kept clear of things he can't bear to think of. Or they may mean (2) that we must try to keep out of his mind the knowledge that he is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil. If they mean the first I agree with them: but not if they mean the second. The second would indeed be to give children a false impression and feed them on escapism in the bad sense. There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the Ogpu and the atomic bomb. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. Nor do most of us -find that violence and bloodshed, in a story, produce any haunting dread in the minds of children. As far as that goes, I side impenitently with the human race against the modern reformer. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book. Nothing will persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel. For, of course, it wants to be a little frightened.

And also this:

And I think it possible that by confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable.

In his next film, and to his credit, Bluth is not afraid to make us afraid, and lonely, and ballooned with a terrible grief. Unfortunately, Spielberg (and Lucas) were afraid to do just that, and the compromised work that survived is the topic of our next discussion. See you then.

2009 in Review

2009-12-30T20:03:00.004-05:00

So, another year comes to a close for Tom and Mary Russell, those dynamic husband-and-wife filmmakers. Of course, since our last film was finished in 2008 and our next one will commence shooting in earnest in the next week or so (that is, 2010), the question is begged: what did we, as filmmakers, do with this year?

We wrote the script for Olivia Forever!!, an extended process involving more hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing, and starting-overing than either of us would have liked. That is, however, one major consequence of (a) trying to eschew traditional narrative and (b) being petrified of the "shoot a whole bunch of stuff and see what sticks" school of thought. But, hey, the script is done and where it needs to be.
We got on The Twitters and The Facebooks and tried our hand at this whole social networking thing. I'm not sure how well we've done at it-- more on that in number three-- but we've made a few friends, including some people who've made our next film possible. Not that, mind you, we've managed to raise money for the film or anything. We're still operating out of pocket, which brings us to our next item...
We started distributing our films directly to you, oh fans of independent cinema, in nice DVD editions with a few extras. From selling our DVDs (and Tom's books) we've raked in a grand total of $41.86. Granted, getting said books published and sending said DVDs to critics has cost us $89, putting us about $47 in the hole. (Not to mention, of course, the three-digit figures that go into making the films themselves.) Not a particularly profitable year for us, but hey, it hasn't been a particularly profitable year for anybody and, as mentioned above, we pretty much suck at this social networking/marketing thing.

We will, however, get better at it. Which brings us to our plans for 2010:

Make Olivia Forever!! Naturally. Maybe another feature come the fall.
Re-release our two previous DVDs, this time will a full commentary track, better bonus features (which we should have the technological capacity to do in the next week or so), and more attractive packaging. Said packaging should also be coherent with our brand identity.
Create a brand identity in the first place, somewhere between "we're scrappy filmmakers" and "but our stuff is actually good".
Get the films online. Which should happen in the next couple of months, actually.
Sell more DVDs. As in, enough to potentially break even. This will likely be helped when we can cajole those critics who got screeners to watch 'em.
Blog more regularly, including more indie film reviews, for the purely selfish reason that the more hits we get and the more goodwill we can engender, the better off we're going to be.

Those are our plans for 2010. Let's see how we do...

Bluth Blogging: The Secret of NIMH

2009-12-28T03:10:00.004-05:00

I have fond but ever-so-vague memories of the four films Don Bluth directed in the 1980s-- The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, The Land Before Time, and All Dogs Go to Heaven. These four films, the last three of which I saw in the theater at ages four, six, and seven, respectively-- The Secret of NIMH having come out a week after I did, I first encountered it on a television set-- formed what probably seemed like an unstoppable chain of hits that came undone with 1991's Rock-a-Doodle. I haven't seen any of these films since at least the early nineties-- or, rather, I hadn't seen them again... until now.

I decided to revisit them partially for the purely mercenary reason that, having resolved to film-blog on a more regular basis, I need to have something to film-blog about, and partially for the purely personal reason that I wonder how well these films hold up to those fond if vague memories.

In general, I remember the films being darker than other animated films, and by darker I don't necessarily mean "scary", though The Land Before Time did frighten the bejeebus out of the six-year-old who saw it, but that they weren't dominated by bright, goofy colours. They seemed in a surreal way to be more "realistic" and less reassuring. I left those movies feeling certain that the things on the screen could happen; I felt no such verisimilitude when I waddled (pigeon-toed and unsatisfied) out of Oliver and Company. The Bluth films felt more like "real" films, the sorts of films that adults watched, and being that I was a strangely solemn little boy that desperately wanted to be taken very seriously indeed, that aspect appealed to me. I liked that there was something at stake. I never worried about the characters or the outcome in the Disney films of the period.

Bluth himself was unhappy with the mollycoddling, banal nature of those late-period pre-"Renaissance" Disney films, which is why he left the House of Mouse in the first place. Before their resignation, Bluth had spearheaded several attempts to change the direction of a company that saw its films as products to exploit, made as cheaply and as quickly (and as safely) as possible. It was that old court case, Art v. Commerce, all over again. When Bluth left, taking nearly twenty percent of Disney's animators with him, a staff meeting was held that reportedly began with the words, "Now that the cancer has been removed..."

The first feature Bluth and his fellow expatriates made was about as far from safe as possible. At its heart, The Secret of NIMH is about a widow fighting desperately to save the life of her sick child. So sick, he cannot be moved, for the chill might kill him. But moving day is near; the farmer's tractor will surely crush the home and the sick child that lays within it. Those are the stakes, my friends: a meek and frightened mother-mouse moving heaven and earth to save her son.

Mortality is central to the film and is emphasized by a series of frightening set pieces, chief among them being the sequence in which Mrs. Brisby seeks the council of the Great Owl. This is a potentially dangerous individual for a mouse to seek out; her not-entirely unfounded fears of being devoured are underscored by the hostile landscape surrounding the owl's tree.

Even more daunting, however, is the prospect of entering the Great Owl's tree. Shadows stretch out from its gaping maw, cobwebs hanging like curtains. Note the dynamic contrast between the shadows and the violent orange of the sky; if it had been a dark-blue starry night sky behind Mrs. Brisby and Jeremy, it wouldn't work, the contrast wouldn't be as striking.

"Film is flow," I'm inordinately fond of saying. Too many films, and animated films especially, are too quick to cut to the chase, to the action, to the sensation; as such, there's no sense of flow (I'm looking squarely at you, Transformers: The Movie). Bluth understands flow and pacing; he's unafraid to luxuriate in this murky atmosphere, to follow Mrs. Brisby as she makes her way through the cobwebbed darkness.

When a shock is required, such as the discovery of this pile of tiny corpses--

-- it emphasizes her vulnerability, her potential as prey, and thus her fears. It's not coming at the expense of the atmosphere, or even paying it off; it's part of the atmosphere, of the tapestry, of the flow. The same can be said for the sequence of shots that follow, which introduce a predatory spider that sneaks up on Mrs. Brisby, glaring at her with its alien red eyes and drooling from its hairy, pincered mouth.

Again, this isn't just a cheap shock, but a deeper and more frightening one. That thing was going to eat Mrs. Brisby, and it just died, it was just squished, all yellow ooze and twitching legs. If that spider is vulnerable, how much more vulnerable is the mouse it was about to eat? How much more vulnerable is the tiny mouse who lies in the bed, threatened both by pneumonia and the farmer's tractor, two forces over which poor Mrs. Brisby seemingly has no power?

Each frightening set piece emphasizes Brisby's mortality/physical vulnerability, often in visual/tactile ways: for example, she's basically stripped naked before she attempts to drug the monstrous cat, Dragon; trying to escape from a cage, she cuts her arm and bleeds. And by emphasizing that mortality, Bluth and company emphasize her son's mortality, and thus her fear, her motivation, her love. If she fails, he dies.

This all comes to a head in the film's finale. As the rats of NIMH move Mrs. Brisby's home intact to a safe place, her four children, including sick Timmy, sequestered within, the ropes are cut by the dastardly Jenner, intent on squashing Nicodemus, the only obstacle to his lust for power. And, sickeningly, the plan carries off with a hitch; Nicodemus is squashed by the house, the effort to move it is thwarted. The bad guys won.

There of course follows a dynamic sword fight, the most exciting animated action sequence since Prince Phillip took on "all the powers of Hell" in Sleeping Beauty, and the badniks are punished. But Nicodemus stays dead: death is final and no one is safe. And so when the house starts to sink in the mud, and when, despite all their best efforts, Mrs. Brisby and the rats cannot stop it from doing so, there is the very real chance that her children will drown, a possibility that is ominously underscored when the home is submerged completely in the mud, and the rats pull the frantic Mrs. Brisby away from it, restraining her.

It's a moment of real terror, and even the somewhat hallucinogenic ending, in which Mrs. Brisby uses the magic amulet to telekinetically raise the house out of the mud, does not mitigate its power. I wouldn't call it a deus ex machina, because a deus ex machina by definition does not flow from within the story but is rather imposed on it. Because the whole film is about her fear, her feelings of powerlessness, and her love for the child, it makes perfect sense for that love to prevail in the end, in the moment when she is the most fearful, the moment where she seems to be the most powerless.

Side Saddle 2 released

2009-12-25T21:13:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas.

And, hey, how's about a contest?

You heard the man! Upload three game play videos-- that's a perfect "no collisions" run-through for bosses eight, nine, and ten-- and post a link in the comments field over at Second Party Games. Good luck!

Best of Decade Addendum: James Cameron's AVATAR

2009-12-24T18:21:00.003-05:00

The problem with making a Best of the Decade list before the decade is over is that something really spectacular might just blow your socks off in the interim. The sock-blower in question is James Cameron's Avatar.

To be brief, it is brilliant filmmaking. Its action is coherent and exhilaratingly staged in an era where Le Cinema Du Blockbustré thrives on incoherence and meaningless stimulation. Cameron takes his time in setting up and telling his story, with each set piece coming out of that story instead of being shoehorned into it. Its computer-generated creations are not there simply to impress us, but to move us; its use of 3-D, that gimmickiest of gimmicks, is not gimmicky at all but, dare I say, artistic. It does not throw a bunch of shit at us, taking us out of the film, but rather gives the image layers of depth, bringing us deeper into it.

Glenn Kenny, in his review for the Auteurs, likened it to the work of Jack Kirby:

What I really love about Cameron’s sci-fi work is that it baldly reveals that one of his key visual influences is comics pioneer Jack Kirby, he of the galactic concepts, massive double-truck panoramas, and the craziest kineticism that was ever contained within none-moving frames, that is, comic book panels. Watching the camera pans going over the desolate planet landscape filling up with defense machinery in Aliens was like looking at a trademark Kirby two-page post splash vision come to life. It wasn’t just the composition and the larger than life humans; it was the hypertrophied design of the weapons and the air, land, and sometimes sea craft. A crazy, violent universe...[Avatar] works best as an insanely expanded Kirby-esque cinematic spectacle.

And this is a case where I agree with Glenn; I totally see (and definitely dig) the Kirby influence. The weird shapes of the flora and the fauna, the sometimes impractical craziness of, say, a trial of manhood that involves first jumping from one flying mountain to the root hanging precariously from another and shimmying up said root. I've written before about how Kirby often finds the sublime in the ridiculous, and Cameron does this in Avatar, tossing more ideas on the screen than most action directors have in their entire oeuvres. It's two-and-a-half hours jam-packed with exhilarating ideas, ideas that come together with a vengeance in the film's final act, especially with the introduction of a most unusual cavalry.

If someone tells you that the film devolves into mindless action in its last hour, they are wrong. If someone says the film has no ideas, no center, no originality, don't listen to them. Rather, feel sorry for those who have closed themselves off to spectacle, who can't appreciate or enjoy bombast at its most gorgeous and astonishing-- those people have cast off an entire and perfectly valid tradition of cinema, becoming like certain academics who can only celebrate the messy and the obscure, who are afraid to embrace something "popular" because it makes them seem less refined.

As for the putative political content, which caused quite a stir at Kenny's site a week or so back, I got to say that I don't think the film should be approached as an allegory for the most recent war in Iraq; while many of the men working for the assuredly Evil Corporation are former marines, they're no more members of the United States Armed Forces than the colonial marines in Cameron's Aliens. (And it's not like the Iraq War was waged for oil. No, no matter what your friend's protest sign says, that wasn't actually the case.) A better analogue for the Na'vi, if you must have one, would be the American Indians; the film is somewhat like Inglourious Basterds in that it provides a new (better?) ending to the whole sad saga: cinema trumping history.

But even that is a bad fit, in that, again, it's not a government but a private company that's waging this war for profit, not American soldiers but mercenaries. (Which does bring to mind the atrocities of that hated Octopus, Chiquita Brands International, nee the United Fruit Company...)

Carter for free online!

2009-12-19T17:18:00.002-05:00

Ryan Andrew Balas (who I interviewed here) has made his film Carter (which I reviewed here) available for free online until January 1, 2010. So, go ahead and give it a watch while it's still available.

In the spirit of giving for Christmas, Balas is also asking that people consider donating to the charity "Musicians on Call"; if you've got the resources to do so, why not consider shooting a few dollars their way?

(Non)-Rejected Poster for Son of a Seahorse

2009-12-14T23:53:00.001-05:00

Rejected Poster for Son of a Seahorse

2009-12-13T12:04:00.001-05:00

Verite is a lie.

2009-12-07T01:44:00.001-05:00

"Verite is a lie," I pronounced yesterday over twitter. It wasn't the first time I had said it, and it likely won't be the last; chances are, when I promote this piece through twitter and Facebook and all the other happy smiling social networking thingamajigs, I'll do it again.

But I said it yesterday, and yesterday, the filmmaker Jarrod Whaley responded through Facebook: "So is every other style." And this is true: any method you use to tell a story or relate an experience, even and especially cinematically, shapes that story or experience. Things are emphasized or de-emphasized, elided or changed. Whether the film is a documentary, a re-enactment, or a wholesale fiction, the simple act of telling that story, of making it into art, changes its substance, makes it "not true", makes it a lie.

And that's not something that causes me any real consternation; shaping a story is not the unfortunate side effect of art but rather the purpose of it. More than that, it's how the human brain works; when we reflect upon an experience, we impose order on it, creating a narrative of cause-and-effect, omitting unnecessary details, drawing connections, finding meaning. To be clear: I'm not saying that art should be manipulative or that an artist should lead the audience by the nose, forcing them to cry here, laugh there, draw this conclusion. The best art contains a multitude of meanings; the very best art contains meanings that we don't have words for, meanings that can't be explained but only experienced. The shaping of a story-- structuring it, ordering it, creating moments of culminative power-- is an integral part of even the messiest of art.

All styles, as Mr. Whaley said, are equally guilty of lying; thus, all styles are equally valid approaches, with some perhaps being better suited to shaping this story or that one. So why do I single out cinema verite, why am I picking on it?

It's partially for the simple, silly, and vindictive reason that we've been told-- by, I might add, some of our dearest friends-- that verite is the only valid method for digital video. That the low-lighting shaky-cam rack-focus whip-pan this-is-happening-right-now aesthetic is what video was made for. And being that our films use lights and tripods, that our style is a trifle bit (but only a trifle!) more formal, utilizing creature puppets, non-diagetic music, and stylized performances, I bristle a bit at being told that we're working against the "inherently naturalistic" medium of video because we don't use this "naturalistic" style.

And there are two fallacies in that last sentence, the first being that video itself is naturalistic. When I related this particular line of feedback to another good friend of ours, who has shot exclusively on 16mm, he said that video is a language that computers speak; what's inherently naturalistic about that? And I'm inclined to agree with him. Video is not any more naturalistic than film. In fact, some of the beautiful peculiarities of video, such as its lower contrast ratio, makes it less naturalistic, less like the human eye.

Video is only considered "naturalistic" because lightweight and affordable cameras are associated with the verite style, with birthday parties and home movies, with in-the-theater bootlegs, with gonzo porn, with capturing some freaky occurrence outside your window and putting it up on YouTube. Which brings us to fallacy number two: the idea that cinema verite is "naturalistic", that shaking a camera about makes it more "real". Let me demonstrate my point with a series of questions:

One, do you possess Superman's telescopic vision-- i.e., the ability to magnify an object several feet across a room?

Two, does your vision go blurry at indiscriminate times, only to snap back to crystal clarity?

Three, is your head constantly wobbling back and forth and jutting to and fro?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should probably seek medical attention. (Well, maybe not the first one. The first one is cool.) But I think you get my point: these touchstones of cinema verite (frequent zooming, rack focusing, and shaky-cam, respectively) in no way reflect the normal operations of the human eye. For that matter, neither do the touchstones of the classic Hollywood style: images typically don't dissolve into one another, we don't glide along sideways in lateral tracking shots, and humans don't, at this point in time, have the ability to pull back and up from something like a crane shot.

They're all artificial ways to add emphasis, beauty, and meaning to a cinematic experience. No one disputes that; no one argues that a crane shot is naturalistic. But verite is just as artificial, just as virtuosic. And, to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that. It's not a style I prefer to shoot in, and it's not my favourite style as a viewer, but like any style the question isn't what it is but what you do with it. And there's been some great films made in that style, no question about it.

My problem isn't that the verite style is a lie-- because, once again, just as Mr. Whaley said, so is every other style-- but that the verite style has pretensions of Truth. I've actually heard directors say that going handheld makes it more "real" or "raw" or "gritty" or "honest". And it's horseshit, plain and simple.

My other problem with verite, as I've stated above, is the monopoly it seems to have formed around the video medium, wherein directors, such as ourselves, working in a different idiom are criticized not for how well or how poorly we work within that idiom, but for not conforming to the dominant style, a style that is not only visually codified but also seemingly codified in other ways as well: our dialogue is too sharp and should be dulled with a plethora of verbal placeholders; our characters are too well defined and should blend together like a bunch of passive-aggressive post-collegiate articulate inarticulates; our performers are too bold, taking too many chances, and should stick to naturalistic, improvised mumbles; our sequences unfold with too much verve and should eschew directorial comment, energy, or artifice.

I don't think I'm being self-defensive here, or trying to invalidate any criticism of the films. Lord knows they have their problems; we've made mistakes and are still in the process of learning from them. And I'm not saying, like some filmmakers on the internet, that every style is equally right for a given story, or that there's no such thing as a wrong choice. Boy oh boy, are there wrong choices! And maybe we made the wrong choice in making our films the way we did, and maybe we didn't.

But the choices aren't wrong because our style is the "wrong" style for video. Video is a medium. Video is a means; it allows us to make films, instead of wasting years of our lives trying to work our way up through a studio system, instead of compromising what we want to do, instead of making films just like everybody else's films. And so, when verite and (let us speak its name plainly instead of dancing around it) mumblecore become dangerously close to being enshrined as the dominant styles of no-budget independent filmmaking, when people start to expect us to make films just like everybody else's films, it gets my dander up. If video is freedom, than the conformity of verite is inherently anti-video.

Verite is a perfectly valid form of artifice, but it is neither any more truthful than other forms, nor is it any more valid. I'm only hard on it because some others deem it to be both.

Tom's Favourite Films of the Last Ten Years

2009-12-03T23:21:00.006-05:00

It's been an exemplary decade for cinema, and the occasion has been commemorated with various "best of the decade" lists all over the internet. I'm even contributing to one at Hammer To Nail; said list is dedicated to films made under a certain budgetary threshold, in keeping with the site's mission to promote ambitious independent filmmaking.

I'm not going to limit this list, my own personal list, by budget-- it's been a great ten years for both scrappy indies and big-budget studio films. What follows are my favourite films of the last ten years, unranked but divided into categories of my own choosing. These aren't the only worthy or even great films that came out in that period; just my absolute favourites, the films to which I am addicted.

I tend to be more awed by mastery than ambition (though of course it is impossible to have the first without the other), so a number of wonderful, imperfect, experimental films that I loved didn't make it on the list. I loved WALL-E's opening act but found the last half wanting; films like Ryan Balas's Carter and Amir Motlagh's whale do interesting and compelling things, with certain sequences that I would classify as brilliant, but for me they fell just short of the sort of cinematic nirvana induced by the titles that follow.

Films which I own on DVD are indicated with an asterisk; those who know me and are feeling generous this Christmas can help fill those gaps, if you like.

The Andersons
*Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson. My favourite kind of rom-com: one that says that no matter how screwed up you are, there's someone out there to love you. Giddy and nerve-wracking: a film that feels like falling in love.

There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson. Tough, dark, surreally entertaining. Like his Boogie Nights, it's funny and sad and terrifying all at once; when Plainview snarls that his son is just a "bastard in a basket", you can see the heart breaking underneath all the anger and hate.

*The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson. A film teeming with beauty and surprises, from the gorgeous Henry Sellick fish to the pirate attack. The deadpanniest of his six deadpan masterpieces, and one of the warmest and most spontaneous as well.
The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson. Heart-on-sleeve: the most emotionally direct and earnest of Anderson's dialogue can be found here, along with the chanciest sequence he's attempted since Richie Tenenbaum's beard-trim and suicide attempt. Part of the fun of auteurism is tuning into a director's frequency so that you might better appreciate the nuances of one work or another; this one requires a great deal more tuning, and thus contains bountiful pleasures for the director's fans, yet is more likely to alienate his detractors. This is probably the film that made me a full-blown Anderson apologist (in the "defender-of", not "sorry-for", meaning of the word).

The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson. A sad children's film-- something there should be more of-- with a clear sense of real danger. The stylish framing and dry humour treats children, and their entertainments, as the equal of adults, never talking down to them; the colour, zip-and-zest storytelling, and "just-so" tactile qualities appeal to the wee ones and old arty-farts alike and in equal measure.

Spectacles

*Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese. Perfect enough for me, even with Cameron Diaz gumming up the works. Daniel Day-Lewis knocks it out of the park, Leonardo DiCaprio remains a compelling screen presence, and Scorsese & Schoonmaker pull off an impressive trick: the pacing and ordering of the film follows what is important to the characters, which is why the historical Draft Riots, so often derided by the film's critics as coming out of nowhere, indeed come out of nowhere. Coming out of nowhere is the point; these characters and their melodrama are squashed by history.
The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan. This is, frankly, what Batman should be: dark, serious, compelling, heroic, morally ambiguous, complex. A thrilling entertainment, with strong performances all around. A thinking man's action picture, which is so very rare these days. Or at all, really. A popcorn movie for the ages.

Spider-Man 2, Sam Raimi. And this is what Spider-Man should be: funny, serious, stressed-out, a colourful villain, acrobatic fight scenes, the struggle to do the right thing. The Subway Train Jesus sequence is vastly superior to the first film's "You mess with one New Yorker, you mess with all of us!", and the mastery of various tones and threads is pitch-perfect here where the third film is famously shoddy. One of the better superhero spectacles.

*Munich, Steven Spielberg. This is Spielberg at the top of his game; this is the director who gave us Jaws and Close Encounters, not the schmaltz machine that inflicted us with E.T., Hook, or The Terminal. He's been slowly working his way back with tough-minded but occasionally creaky films like A.I., Minority Report, and War of the Worlds. Munich is the pinnacle of this late-career progression, and it has me more excited about the director and his work than I've been in years.
Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino used to make films about pop culture (cf. the various riffs in his first three films) and now he makes films that are pop culture; he's no longer talking about the influence of Leone and others, but showing it. After the film, I was euphoric for hours, and I said to my Mary: "This must be what it's like to be high." I don't remember the last time I came out of a theater that satisfied, and that sure that the film I saw was a balls-out, no-bones-about-it masterpiece.

*Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro. A fantasy film with a real sense of menace that's too often missing from the "dark" films of, say, Tim Burton. Inventive, stylish, and terrifying. Like the director's The Devil's Backbone, the scary part is what the people do to each other, not the ghosts and goblins and creepy-crawlies.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee. An elegant kung-fu epic. Perhaps too elegant-- I like my wuxia to have a pulse-- but there's something beautiful about those slow, sad, treetop-swaying combatants.

Hero, Zhang Yimou. Like Crouching Tiger, it's an elegant, beautiful kung-fu film, and like Crouching Tiger, it works. It is a collection of stories, overlapping and contradicting but never confusing; taken together, it's as stunning an examination of the power and plurality of myth as any other.

*Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Peter Weir. What I remember about this film, and what brings me back to it time and again, more-so than the sweep of its action, is the chemistry between its two principles. Bettany and Crowe play off each other beautifully, bringing the characterizations and the relationships from O'Brien's novels to glorious life. My only regret is that this wasn't the first of many adaptations, but the first and only.

Romances
*The Illusionist, Neil Burger. For my money, better than The Prestige, or any of the twisty "everything-you-knew-was-wrong" films that have come out through the years. And it's better because Giamatti isn't terrified or shocked by the big surprise, but rather delighted. I'd much rather be delighted than have the rug pulled out from underneath me. Burger is a great talent, and his first film, the Kennedy assassination mockumentary Interview with the Assassin, is worth checking out. And as someone who hates mockumentaries and the perpetuation of the Kennedy conspiracy myth, that should tell you something.

Amelie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Still a very fine bauble.

Procedurals

*The Company, Robert Altman. I'd rank this with The Red Shoes as one of the best films about not just ballet but about the artistic process. Probably the master's last great film, working with a perfectly blended ensemble that doesn't devolve into the Overacting Olympics you sometimes get with his "quirkier" films.

Zodiac, David Fincher. I never thought Fincher would top Fight Club (especially after the merely-okay Panic Room), but he did, and how. The often quoted line is that it's like being stuck in a filing cabinet, and for a details nut like me, it was nirvana. Steeped in minutiae, thick with atmosphere.
Into Great Silence, Philip Groning. "Two and half hours of monks, doing monk stuff." Nothing more, nothing less. Probably the boldest, and most successful, experiment in film form and especially time. Tarkovsky wished he had directed a film like this. (And, if you know the high esteem in which I hold Tarkovsky, you know that this is not an insult to the late master but merely praise of the new one.)

Image-Making
*Bamboozled, Spike Lee. An examination of where we've been and where we're going, and of the subjectivity of history. It's a film that looks both at the awfulness of minstrel shows and at the real technical skill and talent required of its performers; it grapples with the legacy of black actors working in old Hollywood instead of dismissing or apologizing for them outright.

Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood. A look at the truth behind the Iwo Jima photo's mythology, a look at the necessity of that mythology, and a study in what that dichotomy can do to those being lionized. His most multifaceted and complex film, on par with Ford's Liberty Valence.

*The Queen, Stephen Frears. A stunning behind-the-scenes look at how a public image is constructed, complemented by a great Helen Mirren performance.

Shattered Glass, Billy Ray. A compelling, fact-based story, thrillingly told. When we got out of the theater, a little old lady who had been in the show with us approached us to ask if we remembered the director's name, because she wanted to keep an eye on him. Anyone who can get that performance out of Hayden Christensen is worth keeping an eye on.

Animation
*Ratatouille, Brad Bird. Likely the best and most stylish animated film since Sleeping Beauty. Gorgeous, sumptuous, full of small and wondrous details; a surprisingly literate script bursting with verve and surprises. At its heart, an examination of a self-centered, difficult genius-artist who never learns any life lessons or sees the error of his ways. Refreshingly free of moralism.

Existential Comedies
*I Heart Huckabees, David O. Russell. No relation. Ebert once said of this film that it "may be the first movie that can exist without an audience between the projector and the screen. It falls in its own forest, and hears itself." And I have to say, I have no idea what he's talking about: the film is absolutely hilarious, full of lines that my wife and I repeat in our daily lives.

Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman. One of the most tactile meditations on death and decay I've ever seen. Psychologically complex, incredibly funny, defiantly surreal, formally audacious-- and still it touches the heart. When that old man and that old woman have at last got each other, and they go to sleep in that burning house, it is beyond touching, beyond romantic. And the blow that comes next is truly, deeply, crushing.

*Napoleon Dynamite, Jared Hess. Oh, I'm just a big populist softy at heart, randomly asking people to give me their tots and bragging about my many skills. On the arty-farty side of things, I greatly enjoy the film's complete lack of traditional plot or narrative momentum.

Horror
Jesus Camp, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing. Seriously, the scariest movie I've ever seen. And I'm not talking in an intellectual, religious, or political way. This film is viscerally frightening, and those poor screwed-up kids crying their eyes out and confessing their sins are scarier than any homicidal orphans or Japanese girls with hair in their eyes.

Scrappy Lil' Indies, Distributed Division
Mutual Appreciation, Andrew Bujalski. (Disclosure: I consider Andrew a friend.) A film that gets deeper and funnier with every viewing. The long "parties" digression is not really a digression at all but the heart of the film. I could have easily categorized this one under "image-making", concerned as it is with gender, self-identity, and the way we present ourselves to others.

*LOL, Joe Swanberg. (Disclosure: I am credited in this film, though my footage didn't make the cut. I also consider Joe a friend, and he was kind enough to be in one of my own films, Son of a Seahorse-- thus ensuring the rest of the cast is only four degrees away in the Kevin Bacon game.) Less a study of technology than of male psychology. Strong performances from all the leads and interesting stylistic choices (look at the silent film style intertitles for e-mails, or Greta Gerwig's completely-through-sound-and-still-photo performance) abound. It's a film that I can watch compulsively, sometimes consuming just a few minutes at a time. It doesn't quite hit the emotional depth of the better scenes in Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs, but I think for sheer cohesive mastery, LOL is a stronger film.

*Scrapple, Jay and Mark Duplass. This short film, included on the DVD of the Duplass Brothers feature The Puffy Chair, is one of the most bracing shorts I've ever seen. Too many short films are cute or clever, or play like severely truncated and poorly-paced features; this one has the emotional depth of a feature while remaining a well-structured short.

Scrappy Lil' Indies, Self-Distro Division
*The Lionshare, Josh Bernhard. A multifaceted examination of how culture is created and disseminated and notions of ownership, all packed into a tight and sprightly sixty-five minutes. Entertaining, maturely stylish, ambitious without ever overreaching. The filmmaker has made the film available for free. It's worth your time*Press Start, Ed Glaser. A spoof film? Yes, a spoof film, one that targets a particular audience-- people who grew up with video games and are well-versed in the culture and tropes thereof-- with gusto, authority, and sincerity. Probably of no interest to the uninitiated, but it inspires my devotion all the more for that. A funny film, presented on a DVD packed with extras. Glaser has also released the remakesploitation classic Turkish Rambo under the title Rampage. Show your support for this funny, self-financed guy by ordering both.*Son of a Seahorse, Mary and Tom Russell. Of course I'm putting my own film on my list. First of all, no one else is going to. Secondly, it is one of my favourite films. Of the six features I've made in the last decade, it's the one that's going to last-- mark my words. Or, better yet, buy a copy. Every $15 copy we sell on Amazon nets us $3.34, so you'll be directly supporting independent film.

Olivia Forever!: Second Shoot.

2009-11-21T23:09:00.001-05:00

Spent several hours today getting the precious thirty-odd seconds of stop-motion animation required to bring to life Mike the Headless Chicken, who is (or, rather, was) indeed very, very real.

The "Mike" section of Olivia Forever! comes early in the film, and it is the first of many digressions from the story proper. If it falls flat, chances are the rest of the film will as well. (No pressure or anything.)

The Mike puppet was constructed by our good friend Steampunk Legend Jacob Hildebrandt, who also brought to life the Robot Lady in Son of a Seahorse and The Man Who Loved in The Man Who Loved. He likes building things, is pretty good at it, and likes money, so if you need something built, want it to turn out pretty good, and like to give people money, he just might be your guy.

The Mike footage/sequence is getting more tinkering in post than is per usual for us, and that's because we're looking to replicate a very particular and peculiar look. We're utilizing a lot of the grammar of silent cinema (albeit in widescreen) and purposefully putting in jumps, spatial jitters, and mucking around with the contrast to "degrade" the footage.

It's the kind of thing we want to be careful about-- we don't want to look like arty-farty homage-happy dinguses. We don't want the form this sequence takes to distract from the experience but rather enhance it. We'll have to wait and see how well we do with that.

PURE JAZZ: an interview with filmmaker Ryan Andrew Balas

2009-11-14T14:12:00.007-05:00

I reviewed Ryan Andrew Balas's second film, Carter, back in June; on November 24th, it will be playing at New York's Anthology Film Archives. In anticipation of his film's premiere, Ryan and I had a short discussion via e-mail, about Carter, dividing audiences, the biblical Jephthah, and improvisation. (Spoilers below, though knowing what happens in the film spoils none of the magic of how.)

TOM: Sminch. The name itself is a little odd, Jeb Sminch, and he has these big glasses and moustache, he has this very particular body language, this very peculiar way of looking at things, his vow-- every aspect of his character seems to otherize him, to keep us at a distance, on the outside. We never really get to "know" him. Was this something that was planned from the outset? Was the question of "why" he does it ever intended to be resolved, even obliquely, or was it always a MacGuffin, a way to get the story going, to get us into this world and these characters?

RYAN: Jebadiah Sminch, as a character, is designed to have some moral ambiguity. I feel like it's important that he asks more questions than he answers, not just on an intellectual level but to serve as a defense mechanism to the aspects of life and himself, that he doesn't really understand. From the story point of view, the concept is certainly an entrance into a life that has a lot of layers but nothing about Jeb Sminch was created to merely push plot. I just wanted to spend time exploring someone who found this life to be so absurd that they felt they deserved the last laugh.

TOM: To be clear, I didn't mean to imply that anything about him was created mechanically for plot purposes-- he's a very organic and I think well-drawn character-- it's just that the film operates so much outside of him, that it is, as the title implies, really from Carter's point-of-view, and that, even after he "explains" why he's doing it, the audience, like Carter, still doesn't have a full understanding. I think-- and I could be wrong about this, as I certainly haven't sat down and measured it out minute-by-minute-- but I'm pretty sure Carter actually has more screen-time than he does, and other than the short prologue, she's given the first and the final scenes, the first and the last word, if you will. What prompted the decision to focus on Carter or to approach Sminch mostly through her eyes?

RYAN: Everything returns to Carter. As we shot the film, I found this to be true, over and over, the world seemed to revolve around Carter. For Jeb, it's not so much about whether or not he is ready to go through with his vow, but if he can truly leave her. We made the decision, after shooting the first bedroom scene with Julia (Carter), that we needed to see Jeb Sminch's life through the reflection in her eyes. I think, at some level, Carter represents the part of Jeb, that doesn't really understand this life. She is the question, he's asking.

TOM: So would you say that the greater emphasis on Carter evolved during the production? I know that the film's dialogue at least was largely improvised-- how improvised would you say the film was structurally/stylistically? Did you always have the same ending in mind? Or how about the scene with the two women going through his clothes?

RYAN: Yes. Absolutely. I felt that even when we were shooting stuff with Jebadiah alone, the scene was still screaming Carter. In the end, when he is looking in the bathroom mirror, I just hear him repeating her name over and over in his head.

The film's concept is based off of a one act stage play that I wrote in 2006. The play is about 15 pages, and takes place on Jeb's 25th birthday. We shot that script and it was going to be our "daring" 15 minute, no cutting, opening to the film. It simply didn't work. And was the first to hit the cutting room floor. However, some of it has made it back into the directors cuts. As we began to see that the story was going to be stronger told as Carter reflects on the past few days---structurally the film became wide open with possibility. For the majority of the film, I had an outline, with locations and conversation topics to work off of. We shot a majority of the film in order, basically applying the information we gained in one scene and using it at the next location, ultimately have a solid emotional direction for the climactic arc that takes place at the park. I knew what I was looking for, but I had to work to find it. The film was improvised, like jazz is improvised, we had a foundation to work off of.

Conceptually, the ending has always been the same. However, the film's ending is far more open than the stage plays ending. The stage play "A life in rewind" is the sort of answer to all the questions. It will be on the directors cut dvd, in one form or another. And like I said---aspects of it, have been cut into the final directors cut of the film. As a side note, I remember work shopping the original stage play in class, in LA, and trying to justify it as a dark comedy by saying that it's funny like an old lady falling out of a window could be funny. That concept still needed a little work.

The scene with the two women dressing up in Jeb's clothes, was shot a few weeks after the rest of the movie, and after had already done a rough assembly of the film. I felt it was important to explore Carter's life, after Jeb. I think there is something oddly sexual, and equally maternal about that scene and that is pure jazz.

TOM: It's my favourite scene in your whole picture, and the two women play off each other very well.

RYAN: Thanks. It's probably my favorite as well.

TOM: How much did Sminch change, as a character, from the play to the film? And Carter? A lot of improvisational filmmaker depends on a person's natural charisma or draws on their personality/experience. Was Carter based in some ways on Julia Porter-Howe? Her performance certainly seems more naturalistic than Mark Robert Ryan's. (And, as I'm sure you're aware from watching the acting in my own film, I don't mean that as a knock against Ryan; was that performance more "constructed" in any way?)

RYAN: Jebadiah, as character, has remained fairly consistent. In the stage play, I played the role, so there were aspects of my personality, and physical tics, and so when Mark was given the role, he brought his interpretation of those qualities along with a whole new set of ideas, and quirks. Jeb is still Jeb. Stubborn, absurd and sincere.

I think the character development for Mark, and Julia has to be understood in the context in which they each related to the material.

Jebadiah Sminch views life as being absurd, and so I think Mark approached the character as an absurdist. This doesn't mean that he didn't personalize the experience, but the performance had to come from some place darker and more mysterious. On the opposite end of that spectrum, Julia connected with the suicide aspect of the material on a more personal level. She has experiences in her own life, that allowed her to connect more naturally with the way Carter approached Jeb.

As the director, I'm always searching for the real moments, the aspects of my actors personal character that can be used in the context of the story that we build. I think this kind of improvisational approach to work, allows there to be more naturalistic performance and creates a deeper personal collaboration with the people I'm working with. So in short, yes, Carter is based entirely on Julia Porter Howe and Mark Ryan, as they experience extraordinary circumstances.

TOM: I like how you describe Sminch as being stubborn and sincere. There's a certain religious aspect to his character-- the way he says that his suicide vow is sacred and holy because it is a promise to God. There's a certain similarity to the biblical Jephthah and his vow, the way he backs himself into a corner, perhaps rashly. And of course the names Jephthah and Jebadiah sound quite a bit alike; was this an intentional link for you? And: would you consider yourself at all to be a religious person?

RYAN: That's a really interesting connection, that I wish I could say is intentional. It's not.

However, the name Jebadiah is meant to sound entirely biblical, and the "Jeb" is Israeli for "Beloved Friend". I'm really fascinated by this link between our Jeb and the biblical Jephthah. The idea of making a rash vow to God, and the connection with a sole female character. Jephthah is forced, by a vow to God, to kill his only daughter. And in many ways, our Jeb is doing something horrible to the only woman in his life. Good find, Sir! That's the beauty of interpreting art (Can I call it that?!), we can find connections outside of intention, based on our own personal experiences with the work.

I'm interested in being a human being. Does that make me religious? I don't know. I think it's very interesting how much culture factors into one's religious experience. I'm a Midwestern transplant, so I'm certainly deeply impacted by an average religious upbringing. However, the question of God was never really posed until I moved away from that influence and I began to really deconstruct my existence. I can say this, I'm curious what happens when we die. There are times when I think we become dirt and other days I imagine something larger, more profound. Even more, I find something really profound about dying and becoming the soil that the tree's growing their roots into my body. Ultimately, we find purpose and that's why we go on. I feel that, at some level, I make very spiritual films. I don't think that means I'm professing answers, but really, I'm asking questions, and to me, that's a far more spiritual experience.

TOM: I'd agree that Carter has a spiritual aspect; that opening waking-up sequence especially is very striking, the attention it pays to movement and light, to time itself-- it begs introspection without being at all verbal. And then, to contrast that, you have the scene in the office, which is frankly very profane, and also very verbal, where you have Sminch's coworker talking about men have sex with horses and suggesting that they rape people while they sleep. It's a very vulgar character, and while he serves as a foil for Sminch and the scene itself as a foil for Carter and her first scene, do you think it might be a little bit too much? Or is a "little bit too much" entirely the point?

RYAN: In a way, I hope these sort of "spiritual" questions I'm attempting to ask, can act as the through line that connects all the work, as a whole piece. And someday, I can look back at my films, and have a bolder, more articulate understanding of where I'm going.

The question "is it too much?" is reason alone, for that scene to be in the movie.

Yes, Jeb's friend is extremely vulgar. He talks about sex in a perverse, disgusting manner. The idea of "sleep fucking" is horrible. But, as I watch him, I'm reminded that he's human. And more so, I hope to be reminded that I'm human. As for the experience Jeb is having, it's far bigger than that. Jebadiah is faced with the ugly side of being a human, and it's perverse and all a "little bit too much". He is mentally preparing to end his experience as a human being and the only bit of solace he has left, is humanity, and it's currently suggesting they make a porn website and rape sleeping people. In a dark way, they are both searching for a "real" experience.

I chose to juxtapose the morning introspective scene with Carter and the darkly profane office scene with Jeb and his friend because I don't want to make safe films, I want films that reflect my own humanity. The beautiful, the curious and even the darkly perverse.

TOM: Do you think these darker aspects of humanity have anything to do with Sminch's decision? Do you think the ugliness in the world is part of what compels him, part of what he finds absurd about it?

RYAN: I think its certainly an aspect of what he finds absurd, but I don't know if I would necessarily say that it's what compels him.

Jebadiah wants to be in control of his life. His vow is a self fulfilling prophecy. He could have chosen to save himself and get married to someone, anyone, before the deadline. In a way, he gave fate the opportunity to deliver, and was let down. So he committed to his own path. Mark Ryan once described the character as "wanting to be his own God".

I think the ugliness in the world certainly effects Jeb, but he accepts it as truth, just the same as he accepts the taste of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with soda.

TOM: Let me come back to the idea of not making safe films, which is something that I admire and an ambition that I share. Did you ever worry about turning off a chunk of your audience with that scene that might have really appreciated the rest of the film? John Grisham once said that a lot of people didn't get past the first few pages of his first book because of how graphically he described the crime, even though the rest of the book was nowhere near that graphic. Do you worry about something like that happening with "Carter"? Or is that part of not being "safe"?

Honestly, I can't say that I've lost sleep over it. This isn't any disrespect to my audience, in fact, it's because I think they are viewing the movie with an higher intelligence level than me. I feel that I've set up the first scene to establish what the film is going to feel like, as far as tone and time go, so the first thing I wanted to do was shake it up a bit. We open on this beautiful image of Carter waking up, and we see, without knowing it yet, what Jebadiah is going to lose. This is juxtaposed with the uglier side of Jeb's life, the shallow surface level aspect. I feel it let's know what it's truly at stake. I also wanted to give Donald, Jeb's friend, the opportunity to be judged and redeemed within a two scene character arc. First we despise him, then we learn to respect him for his deep concern about the grave vow his friend has made. He seems shallow, but within two interactions, the layers unfold. This opportunity to have a second impression, is hopefully another reminder of our own humanity.

I think some people will be thrown off by this, and some critics have certainly slung mud at the concept, but there is a part of me that's excited about this. I've heard it said, that love and hate are almost the same thing. I could lose half an audience by doing something that the other half loves. I've got to stay true to my instincts. I think as time goes on, they will become sharper and I'm going to have a better sense of the best ways to communicate a specific idea to an audience. Ultimately, the only loyalty I have, is to my vision.

I feel no responsibility to follow traditional structure. I think it's safe, and commercially responsible at times, but it's not contributing to the art form. More so, it's not helpful to me, as a filmmaker, to set guidelines in which to work. I want to learn as much as I can from experimenting with time, image and sound and how they can be used to connect with the inner workings of other human beings.

TOM: Would you say that working at a lower budgetary level allows you to experiment? If you were to be given oodles of money-- assuming, of course, you're interested in taking it-- would you feel a need to be less experimental and more "commercially responsible"?

RYAN: I'd say, in the case of Carter, and my first film Sandcastles, spending my own money gave me a lot of freedom to mess up.

My new film "Mother Sister" is crowd funded, and so the major responsibility I feel, is to make a great film. This doesn't meant that I'm being less experimental, I'm just working harder to learn from my mistakes and communicate my idea's the better than before. I would like the generous supporters of my new work, to have a film that they really enjoy and connect with. That's my hope. I'm still trying to be as experimental as ever when it comes to production structure and the way I shoot films, I'm just a little more intentional about it now.

Now If I were working within a system that had financial investors and their was an obligation to make money back in order to continue making "bigger" stories, I would simply bring the right kind of story to the table. I approach each film, looking at what resources will be available to me, then create my story around those circumstance. I'm not writing $75, 000 movies and making them for $5,000. So financial support or not, It's really about the story and what I can say with what I have. I'd like to see my work as being somewhat of a good investment, the production cost is low because the crew is minimal, I shoot everything digital and I have an amazing, talented group of supportive collaborators that care about the work. My web series "The Really Cool Show" is the most "commercial" thing that I make, and it cost's me the least to do. It's got over 9 million views, and with the right business structure, it has potential to be a fiscal success. And we've always just experimented and did whatever we wanted. I don't think there is a true model for financial success, but to make films that you really care about.

TOM: How well would you say Carter communicated the ideas you wanted to communicate? What would you have differently, look at it in hindsight? What do you think you learned from the experience as a filmmaker?

RYAN: I started with a character, and that character was Jebadiah Sminch. I had no idea how much he loved Carter, until we began shooting, and after that, the film wrote itself.

If I would have made the film in any other window of time, maybe it would have been edgier, and pushed the relationship further. I don't know. These films are made during a really special window of time, in which our reality completely shifts and we give in to these beautiful creative monsters that live inside of us. I don't judge them, I learn from them. On that note, The only technical regret I have, is that the sound isn't perfect. I learned not to trust home made xlr to stereo mic jack converters.

TOM: Was Jeb not going through with it ever a possibility? The whole structure kind of hinges on it, and it totally works, but I'm just wondering if there was ever a point where you and Mark Robert Ryan said, "maybe..."?

RYAN: On the morning of Jebadiah Sminch's 25th birthday, Carter wakes up early, she is careful not to disturb a sleeping Jeb. She walks into the bathroom, as per her normal routine, except today is different, today she is going to switch Jeb's sleeping pills with placebo's. The deed is done. She has left two sleeping pills in the bottle, so that Jeb will fall asleep believing he succeeded but awake to find Donald, Maggie and Carter having what was supposed to be his last laugh. Carter exits the apartment en route to get a cake, and breakfast for the birthday boy.

Jebadiah, opens one eye and listens carefully, making sure Carter is gone. He gets out of bed, walks into the bathroom, reaches into the bottom cabinet, and reveals a second bottle of real sleeping pills, he pockets them and exits the bathroom...

CARTER Festival Trailer from Ryan Balas on Vimeo.

She Moved The Pillow: A Tale of Tom & Mary.

2009-11-11T00:46:00.004-05:00

Tom had known Mary for a couple of years-- not well, but casually, and well enough to have a little crush-- when he invited her to tag along on one of the shoots for his new film. The film itself isn't all that important: it was, in the end, a manifestly terrible piece of work, a cynical and completely misanthropic film that had nothing but contempt for its characters. The person who made that film scarcely resembles the person writing these words today. And yet, somehow, miraculously, Mary saw the latter in the former and fell in love with him. And I'm so very glad that she did.

And while I think our love was built slowly, bit-by-bit over the years, evolving into a fast friendship and then, wonderfully, something more, I can pin-point the very moment that my infatuation, my attraction, my crush on her exploded madly with passion and desire.

It was on that shoot. I had set up my actors on a couch-- in those days, all my scenes took place on couches, so much so that the joke going around the set was that next time, the couch would move-- and my camera was at one end on the couch, glaring at them in profile. Or, at least, it was supposed to; situated at each end there sat a pillow. Not a big pillow, just the sort of ordinary square pillow that adorns any couch worth its cushions. But it was big enough to obscure my camera's view of the actors as I tried to frame my close-up.

And so, I started cranking up my tripod-- an old photographers tripod, really intended for sitting photographs, another reason for my commitment at the time to cinema du sofa-- to try and peer over the pillow. When that seemed to not be working, I tried tilting the camera upwards. No dice. I adjusted the tripod again. I got my dolly-- by which I mean, of course, a block of wood with some casters on the bottom-- and placed the tripod on it to gain some extra height. Still wasn't quite what I wanted.

This went on for a few minutes, constantly making adjustments, continually getting frustrated. And then, Mary got up off her chair, walked to the couch, grabbed the pillow, and, without saying a word, sat back down with the pillow on her lap. The shot was very quickly framed and, as they say, in the can.

Mary moved the pillow, and my heart skipped the beat.

Olivia Forever: First Shoot.

2009-11-07T18:56:00.001-05:00

Adrienne Patterson as Olivia.

We've (by which I mean, Mary and Tom Russell, the filmmakers behind Son of a Seahorse and The Man Who Loved) been ready to shoot Olivia Forever! (by which I mean, our next feature film, a comedy/period piece) for about a month now (by which I mean, a period of four to five weeks). The only thing that's been prevented us from leaping right in is that we've been waiting on a new shotgun mic, which was supposed to ship, well, almost a month ago, and which has yet to arrive.

But: be it known that our film takes place in the autumn, and this being November and Michigan, autumn is a commodity that will soon be in short supply. But, you say, couldn't you just rewrite it so that it takes place in the winter or the spring, you scrappy and adaptable no-budget filmmakers you? Unfortunately, no, because the film takes place during a very particular autumn-- to wit, the autumn of 2004. You can't really "fudge" or move an election season.

And so, knowing that we needed to shoot some exterior autumnal scenes while said exteriors still looked autumnal and scenic, and fully aware that the all-important microphone might not arrive for some time yet, we reworked said exterior autumnal scenes and removed the dialogue. (We are, after all and as noted above, scrappy and adaptable.) And then, today, we shot two of them: scenes eleven and twenty-four are in the can. Or, more accurately, on a hard drive.

Production: 1.16 % complete.

The Siren Programs TCM.

2009-11-02T21:04:00.002-05:00

We're generally not "click on this link" bloggers, but, um: click on this link. This is seriously cool stuff, and if you're not following The Siren's blog you're definitely missing out.

Former Dearborn Mayoral Candidate Endorses Jack O'Reilly for Re-Election, Claims He Did Not Pick His Nose.

2009-11-01T20:10:00.002-05:00

Photo by Press and Guide.

There's been a picture printed on the front page of the Dearborn Press and Guide a couple of times in the last month or so from the last election, featuring Mayor Jack O'Reilly, challenger Michael Prus, and some doofus on the end who looks like he might be picking his nose. I am that doofus. (No, I'm not picking my nose. Just thinking.)

A number of people have recognized me from the photo, and asked if I was running again. No, I'm not, but I think more people have asked me about my candidacy in the last month than ever asked me when I was actually running. And part of that is because I really ran as a lark, with full knowledge that my chances of winning were next to nil. I just tried to have fun with it, which is why I did a video comparing municipal financing to the arcade game BurgerTime, and why I campaigned wearing a fuzzy yellow bathrobe.

A bigger reason why I didn't get much attention, however, was that there were so many of us running. If anyone was going to beat Mayor Pro Tem O'Reilly, it would be because so many of us fractured and split the vote. Looking back at it now, with the knowledge that O'Reilly won in a landslide, such concerns seem a little silly. But back then, I was worried.

Because even if my candidacy was a deliberately Quixotic act, I still did and do care deeply about my hometown. Some of the other candidates were even more unqualified than I was, or, if they had educational credentials, their ideas were nonsensical or dangerous. One candidate said he was going to create new revenues by cutting taxes. Another thought he could change the shape of U. S. foreign policy from Dearborn's City Hall. These are not people you want running our city during a difficult and tumultuous time.

There were other ideas that were well-meaning, but ultimately of little utility. Sure, having a "Ford Dream Cruise" might be nice, but it wouldn't do much to support Dearborn's biggest tax payer in real world terms. And I'm not sure if a city-wide lottery would really shore up any of our budgetary problems.

When I was running for mayor, I actually said, if you don't vote for me, than vote for O'Reilly. Because the thought of anyone else in City Hall (which, in all honesty, would include myself) was terrifying. That still holds true today. For what it's worth, this doofus is giving his endorsement to Mayor O'Reilly.

That's not to say he's done a perfect job. Progress has been slower than many of us would like, especially regarding development in the west end. There have been disappointments and setbacks. And he is not quite the communicator that his predecessor was.

But he is a good and honest man. He has investigated charges of corruption with integrity and has always been candid with the people of Dearborn. He has the skills, knowledge, and experience that we need at this crucial time. Progress is being made, but like all real progress, it takes time, especially given the state of things across our great nation. I am completely certain that patience will be rewarded, and that Dearborn will really flourish in the years it is under O'Reilly's stewardship.

In the last election, I was immensely proud of winning 82 votes, many of them, I gather, from strangers. That's 15,978 votes less than Mayor O'Reilly, and 19 votes more than his challenger, Mr. Prus. If those eighty-two are listening, this doofus asks you to give your vote on Tuesday to Jack O'Reilly.

(Tom Russell is a life-long resident who makes films with his wife, Mary. Their latest, SON OF A SEAHORSE, is available on DVD from Amazon.com. His opinions are his and his alone and do not reflect in any way, shape, or form the opinions of his employer.)

Azazel Jacobs's THE GOODTIMESKID

2009-10-31T16:46:00.002-04:00

When someone tells me that deadpan comedies leave them cold-- that, for example, Jim Jarmusch is only concerned with being "hip" or Wes Anderson only with how he arranges objects in the frame-- I wonder if they're watching the same films that I am. Deadpan comedies are not about suppressing emotions but about accessing them; the anguish on the screen for me has always been palpable, and the characters are usually larger-than-life, completely consumed and defined by their depression, their alienation, or their inability to connect with others.

What those people who don't "get" deadpan are really saying is not that the films lack warmth, affection, and emotion, but rather that the emotions on display make them uncomfortable, and they certainly didn't come to a comedy to, you know, go through an actual emotional experience, to actually think and feel. Comedy equals autopilot, while deadpan demands attention. And I feel sorry for them, because they're really missing out on experiences that will make them not only better cinephiles but also better people.

Almost every great deadpan comedy is an act of sympathy for the putatively unsympathetic, and this holds true for Azazel Jacobs's* The GoodTimesKid. Consider, for example, the character that Jacobs himself plays: a wiry, surly mass of pointless, directionless rage, angry at everything and nothing. This character, one Rodolfo Cano, starts fights (clad in boxing gloves and a cape made from an American flag) for no obvious reason, screams and scowls at and rushes out on his girlfriend, Diaz (Diaz), and enlists in the army, also seemingly unmotivated.

His call-to-service letter ends up being sent to another Rodolfo Cano (Gerardo Naranjo); this Rodolfo has an expression that is so self-depreciating that Diaz dubs him, not unfittingly, "Depresso". He is most assuredly a passive figure, the exact opposite of a self-starter. He spends most of the film following others: he follows the other Rodolfo to the latter's home, follows Diaz on her way to the bar where her Rodolfo is getting the snot beat out of him, follows the other Rodolfo for what appears to be an entire evening as he walks around aimlessly. There's a great gag in the first following sequence when the angry Rodolfo comes to a stand-still, and Rodolfo the Follower does the same, stopping next to a tree. A sudden cut takes us from brisk daylight to black evening, and there's Rodolfo, still next to the tree, still waiting for Rodolfo to make a move.

There's a scene in the house where Depresso-Rodolfo watches Diaz beat up a chocolate birthday cake in anguish, then start pounding on the refrigerator, smearing it and her dress with cake before plopping down in front of it. Diaz looks up at him, and demands, "Who the fuck are you?" In answer, he punches and kicks the refrigerator, than slides down next to Diaz. It's a moment of bonding, almost a ritual of initiation, but there's a delicious irony in that, even in this moment, he is still following somebody else's lead. (The film's ending, which will remain unspoilt here, gives this running gag its most logical, apt, sad, noble, and generous punchline.)

By naming both his male leads Rodolfo, Jacobs of course asks us to compare and contrast them. We might align our sympathies more readily with Depresso-Rodolfo than his angrier counterpart, but they're not really so different. Consider the scene in which Depresso-Rodolfo and Diaz hide from the former's girlfriend, as said girlfriend pleads for him to open up and let her in. Isn't that really what Diaz herself asks of her Rodolfo in the film's opening scene? Diaz knows what it's like to be that person on the other side, beating on the door. And maybe this new Rodolfo might not be the perfect replacement he at first seems.

What's interesting about this moment, this parallel, is that it's almost tossed away; while they hide from Rodolfo's unseen girl, our intrepid duo play with a flash-light, comically shushing each other and making faces. Because of this, the parallels are still allowed to register, but they never call attention to themselves, never metastasize into Big Obvious Points.

This is what I like about deadpan comedies: themes are still dealt with, emotions still explored, but in a sideways kind of way that helps to make the often heavy material more bearable. Anger, depression, longing, loneliness, and the mysteries of why we hurt the people we love and why we do the things that we do: these are all important and potent ingredients in Jacobs's concoction, but they never overpower his comic sensibility and the deep compassion he feels for his characters.

This compassion is most evident, I think, in the remarkable monologue Jacobs gives to the Rodolfo he himself plays. Temporarily stripped of his rage and vulnerable, seemingly willing to relinquish Diaz to the new Rodolfo (another parallel: he's just as capable of being passive, and perhaps his anger is tied up in that), he talks about Diaz, about how special and how rare she is.

This is the guy who began the film by storming out of the house; this is the guy who returned home just long enough to yell at Diaz before running out to start a fight at a bar; this is the guy who comes home with another woman and crashes on the couch; this is the guy who, in his next scene, will suddenly start to attack Rodolfo. This guy-- who my wife dubbed Rage-O in homage to Diaz's own coinage of Depresso-- is the guy who gets the most poetic expression of emotion. If we don't-- I don’t want to say "identify", as that's not quite the word-- but if we're still completely outside this guy, still completely rooting for Depresso-and-Diaz, then I dare say this scene, and perhaps the film itself, would cease to work. Quite a gamble, that.

But for this viewer, at least, it did work; this sudden yet oh-so-quiet explosion of feeling hooked me completely, and when the film had come to its end-- when Depresso-Rodolfo does something that is at once completely within his character but also an uncommon act of, dare I say it, nobility-- it is completely satisfying and makes complete sense because of this scene.

It is, then, the pivotal scene, the one that sets the film's final act (and final actions) into motion. And this scene depends on a guy who is almost defined by his unfocused anger. It's a testament to Jacobs's abilities as an actor and director, as a creator of tone and of flow, that the scene works. The little parallels between the two Rodolfos, and between Diaz and her doubles, register obliquely; the deep wells of emotion and turmoil that gush within all of these fucked-up and angry people (the Rodolfos and Diaz are all a little defensive, all attacking or being attacked, all wary of others) seep through the long quiet moments, the surreal-yet-underplayed gags, the droll-but-at-times-pointed dialogue. Our sympathies for and understanding of the Angry Rodolfo are created almost by osmosis, seeping in undetected, until they surprise us in that monologue, in that moment.

This sort of surprise, this culminative effect, this is, for me, the promise of deadpan comedy. In this case, it is a promise that is fulfilled.

The GoodTimesKid came out on DVD this summer, the sixth release from Benten Films. I own all but one of their titles, and can recommend them wholeheartedly: (1) Joe Swanberg's LOL (which, full disclosure, I'm sort of but not really in-- long story); (2) Aaron Katz's Quiet City and Dance Party, USA (packaged together); (3) Todd Rohal's The Guatemalan Handshake; and (5) Kentucker Audley's Team Picture. I haven't seen Benten number four, Matthias Glasner's The Free Will, which is two and a half hours long, in German, and about a sexual predator-- not exactly the sort of thing I'm personally clammering to see-- but, what the hey, I'm going to recommend it anyway because Benten's track record is impeccable: good films, great packaging, perfect transfers, loads of extras. Everything you could want from a DVD, really.

*-- "Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's. Follow this rule whatever the final consonant."-- Strunk & White, mofos.

So I Guess I'm Really a Critic Now

2009-10-28T22:03:00.003-04:00

Holy crap, I'm a pull-quote in a trailer!

CARTER Festival Trailer from Ryan Balas on Vimeo.

That quote, of course, comes from this review of Carter. Balas's film will be playing Nov. 24 at New York's Anthology Film Archive.

If anyone else out there has a film they'd like me to review, please don't hesitate to contact me via e-mail (that's milos_parker at yahoo dot com) about sending a screener my way. It should be noted that if I don't like the film in question, I'll give you the option of not having me review it-- but if you ask me to go ahead, I ain't going to pull any punches.

Indie Trailers A-Go-Go # 5

2009-09-27T22:59:00.002-04:00

Josh Bernhard's THE LIONSHARE

2009-09-23T00:37:00.004-04:00

As always, spoilers.

Features running between an hour and an hour-ten, maybe hour-fifteen, incredible rarities since the B pictures flourished and faded (and by "B" I mean of course the second-half-of-a-double-bill other-side-of-a-record "B", I mean Mexican Spitfire's Elephant coming after Citizen Kane and not, you know, a modestly-budgeted genre picture), are making a sort of comeback-- if not exactly as a part of the mainstream filmgoer's experience, at least not yet, then as a part of the cinephile's. Digital video, the great democratizer, has allowed non-traditional people to make non-traditional films with non-traditional running times.

Having seen (and made) a few films that run skinny, I can say that the shorter running time isn't exactly automatically a cause for excitement. I've seen (and, uh, made) a lot of films that are still far too long at seventy minutes. The filmmaker, wanting to chase the "legitimacy" of feature film, extends a premise that would have been more at home at, say, twenty minutes, maybe thirty, forty at the most, far past the breaking point (I should note, in the spirit of "please buy one of our DVDs", that we're not trying to sell any of the over-extended films Tom made before he met his Mary). Some filmmakers even go as far as to lie about the running time, with the disc face itself proclaiming that it's 80 minutes when we know full well that it's only (yet, strangely, excruciatingly) 65.

But every once in a while, there's a film that packs its 65 minutes with ideas, explored fully yet obliquely-- a film that makes you wish there was another half-hour to look forward to, yet leaves you feeling satisfied. One such film, peering a few decades back, was 1967's The Firemen's Ball, the delightful sociological comedy that is still one of Milos Forman's best films. Another is Josh Bernhard's The Lionshare.

I do not make this comparison lightly; to my mind, the two films have more in common than the slim running time. Both films are comedies that explore sociological phenomenon with a light but occasionally biting touch; both come at their respective subjects a little sideways, making points in such an oblique and organic way that they don't feel like points at all, that they only register on a subconscious level-- which ensures that the films will last beyond the current sociological climate, that they have things to say about life when their subjects have been regaled to relics.

Granted, those subjects aren't exactly equal: Forman made a film about communism and Bernhard about file-sharing. Forman's film is "banned forever" in his native Czechoslovakia, and he was nearly imprisoned for doing "economic damage to the state". Bernhard's film will never be quite so contentious. And so we'll bid that particular comparison adieu.

Bernhard's treatment of his subject is more complex and subtle than it first appears. The film's first scene follows a first date that quickly becomes a search for a copy of the film Ghostbusters. The male half of this heterosexual pairing, young filmmaker Nick (Mike Pantozzi), has seen it but the distaff half, Eva (Jessi Kneeland) has not. Blockbuster's copy is in use; Nick says that he'd buy another copy for this occasion, but where would they find a copy to buy?; Eva suggests using the titular (and fictional) file-sharing network, the Lionshare, to download it. And so, they head back to her place and, as they wait for the film to download, they drink, they kiss, and then they do some file-sharing of their own, if you know what I mean.

At this first glance, the film seemed decidedly pro-file-sharing; after all, it got the guy laid. Moreover, it seemed to go to some lengths to excuse its characters from any culpability for their piracy; after all, they went to Blockbuster like law-abiding citizens, and they were thwarted! He had intended to buy another copy-- another copy, so he already owned it!-- but may have been thwarted as well! File-sharing was a last resort, and if the film had been available when and where they wanted it in the first place, there wouldn't have been any problem. Of course they wanted to do it legally, but they were really left with no choice.

Does this line of reasoning sound familiar? It should. It's behind the obnoxiously stupid argument that all art should be free, and that for an artist to seek some kind of monetary compensation is some form of gaucherie, if not a crime. It's the justification I used to seek out and download ROMs of old Nintendo games. The justification you used, perhaps, to burn a copy of a friend's DVD. A justification that, frankly, doesn't hold water, but that we use to make ourselves feel okay about our theft.

And so, ten or fifteen minutes in, I was more than a little worried about where this was going, a worry that was in some ways deepened by the knowledge that this film was being distributed through a Creative Commons license. That is, a film that is meant to be freely distributed. Not that that in particular bothers me-- as someone who makes freeware games, and as someone who got a free copy of this film from the filmmaker, I have nothing against such a spirit of generosity-- I just got the feeling, that's all, that because this film is being put out there for free, that the film was also advocating putting everything out there for free.

But that's not true; as I said, the film's attitude towards its subject is actually fairly complex. It's neither pro-piracy or anti-piracy, pro-free or anti-free. Shortly after Nick starts using the file-sharing network, he discovers that he has to maintain a certain uploading-downloading ratio; that is, he needs to put some files on the network before he can take any more. He grabs the music of his friend Bracey (Bracey Smith) and puts it online.

Bracey discovers this and is less-than-pleased; that music wasn't finished, in his opinion, and he didn't want it getting out there for anyone to download. But before you can say, "Aha, now Nick knows how it feels" or otherwise impose some sort of morality on this little photo-play, Bracey is signed to a record deal... because of someone who downloaded those files.

But that doesn't mean the film is "ultimately" coming out in favor of file-sharing, nor does it mean that the film is simply and stupidly reporting "both sides" like a spineless nightly newscaster or a "teach the controversy" idgit. I would say, in fact, that the film's concerns go beyond something as small as file-sharing; it provides, instead, a nuanced look of the notions of ownership in general, whether we're talking about art, friendship, love, or schtick, and how networking-- whether by computer or face-to-face-- changes those concepts.

A couple of examples, to better explain what I mean by all that arty-farty gobbledygook.

The girl, Eva, introduces Nick both to the file-sharing network and a band called Apple Curry, and through the former he listens to the latter. Later in the film, he comes across one of the band's songs on the radio, and this upsets him: the band has sold out, the radio chose the worst song from the album, et cetera. But what's really irking him is that the band doesn't "belong" to him anymore. He's no longer the cool insider, privy to some obscure piece of musical magic.

And note the double standard here: when Nick's friend Bracey is brought to the attention of a record company, Nick is of course very happy for him, even feeling a bit proud, if not vindicated, about his role in bringing that about. Bracey hasn't sold out; if Bracey's songs dominate the airwaves, if the stations pick the "worst" song, Nick likely wouldn't be irked. That's because Bracey still "belongs" to Nick exclusively as a friend. Others might have access to the music, but Nick is still part of that special in-crowd.

And if it sounds like Bernhard is simply scoring points about this particular psychological mechanism, one that's in no short supply among film buffs and music aficionados, then I've done him and his film a disservice; more than simply making points about ownership and exclusivity, he registers the emotions, the sense of loss, that accompanies the growth of any meme. Nick and his friends have an in-joke of sorts, a pet phrase: "Bear Fact." What starts as facts about bears morphs into something completely different, something that has nothing to do with bears.

This is something that happens with any group of friends. For example, at my place of employment, whenever somebody drops something, we say "Paris Hilton". There was a reason for this-- trust me, it did, at one time, make sense-- but we don't have way of explaining it to new coworkers or onlookers in a way that sounds reasonable. My wife and I have a number of phrases and rituals, but I'm not going to share them; they're ours.

The fact that they're ours and only ours makes them special; it deepens the bond between us, and their regular usage, these pet phrases and rituals, are expressions of love and affection. If someone else were to spy on them, we would feel violated; if someone else were to use them, it would be crushing.

And this is what it feels like for Nick when Eva, the girl who started it all, having been transformed (in the movie's cruelest and yet gentlest, most absurdist, joke) into Bracey's girl, uses "Bear Fact." In fact, she uses it incorrectly ("polar bear fact"), and Nick's rage is sudden and chilling. Both "his" girl and the pet phrase he "co-owned" have been "stolen". Sharing, whether it be of physical things, of art, of moments, or of people, can create both opportunities and sadness, sometimes in the same click of the mouse.

Why not click here and see what happens?

Crazy People

2009-09-13T15:55:00.019-04:00

Every once in a while, our filmmaking escapades bring us into contact with crazy people. What do I mean by "crazy people"?

Well, I don't mean people who have a mental illness or neurological disorder. I've worked in the past providing care for people with various mental disorders and would not be dishing about them in this space.

Nor do I mean people who are "odd". I mean, we're a bit odd ourselves. Most creative people are. Neal Adams, one of the finest artists to ever put pencil to bristol, thinks that the Earth is flat. That's a bit weird, a bit eccentric, but I wouldn't call him crazy.

And I'm not talking about people who are flaky. Believe me, working as independent/DIY/whatever-you-want-to-label-it filmmakers, we get plenty of those. One reason why our cast members reappear from film-to-film, and one reason why we're so cautious when enlarging our little group, is because we only work with people we can trust.

So, what am I talking about when I'm talking about crazy people? I suppose it'll be easier to explain by way of example. And so, some anecdotal encounters follow, offered to entertain and enlighten you, and to give you some sense of what filmmakers working at our level often have to deal with.

The Comatose Actress

So, we were short an actress for one of our films and, having exhausted our pool of actors, we put an ad up on a few billboards, mostly at some of the local schools. We got precisely two responses.

The first was from a man. Well, we told him, we were really looking for a woman.

"I know," said the actor, his voice slightly muffled by the poor reception on our cell phone. "But can you rework it for a man if he's right for the part?"

We considered it briefly (very briefly). "No."

"Are there any parts for men still open?"

"I don't think so." Always in need of actors, we didn't want to brush him off right off the bat. "Maybe we can work something in. What kind of roles have you done in the past?"

"Oh, I've done a lot of acting on the stage."

"Well, what plays were you in?"

"I don't see how that's any of your business."

"What kinds of parts did you play?"

"That's really a very personal question."

"Can we meet you somewhere and, I dunno, have you read for something?" (We have copies of Shakespeare, Sturges, Schrader, and Chayefsky on hand for just such an occasion.)

"No."

"No?"

"No."

"Can we meet with you at all, try and get an impression of you and what you can do?"

"I've done a lot."

"Okay. But can we meet with you?"

"No. Just give me a part."

"We can't really do that, just give you a part without any knowledge of who you are or what you can do."

He seemed genuinely confused about this, if not outright offended, and that was the end of that conversation.

But then came the second response. The phone rang at, oh, one o'clock in the morning, waking both of us.

"I'm calling about your ad," said the woman. Somewhat sourly, we informed her that it was one o'clock in the morning.

"I didn't notice the time. Did you want me to call back?"

"No, it's fine. So you're an actress?"

No, she wasn't; she was calling on behalf of her friend. Her friend could not call on her own not because she was shy, but because she was comatose.

We weren't sure if we heard that correctly. "She's in a coma?"

Yes; it had happened over the weekend. But she had always wanted to be an actress in a movie, and when/if she came out of the coma, would it be possible for her to have that part?

"I don't know. We're kinda hoping to get that stuff shot pretty quickly; we have the rest of the film almost done and we're just waiting on those couple of scenes and our leading man is going back upstate at the end of the summer. So probably not."

"But this was her dream!"

"Well, if she comes out of it, have her give us a call."

That was weird, we thought. But it got weirder.

At four that morning, we got another call from the same woman. She wanted to know if her friend (the comatose one) had called us before she went into her coma. She had found a copy of the ad among the friend's things and was trying to piece together what had happened before the coma.

No, we said, you're only the second person to contact us and the first was a man. Perhaps even more irritable now (we had not gotten back to sleep since the one o'clock phone call awoke us), we bid her a good night and hung up.

A day later, we got another phone call from the same number; this one, we ignored. The woman left a message, asking us to call her, unless we want the police to get involved. We did not call.

A week later, we received an e-mail. She said she didn't mean to scare us:

Calling me was not going to land you in court or jail. I sincerely wanted to talk to you again. Though I doubt that you would ever risk revealing your true identity, and I guess that is what I really am hoping for. Because if you really are an independent local filmmaker then I guess this conclusion means that I am delusional. But if you are a certain mathematician that I think you might be, relax, I don't believe you "rigged" my grade and I don't mean any harm.

She closed her e-mail with a few line from William Blake.

It was around this time that we called the police. The police said that it was likely some kind of phishing scheme, and that we shouldn't contact the woman any further. And so we didn't.

About five or six months later, there was one final phone call; the woman was convinced that our film, our website, and the websites of our friends that linked to us were part of an elaborate ruse concocted, for some reason, by her math teacher. I assured her that it was not and told her not to call again.

The next day, she came into Tom's place of work. How she knew where he worked, we still haven't quite figured out. But she saw that Tom wasn't her math teacher, she was told that Tom was not related to her math teacher, she was assured that, yes, we are filmmakers and the films we made actually happened. She was asked to leave the building and we never heard from her again.

And that was the last time we ever put an ad up looking for an actor, and the last time we ever tried to work with someone who we didn't already know and trust intimately.

The Movie Buff

It was not, however, the last time we ever came into contact with someone as the result of an ad. Be it known that filmmaking does not, at this time, pay the bills, and that, what with bills that need paying, we are both actively seeking work in a variety of industries, including The Michigan Economic Miracle of 2008-2009-- Film.

We came across an ad recently that was looking for a producer and, to make a long story short, we applied. A business dinner was arranged between us, the self-proclaimed "Movie Buff", and his family.

This being our first ever business dinner, we snazzed it up a bit; Tom put on his green vest but could not locate his clip-on bow-tie. Shortly after we arrived, the man of the hour came sauntering in with several copies of his script.

As we opened the binders and peered at the pages before us, the Movie Buff cautioned us that he has never read his screenplay but had worked on it, a bit at a time, over the last ten years or so. A few things about this screenplay:

One, it wasn't properly formatted. And I'm not exactly the sort to get hung up on unusual formatting for the sake of getting hung up on it-- Schrader's strangely poetic but eminently readable scripts for Taxi Driver and Light Sleeper, with their chapter headings, asides, and footnotes come to mind-- but this screenplay was extremely hard to read. All stage directions were included in the dialogue blocks, within parentheses. It didn't matter if the direction was related to the speaker or not-- it was still there. Montages and inter-cut action, all in the same hard-to-read block of text, with spoken dialogue peering out in the middle of this line or that. There were no slug-lines to differentiate one scene from another; all such transitions were covered in someone's dialogue block.

Two, it was 106 pages, double-spaced,

with size 18 font. When we mentioned

that we weren't sure if the "one page,

one minute" rule of thumb could be

applied to a double-spaced, size-18

script that read as one pages-long

paragraph after another, he took

quite a bit of umbrage. Apparently,

during a lot of the writing process,

he had been going blind in one eye.

We were sympathetic but suggested he

might try a smaller font. He took

umbrage again and we dropped it.

Three, it wasn't a particularly good script. It was, or rather aspired to be, a standard sort of action-fantasy-comedy film. "There's no deep meaning to it," said the Movie Buff. "The characters are all archetypes. It's like the first Star Wars. It didn't get deep until the second one. The first one set everything up." We mentioned that Star Wars did go a bit deeper, that it broached themes of loyalty and honour, of coming-of-age and manhood.

It was also expertly structured, which couldn't be said for the Movie Buff's script. I don't want to harp on his script-- that's not the point of me recounting this-- but I think the best way to explain some of its problems is to use his self-made comparison to Star Wars. Imagine if, at the end of the sneak-into-the-Death-Star and save-the-Princess sequence, after Darth Vader kills Obi-Wan Kenobi, that Luke Skywalker kills Darth Vader. And then the movie ends.

No escape or retreat, no final attack on the Death Star, no Han Solo showing up at the last minute to save the day. No character arcs, nothing learned; the movie just ends there with Luke finding some kind of clever-but-convoluted way to defeat Vader. That, in a nutshell, explains the Movie Buff's opus.

He figured that, conservatively, it would cost between 3 to 5 million, and that, if we took the job, we would have four or five months to raise the funds, because he wanted to shoot in the spring. "I don't think we can cut it, but like I said, I haven't read my script," said the Movie Buff, laying down the law. "Because either you want it done cheap, or you want it done right, and I want it done right." He mentioned Star Wars again, this time in the context of its special effects work.

Now, Tom is the sort who carries around in his head certain pieces of trivia, and given the opportunity, he will share it. And so, whenever someone mentions all the effects in Star Wars, he throws out the little fun-fact that the film that held the record for most special effects before Star Wars was Citizen Kane.

"Never seen it," said the Movie Buff.

"You've never seen Citizen Kane?"

"Nope." The Movie Buff had never seen Citizen Kane.

The actors he had in mind for his film, he said, were Morgan Freeman or Robin Williams for a kooky but lovable paternal figure. Grace Jones would be ideal for the villainess. He thought that Enya could do the music for the film's Medieval-set prologue.

We mentioned that this particular cast might cost quite a bit of money. "Well, they'll take a pay-cut for it," he said. "Morgan Freeman's taken pay-cuts for the right roles."

"Usually those roles are in character pieces, independent sort of films," we ventured.

"Well, we'll never know until we try," he said.

"Very true." But would he take someone else who was right for the part?

"If someone exists," he said.

Knowing full well that she was just as unlikely, we proffered the immortal and divine Pam Grier as a second choice for the Grace Jones part.

"Who?"

We rattled off some films: Coffy, Foxy Brown, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and, of course, Jackie Brown, "you know, the Tarantino film."

The Movie Buff had never heard of Tarantino.

"You know," said the Buff, "I know this sounds really bizarre, but I don't care what someone looks like. I only care that they can act." Preaching to the converted, he was. But then: "I mean, Brad Pitt?-- not an actor. He just looks pretty. What he does isn't called acting."

His list of "real" actors included, besides the above-mentioned Morgan Freeman-- "he was so terrific in the Bucket List, what a great movie"-- Judd Hirsch, Chuck Norris, and Eddie Murphy, "who is really quite good. He understands the power of a stare. Like Karloff or Lugosi."

Much as Star Wars gets Tom talking about Citizen Kane, mentioning Eddie Murphy will cause him to mention the original Doctor Dolittle, a film for which he has an awful lot of (perhaps misplaced) affection.

"That's what I'm talking about!" said the Movie Buff excitedly. "There used to be such a thing as directors, acting, writing! But now there's nothing!"

Wow. He's right. The last ten or fifteen years of film has just been an absolute cultural wasteland.

The other thing the Movie Buff wanted to know was how much we should set aside for marketing and distribution. To get the trailer into theaters, it must cost some kind of money, right?

"That's probably something you'd want to let the distributor take care of."

The Movie Buff seemed confused by this.

Said we, "We assume you're planning on making the movie, sending it to festivals, and trying to sell it to a major distributor?"

He had no idea what we were talking about. He was under the impression that the theaters would just have to play his film after he made it.

"No, that's not quite the way it works."

"How do you do it?"

"Well, we do it a little bit differently than most. At the moment, we're distributing our own films, straight to DVD, and because our overhead is reasonable low, we keep our expenses down, we can afford to do that.

"But if you're going to be spending 3 to 5 million on a film, and you want it to play theaters, you'll have to sell it to another company. Or, conversely, you could four-wall the theaters like Tom Laughlin did with Billy Jack." He didn't know what any of those-- four-walling, Laughlin, or Billy Jack-- was.

"Four-walling is where you rent out the theater. But that would cost a lot of money. An awful lot."

But the bigger companies didn't four-wall the theaters.

"This is true. But they have a deal with the theater chains. And if you wanted to try to do that, again, it's going to cost a lot of money upfront and so for your kind of film, the only feasible route is trying to sell it."

He didn't like this one bit. "Well, it could all work out. Look at Stallone and his first movie, Rocky. He wrote it, directed it, and starred in it, raised all the money himself, and it won all the Academy Awards."

"Actually, Stallone didn't direct Rocky. And he didn't pay for it or release it. That was MGM."

"No, I think you're wrong there," said the Movie Buff. Other things we were wrong about: the length of the Governator CGI-cameo in Terminator 4 ("It wasn't that impressive," quoth the Movie Buff, "it was just one shot") and how the universe started.

By way of refusing the producer job, we tried to explain, again, that we didn't think this was the sort of film that Morgan Freeman would take a pay-cut for, that the film he was making was really trapped between two distribution models: he could make a big-budget star-studded action film or a scrappy no-star indie action film, but he couldn't really do both, let alone distribute it on his lonesome. We weren't trying to be negative; rather, we were trying to be realistic.

But our oblique refusal didn't seem to sate the Movie Buff. "So, where do we go from here?"

"Well," we said, drawing it out, "we're going to have to think about this and see if it's something we want to take on." We had yet to read the script all the way through. "And we need to see if it's something we can do. 3 to 5 million dollars in five months is a pretty tall order and it's a bit higher than anything we've done in the past."

"How high have you done?"

"Three figures."

"Three...?"

"Yeah, our last film cost 4 or 500 dollars."

At that moment, he wanted us less than we wanted him. But he didn't seem to want to cut us off, either. And we, in our own way, tried to get him to be the one to say no. It was a stand-off of passivity, and I'm sure he thought we were as crazy as we thought he was.

That non-confrontational stand-off extended to the matter of the check; we were unsure if he was going to pick it up or split it. He split it, and in fact asked for more than what our two meals had cost. We gave it to him anyway; we were glad to be out of there.

A couple of days later, we dropped by his place of work-- he is a chiropractor, operating out of a flea market booth on weekends only-- to drop off his copy of the script and deliver a final and concrete "no".

In the spirit of being helpful, we brought along a few pages of a script in the proper format, along with a couple of screenplay and structure-oriented websites. He dismissed them out of hand, and claimed that his script was actually pretty close to the format we presented, and that the font size was not all that different. He asked for "brutal" feedback on his script now that we had read it all the way through, and when we started to offer it, he became angry. He had an answer for every charge.

We wished him well and then he stopped us; he had another idea for a reality show and would we like to get involved?

The reality show was, in short, of the Battle Royale variety, and we were uncertain if it was to be simulated or real. He mentioned using blanks and pieces of armor with sensors on them, but also mentioned running 50,000 volts of electricity through the "shot" contestants and the necessity of stripping/hiding the bodies. Also something about shooting it without knowledge of the authorities, and betting pools as to who would be the next to be "killed".

"I've surveyed a lot of people, and, before 9/11, ninety-seven percent said that they'd watch it. After 9/11 it was ninety percent. Another seventy percent said they would love to be in it. Esp. wives who want to pay me for the opportunity to kill their ex-husbands."

"Well, we're in the three to ten percent where it's just not our thing."

"It's not my thing either," said the Movie Buff, as if it was obvious.

"We find it morally repugnant, actually," we said. And we meant this regardless of whether it was staged or not.

"So do I!" said the Movie Buff. "That doesn't mean I'm above making money off of it."

"Well, the thing is, working at the budget level we do, we can choose what we want to do and when we want to do it. We have the autonomy to spend our creative time on projects we're passionate about."

"But if you do something morally repugnant and make a lot of money, you can do whatever you want."

We considered explaining that we could already do that without doing anything we objected to since we worked at such a low budgetary level, as that was what we had just said, but thought better of it.

In Conclusion

And so that's what we mean by crazy.

This is what we, as low-budget filmmakers, have to deal with, far, far, far, far more often than we'd like. We're unsure if we're just extraordinarily unlucky or if this is par for the course for most filmmakers, cottage-industry or otherwise.

So if we're aloof or hesitant towards new people, it's not because we're unfriendly people on principle. Quite the opposite. We're just cautious, that's all. And after reading the above, we hope you understand why.

A Dream I just Had About Jean-Luc Godard

2009-08-29T11:52:00.003-04:00

Tom walks into work. In the back workroom, away from the public, and more specifically seated at the back table upon which there are often snacks, sits Jean-Luc Godard.

TOM: Godard! I'm a big fan. It's an honour to have you here.

GODARD: I know.

TOM: I love your work.

GODARD: Why?

TOM: I love all that you've done for filmic grammar.

GODARD: That is wrong! I am so tired of people talking about my ingenious experiments in form. Nobody ever talks about my characters! About the emotions! About my love stories.

TOM: Well...

GODARD: Love stories is the essence of cinema.

Should be noted that every statement that's been bold-faced in the above is a bold-faced lie. But I meant it in the dream.

Dissolves: An Essay in Eleven Statements of 140 Characters or Less

2009-08-29T02:23:00.001-04:00

For some time, I've been threatening loudly and publicly to write an anti-dissolve-as-transition screed. For one reason or another, I just couldn't seem to marshal together the arguments, evidence, and wit necessary to put these nebulous thoughts into a form that could be easily digested by other human beings. Wanting to get it all out there, however, a few nights ago I presented them in a series of eleven twitter dispatches. They are presented anew here, in the hopes that it might prompt some discussion. Don't be shy.

1. Montage vs. mise-en-scene; combination of elements vs. elements themselves; footage as raw materials vs. thing in its own right.

2. An image has integrity. Put one image next to another (timeline): integrity. Side-by-side (split-screen): integrity. Dissolves: none.

3. Neither image is its own thing, but rather a most monstrous and hazy amalgam, mutant, gestalt.

4. But a dissolve does not stand still in time; it is a transition. It is time. A way to show its passing. A way to bridge gaps.

5. A dissolve refuses to let go of one thing before grabbing another. It is then inherently sentimental.*

6. Ozu had no use for them. He understood that they untether the image from reality. Every dissolve is a lie.

7. As Schrader explained, Ozu's cinema is transcendent because there are no dissolves. Formality is key.

8. Film is image, film is time; Dissolves disrespect & misunderstand both. But film is also people, performances, gestures, spirits, essences.

9. Montage uses people/souls as raw materials to be reshaped and/or discarded. Mise-en-scene respects the actor & his space.

10. If dissolves are "montage plus", then they are implicitly dismissive of actors, framing, timing, writing. People. Art.

11. And so, yes dear ones, my argument against dissolves is an argument for mise-en-scene, formal control, space & time, acting.

Again, comments are welcome.

*-- Before this "piece" was written (twritten?), the venerable C. Mason Wells chastised my blanket condemnation of dissolves by pointing to the films of Sirk. And had he not done that, I would not have realized the inherently sentimental nature of the dissolve-as-transition. So, um, thanks, Chris! And, it should be noted, that Sirk uses dissolves quite well because he understands and capitalizes on this aspect.

Huck Melnick's HARDLY BEAR TO LOOK AT YOU

2009-08-20T04:10:00.001-04:00

Art, like romantic attraction, is subjective. In both cases, there are certain things a person digs and certain things they don't, and what might be the bee's knees for one person might be the bee's rheumatoid arthritis for another. And having seen Huck Melnick's Hardly Bear to Look at You three times now, I can sum up my reaction in three statements: one, there's a lot of stuff I dig about it; two, there's a lot of stuff I don't dig about it; and, three, I know full well that the stuff I don't dig is stuff that a lot of other people do dig.

Statements two and three are in reference to one of the central themes and structural devices of Melnick's film, namely the transformation of experience into art, of longing and pain into writing, of life into cinema. It's a fairly thorough examination, at that, and Nick Rombes went as far as to say that it is "a love story, but also a story of the making of a love story... a film to love, even as it shows you its source code". And if you dig art about the artistic process and cinema about cinema, created by a director who is obviously quite cine-literate and not afraid to acknowledge great filmmakers by name, then there is a lot to fall in love with here.

The thing is, that whole thing just isn't my bag, at all. My tolerance for meta-film and films-about-making-films and the creative process is extremely, extremely low. It's one of the things that I generally can't stand and that almost always turns me off. (Exceptions: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Red Shoes, La Belle Noiseuse, Boogie Nights, Celine and Julie Go Boating, though that last one is about watching and engaging with art, not making it.) For the same reason, I also have a low tolerance for Godard (ssh, don't tell Filmbrain).

And yet, I have watched the film three times. What is it, then, that has kept me coming back? Well, as I said at the top, there's a lot of stuff I dig about it.

First and foremost among these is the acting and the writing. The two lead roles are fully-realized: precisely defined yet dynamic enough that the characters can occupy different poles of behaviour without the end result being schizoid or otherwise straining belief.

Daniel (Jeremy Herman, who also wrote the script) is at times cynical, almost mercenary and cruel in his pursuit of Stella (Anna Neil), while at other times appears to be in full-blown puppy-love mode and many times is able by way of actorly alchemy to occupy both spheres at once.

In doing so, rather than reducing the role to one thing or the other, Herman and Melnick have created a performance that is more realistic than either extreme, one that speaks to a certain facet of the human, and especially male, experience. That is, they find the thing within people and men that allows us to be both monstrous reptiles and lost lovesick children and that's the thing that they put on the screen.

A similar balancing act is at the heart of Anna Neil's performance as Stella, but because Daniel serves as our viewpoint character, and because his lack of understanding for Stella is a crucial part of the film's design, she is deliberately a bit mysterious and hard to read. This doesn't make her performance any less stunning or any less the equal of Jeremy Herman's.

And I love the way, in certain key scenes (for example, the business about the temperature of wine) Daniel can barely hide his exasperation and, yes, his intellectual contempt for Stella. And the character reminds me a bit of certain men who like to play Pygmalion, romancing women that don't pose a threat to them, women they can mold and teach and own, body and soul. This fits in also with Daniel's odd possessiveness (witness how he bristles when another man kisses her, or invites her to a porno festival, despite the fact that they aren't in a relationship themselves). Smart writing, that. Smart acting.

And smart direction, because as any director with even the slightest trace of an ego can tell you, great performances don't just spring out of an actor fully-formed but as the result of collaboration and taste. A director has to know when to say "more", when to say "less", what to leave in and what to take out. And if you can judge a director's taste by the performances his actors give, then I can say hands down that Melnick's is impeccable.

That taste also expresses itself in some of the film's ballsier stylistic moments. The first few minutes of the film, in fact, are comprised of a silent, shaky-cam look at the sleeping Stella. The camera work is invasive, even violating. You feel every second as it zeroes in on her neck, and the feeling is a bit queasy. It's almost like a sort of challenge, a mocking invocation of the film's title: can you bear to look at her?, how much longer?

A friend said of our film Son of a Seahorse that the first twenty-two minutes felt like a "fuck you" to the audience, but what Melnick does is far more audacious (and perhaps even a bit incendiary) than anything we were doing. I wish I had the cajones to start a film like this.

And then, the sound cuts in briefly only to announce that the footage we just saw was being shot for a film. And, well, of course it was, as we're watching a film and there it is, but it's also footage from the film-within-the-film, and which is the real film, anyway? With even this first scene Melnick raises questions about the nature of film and the morality of capturing reality and invading intimacy (sleeping) for art. And he continues to ask these questions throughout the film, the blurring between "reality" and "art" being made more complicated by the fact that the "art" employs the "real" "people" in the same roles, re-enacting the same scenes, as they do in the "real" portions of the film. (Again, it's not a question that I personally find all that captivating, but your mileage may vary and if this is your kind of thing, seek it out.)

A visual that sticks with me even longer is a one of Daniel removing his contact lenses. Melnick shoots it really, really close, so that we can see every blood vessel in the eyeball, so that this monstrous finger is reaching in and digging around the eye sockets. It's a grotesque image, and Melnick knows it, and he emphasizes it by shooting it as close as he does, he understands the way close-ups de-tether people from their bodies. And the accompanying voice-over from Daniel-- cynical and with hints of anger-- complements the image with its own monstrousness.

And this, too, is the sort of shot I wouldn't dare put it one of my movies. The fact that Melnick had the audacity to try it, the taste and discretion to know it'll work, and above-all the talent to pull it off--

Well, that is, in short, what keeps me coming back to the film. And it fills me with anticipation for his future work. And the fact that he's done this with a film that's explicitly about making a film is a testament to that skill. Whether you love the meta-stuff or despise it, Hardly Bear to Look at You is worth looking at. (Sorry. Couldn't resist.)

Indie Trailers A-Go-Go # 4

2009-08-19T18:21:00.003-04:00

Preston Miller's GOD'S LAND.

Dmitry Trakovsky's MEETING ANDREI TARKOVSKY.

Jonatan Soderstrom's DEATH PARTY.