Editor | Scott Macaulay

LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy has done the music for Noah Baumbach's new L.A.-set Greenberg. Whether the L.A. of the movie bled into his new movie or the recording of his new album bled into his film soundtrack no one can conjecture, but as the below video, taken from the LCD site, shows, Murphy has adapted the town to his needs.

clip 1 from lcd soundsystem on Vimeo.

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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. Premiering with a James Franco-starring drama by The Celluloid Closet filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman about Allen Ginsberg’s canonized countercultural poem, “Howl,” and with a catalog that announces, “This is the renewed rebellion,” this year’s annual film festival in Park City is all about iconoclasm. Whereas previous festival preambles would spin the fest as a series of responses to some form of social change, this year the festival, its first iteration under new Director (and former Director of Programming) John Cooper, broadcasts a single blunt message: we can be new again.

In interviews Cooper and his new Director of Programming Trevor Groth, another veteran, are eager to talk about a debuting section, Next, devoted to low- and -no budget filmmaking, as well a series of innovative distribution initiatives. These include Sundance USA, which will send eight films, including Philip Seymour Hoffman’s directorial debut, Jack Goes Boating, on the road to arthouses across the country while the festival unspools in Utah, and an online distribution partnership with YouTube in which five films will be available for rental during the festival’s dates. “I hope some great new mythology comes out of [these new programs],” Cooper says, implicitly acknowledging that they are unlikely to replicate stories of the late-night bidding wars of Sundances past. “We hope these things become a phenomenon. I want filmmakers to make their money back and to continue to make films because that’s what sustains what I do.”

At this point, it would perhaps be churlish to cite the Latin derivation of rebel: “rebellis,” originally referencing “a fresh declaration of war by the defeated.” But it’s true that American independent film, of which Sundance is a bellwether, has had a tough year. The economy has downsized budgets, there are fewer specialty buyers, and independent filmmakers are more often found today at industry confabs pondering new business models than on sets. The Sundance Film Festival has to change because it’s not clear that the old model, which involved speculative financing and sales to an industry subsector of specialty buyers, will ever throw off enough cash again to entice enough new investors to return to the game. A possible new model, of which this year’s Sundance offers a taste, consists of a tiered marketplace in which a smaller group of films vie for the industry slots while other filmmakers arrive in Utah with their own smaller-scale VOD and online distribution plans in place, making the festival the equivalent of their theatrical premiere. Comments Cooper, “I think Sundance could get almost half and half — half films going [immediately] out to the marketplace and half bigger. I am not afraid to have that split.”

Another reason for Sundance to experiment with these industry initiatives is because the smaller-scale DIY productions they’ll benefit are where much of independent film’s artistic energy is at the moment. Many of these younger filmmakers, like Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy), Josh Safdie (The Pleasure of Being Robbed) and Ronnie Bronstein (Frownland) have in years past premiered their films at Austin’s SXSW, where industry expectations are lower (and parties easier to get into). This year, however, Safdie will be at Sundance with a film he directed with his brother, Benny, Daddy Longlegs. It’s one of the ones going out through Sundance USA (it will play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music next week), and it will also be available on VOD by IFC. The Safdies’ film is a delight, a jubilant drama based on their own childhood starring Bronstein (yes, the Frownland director) as a hapless divorced dad entrusted with his two young sons during a particularly chaotic summer fortnight. The film is both hilarious and painful, full of wonderful, unexpected moments, and imbued with an emotional understanding that is astonishing given the youth of its makers.

Daddy Longlegs premiered in Cannes where it played under the charmingly obscure title, Go Get Some Rosemary, and that’s where I saw it. As for the films premiering at Sundance, Cooper is happy to tip a few. “Jack Goes Boating is such a wonderful occurrence,” he says. “Philip Seymour Hoffman directed, and he’s in it, and it comes from a play he did. It has all the credentials but then it hits its mark. He did an amazing job. And I love The Company Man, directed by John Wells. I like when people who have another career [make features]. John is a TV producer [The West Wing], but he has real filmmaking passion, and his is not a flashy film. And then there is Blue Valentine, Howl, and Hesher, which is a really wonderful film. Douchebag — that could have played in the Next section. It’s a nearly perfect film for its budget.”

The films I’m most excited to see? Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways, which stars Twilight star Kristen Stewart as ‘70s rocker Joan Jett; the aforementioned Blue Valentine, a harrowing tale of divorce starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams that’s directed by talented second-time director Derek Cianfrance; Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik’s follow-up to her Down to the Bone, which launched the career of Vera Farmiga; The Extra Man, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s follow-up to American Splendor, a comedy based on a Jonathan Ames story starring Kevin Kline that’s reported to be very, very funny; and Life 2.0., Jason Spingarn-Koff’s innovative documentary on Second Life and its residents. Check back as the festival progresses to read my thoughts after I see them.

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In New York magazine this week, Eric Kohn profiles Michael Stuhlbarg, the star of the new film by the Coen Brothers, A Serious Man. Here's the lede, in which Kohn gets to the essence of what makes Stuhlgard's performance work:

Michael Stuhlbarg gets his breakthrough film role with the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man. And as far as breakthroughs go, it’s a bravely quiet one. Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik, a rational physicist forced to deal with all sorts of irrationality when his wife first asks for a divorce, then moves her lover into their house. The film could just as easily have been called The Straight Man, since Stuhlbarg is essentially reacting to everybody else’s outrageousness—his nagging wife Judith (Sari Lennick), a good-for-nothing brother (Richard Kind), and various rabbis consulted for spiritual guidance. In any other actor’s hands, Gopnik’s passivity would be unendurable, but the actor finds so many subtle ways to register bafflement and good-natured exhaustion that his suffering becomes endlessly entertaining. “The danger was that the performance would become some sort of shticky thing,” says Ethan. “The guy’s kind of a schlemiel, and that could be a Woody Allen character. Michael brought a soulfulness that rescued the character from that.” Stuhlbarg read for three parts; he was so perfect for two of them that at one point the brothers joked about having him play both. “It was a weird casting conundrum we’d never had before,” says Ethan. “We would have cloned him if we could have,” adds Joel.

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As part of the Walker Art Center's 50th Dialogue and Regis Retrospective Event on the Coen Brothers, the Minneapolis based institution has asked for its blog a number of critics to cite their favorite Coen Brothers movie. Click here for responses from Kenneth Turan, Howard Feinstein, Rob Nelson and, among others, me...

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No, this is not about a promotion for Shane Acker's upcoming movie 9... or at least we here at FilmInFocus don't think it is. Via the always fascinating blog of the U.K. mentalist Derren Brown comes a link to a story from ABC News in Australia. Titled "9 Hypnotizes Viewers," the story details how the Australian version of A Current Affair, broadcast on Channel 9, booked a hypnotherapist to discuss the use of hypnosis in weight loss. The segment became controversial, however, when it slid into a broadcast of an actual hypnotherapy session, "complete with swelling lights and droning music" designed to put viewers in a hypnotic state. "Get in a comfortable position and trust the process," the therapist told the broadcast audience. The Australian Communications and Media Authority explicitly prohibits programming designed to "induce a hypnotic state" in viewers, referencing the outcry from media critics in the '60s and '70s over so-called subliminal advertising. Channel 9 protested the judgement, claiming that the segment was too short to actually push viewers into a trance, but the communications authority ruled against them and now stations are alerting their staff as to what can be considered simply too transfixing for television.

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After viewing Taking Woodstock at Cannes, Indiewire's Brian Brooks realized that he belongs to "the Woodstock Generation." Never mind that he was born less than a year before the event and that during his childhood he styled himself like Alex Keaton, the improbably conservative youth played by Michael J. Fox on the sitcom Family Ties. And forget the fact that he still bristles when he remembers his mom's love of dressing him in "flower-patterned shirts, plaid bell bottoms and moccasins and a bead necklace" when sending him off to pre-school. (And totally forget his teenage fan letter to Ronald Reagan!) For Brooks, whose taste (and politics) soon shifted away from the traditional to embrace everthing from goth to Godard, Taking Woodstock brought him back to his childhood. "Except this time," he writes, "I could actually appreciate it rather than run away."

His indieWIRE piece, "Rebel, Rebel: Why Taking Woodstock Gave Me Goosebumps," is an eloquent personal testimonial as well as a timely meditation on why the spirit of the '60s still matters. The piece is a great read, a conflation of the personal and the political, that concludes with these words:

Somehow, the film awakened my inner rebel if only for a moment and it taps the inner youth that never completely dies...

Maybe I can’t completely articulate why the era as seen in the story of this film has a special place in my soul. OK, maybe rebellion is just fun, damnit. Maybe it’s worth it to have a focus on fighting against something, if only for the joi d’vivre. I went against the ‘60s when I was really young and became a fan as an adult (maybe I owe a thank you note to George H.W. Bush). The same rebel that made me an Alex Keaton knock-off at 13 is the same spirit that makes me a raging liberal at 40. But then again, as Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick once said back in the ‘60s, “Never trust anyone over 30.”

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Perhaps my favorite current film podcast is The Film Talk, the spirited weekly conversation between Belfast-based Gareth Higgins and Nashville-centered Jett Loe. What's great about their series, which has recently tackled Moon, Public Enemies and Tetro, is the hosts' blend of intelligence and enthusiasm. First and foremost they are movielovers, and their in-depth and personal takes on the films they discuss are both in-depth critiques as well as broader celebrations of film as an art form.  And while they can sometimes be both humorously sardonic and thoughtfully analytical, they steer clear of both snark and pretentiousness.

This week Higgins and Loe, in collaboration with the Film Society of Lincoln Center and timed to the Society's Ang Lee retrospective, devote an entire series to Lee, walking us through their personal take on all (or, most, as there are a couple they haven't seen) films.  Higgins spins an overarching theory on Lee's central theme, both debate The Hulk, and they pick a favorite Lee film that might surprise you.  Subscribe to their podcast here or search for them on iTunes and have them delivered directly every week.

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There's always a weird thing about going to a film festival in a place you've never been to. You travel all the way to get there but then spent most of your time sitting in a multiplex that's just like the one you have at home. Sometimes a film festival offers the exception to this rule, though. I was once a guest at the Sarajevo Film Festival and they encouraged me to travel the region instead of seeing movies, sending me one day on a three-hour bus ride to Mostar.  

But, I don't think I'd feel this movie-viewing guilt at the upcoming Branchage Jersey International Film Festival, and that's because there are no cinemas. Or, rather, no proper cinemas. The island festival screens films in "unusual atmospheric locations" that are intended to be as provocative as the films.  From the fest's recent press release:

Highlights for 2009’s festival will include British Sea Power performing their poignant soundtrack to the renowned 1934 fisherman film Man of Aran; an Icelandic band performing to a classic silhouette fairytale from 1920s Germany and the latest Andrew Kotting film. Branchage Jersey International Film Festival launched in 2008 as a vibrant cross-arts film festival that transformed a number of Jersey’s well recognised landmarks and changed them into unusual screening venues.

No cinemas are used throughout the festival – making the event truly unique in the film festival landscape.

Venues secured for the 2009 festival include: Mount Orgueil Castle, Jersey Museum Cinema, The Town Hall/Magistrates Courts, The island’s animal sanctuary, The War Tunnels, Victoria College Boys School Hall, Jersey Opera House. There will also be screenings inside one of the world’s few remaining Spiegeltents, plus an incredible drive-in screening at People’s Park.

Branchage aims to create new cinema-going experiences by holding screenings at unusual, atmospheric locations - bringing people into environments they wouldn't usually associate with film, and hand-picking the perfect films to screen in these weird locations. The festival is also giving a total of £10,000 in awards for filmmakers.

From the festival's blog is this trailer:

Branchage Jersey International Film Festival 2009 from Branchage Film Festival on Vimeo.

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When FilmInFocus asked five magicians to list their five most mysterious films, we gleaned that there was some kind of connection between conjuring and the culinary arts.  Sleight of hand maestro Roberto Giobbi picked two food-themed movies and proclaimed that “gastronomy is the basis of all art.”  Further confirmation is provided this Wednesday night on Top Chef. The mentalist and magician Max Maven, another contributor to our list, is the guest as the series’ contestants (who include the great New York chef Anita Lo) travel to L.A.’s Magic Castle to prepare a meal.  Below, watch Maven initiate this episode’s challenge, with, you guessed it, a magic trick.

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As you’ll know from our regular Movie City features, we at FilmInFocus like to travel. And, we like to think about movies while we’re doing so. Kindred spirits can be found at the Museyon Guides, who have just launched a series of lovely paperback guidebooks entitled Film + Travel. Pitched towards both the armchair traveler and cineastes with tickets and passports in hand, the books are beautifully designed, with stunning photographs arranged by country and text that’s perfectly laid out for the filmic flaneur. There are three books so far: Europe; North America, South America; and Asia, Oceania and Africa. We took a look at the Europe edition and were happy to see the wide range of references. Istanbul’s “answer to Soho,” the Asmalimescit neighborhood, is referenced in connection with Fatih Akin’s Head-On, while the traveler to Berlin is guided to retrace Jason Bourne’s steps from The Bourne Supremacy. There are occasional sidebars that go deeper. In one, director Martin McDonagh discusses the Bruges of In Bruges, noting the boys hotel and the Bell Tower, both of which feature prominently in the movie.

Priced at $15.95, the Museyon Guides Film + Travel series is in bookstores now.

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David Bordwell has a great post on his always fascinating blog David Bordwell's Website on Cinema about the "depth cues" in Coraline. Don't know what depth cues are? Don't worry -- I didn't know what they are either. Writes Bordwell:

Back in the 1980s I began speculating on how the film image represented space, and I adopted the then-current terminology of perceptual psychology. Researchers spoke of depth cues, those features of the real world that prompt our visual system to make fast inferences about a three-dimensional layout. Classic depth cues are the Gestalters’ figure/ ground relation, da Vinci’s “atmospheric perspective” (the haze that envelops more distant planes), and Helmholtz’s “kinetic depth effect,” the way that when you’re moving, closer objects change at a different rate than more distant ones.

Bordwell goes on to quote from an interview in American Cinematographer by Coraline d.p. Pete Kozachik in which he discusses his and director Henry Selick's very deliberate crafting of the film's depth cues so as to provoke specific feelings in us.  He writes:

Kozachik also explains how he spent a lot of time trying to vary the two images’ interocular distance, the distance between our two eyes, in order to give a greater sense of volume. The care paid off, at least for me. Coraline is the best 3D film I’ve seen, as well as the scariest. (For our take on Beowulf see this entry.)

In addition, Coraline helps me push a general point: Cinema is at least partly an affair of perception. Filmmakers are practical psychologists, artists who have mastered the skill of playing with our senses. We can open up their secrets a little by using tools borrowed from the sciences of mind.

Check out Bordwell's post -- he's got several links to relevant scientific articles as well as great screen grabs from the movie that illustrate his points.

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"Independent films are recession proof," said Film Independent executive director Dawn Hudson at yesterday's Independent Spirit Awards. That's because, she went on to argue, that they aren't made with a profit motive in mind.

That premise, along with host Steve Coogan's quip that "[independent films are] about shared experience and today we all share the experience of not having seen most of the films" were the afternoon's only nods to the struggles that indie movies are facing in today's downturning economy.  And while outside the tent during the pre-show cocktail party there was quite a bit of anxious talk about the state of the film business (one bright spot, however: with less work going around everyone was having an easier time scheduling meetings), inside the tent the Spirit Awards was its typically insouciant, smooth-running self.  Coogan was an able host, best when he was the most obscene (he'd often remark that his expletive-laden jokes would be edited out of the live broacast) or riffing on one of his comic personas -- the sycophantic Hollywood schemer.  As an example of the latter, he grabbed a mic to walk into the audience and accost director Jonathan Demme about a part, wondering why the Rachel Getting Married helmer was so stand-offish when they bumped into each other at Whole Foods. 

As for the awards, Milk won two early on, with James Franco winning Best Supporting Actor and Lance Black winning Best First Screenplay. Franco spoke humbly of his admiration for Gus Van Sant and Sean Penn's body of work and his excitement to have worked with them.  In his speech Black talked about getting the script to Cleve Jones about five years ago, and thanked him for his instrumental early support of the project.  "I don't think we can wait 20 years more" to realize Harvey Milk's dream," he said.

Other award highlights include Melissa Leo winning Best Actress for Frozen River and thanking not only the usual suspects but also the bloggers and regional theater owners; Alex Holdridge's f-bomb'd remarks about the making of his no-budget In Search of a Midnight Kiss and his awe of all the actors in the room; Darren Aronofsky's acceptance of Maryse Alberti's cinematography award for The Wrestler, in which the director chronicled all the places around the world his d.p. has shot amazing documentary work before and after shooting his film and, finally, a hilarious skit in which Coogan, clad in a novelty-store Batman suit, played Christian Bale to a bearded and gnomish Joaquin Phoenix impersonator.  "You haven't quit acting," Coogan shouted. "You've quit shaving!"

At the end of the afternoon the final prize went to The Wrestler, with producer Scott Franklin thanking financier and sales agent The Wild Bunch and talking about the challenges of making the movie just days after the birth of his first child.  For a complete list of the awards, click here.

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Director Ian Olds at Rotterdam

“Where else could you see this movie?” a dazed colleague asked me as we stumbled out of Exhausted, a bodily fluid-drenched, comically repellent piece of transgressive horror from South Korea. “Maybe only at Rotterdam,” I replied, as we both mulled Kim Gok’s Super-8 shot feature, which details the guttural relationship between a pimp and his near-mute girlfriend/prostitute as they stumble around a bleak industrial landscape quarrelling, buying new sets of dinnerware, and scaring up business (“We have Girl,” reads the flyer they post on the neighborhood’s graffiti-scarred walls). As we leave the theater, the director’s friendly manager approaches us and asks if we’d like to sit down and have a coffee with him the following day. Tentatively, we ask what he’s like, and if this is his first film. “Oh, he’s a very happy guy,” she says, “and he’s made many movies – comedies, political satires. We’re not sure about the sales for this film, and he would just like to sit down and talk to people who have liked the movie.”

Unusual cinema, meetings, and a cheerful disregard of the vicissitudes of the commercial film business have always marked the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Nestled between Sundance and Berlin, each year it lures both a loyal group of cineastes and business types to this Dutch port city. Aside from uncategorizable cinema, the festival is also the home to the Cinemart, the film world’s first co-production market where, speed-dating style, filmmakers meet distributors, sales agents and financiers and pitch their projects in pre-arranged half-hour meetings. Mid-day everyone comes together at large, bustling and somewhat infamous lunches (yesterday’s three main courses were pasta, pasta and pasta), while drinks begin at a late afternoon cocktail party and go on late into the night. This year’s Cinemart includes new projects from Eagle vs. Shark director Taika Waititi, Insomnia and Prozac Nation director Erik Skjoldbaerg, and Lance Weiler, the American director and digital evangelist known for his feature Head Trauma as well as for his collaborative filmmaking website The Workbook Project. For Weiler, a film is not just a film but also a video game, web serial, and interactive social platform, and his technology-charged pitch meetings left at least one European sales agent reeling. “I feel like such a Luddite,” the sales agent told me. “I have to spend a night at my computer catching up to things before I read his script.”

The Cinemart takes place in the Doelen, the festival’s large, modern hub, and outside vistors scurry from theaters ranging from the luxurious Pathé Cineplex to the old school cinema café, the Venster. But movies can be seen even while out on the street: the festival commissioned shorts by Guy Maddin and Carlos Reygadas, which screen on the sides of some of the city’s biggest buildings. Festival events take place at other venues too. To accompany a section of the festival devoted to Asian horror (charmingly titled “Hungry Ghosts”), a group of filmmakers have constructed a “bloodcurdling” haunted house inside Rotterdam’s former Photo Museum. “Do you dare go inside?” the catalog copy asks. (In a funny, seemingly random coincidence, the festival’s opening night film, Sopranos actor Michael Imperioli’s directorial debut, is also called The Hungry Ghosts, although it’s not Asian horror but instead a Cassavetes-influenced tale of a group of interconnected New Yorkers battling their own spiritual malaise.)

The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi

In addition to “Hungry Ghosts,” which is one of several sidebar programs in the “Signals” section, there are three major program groupings. The festival’s competition is the Tiger Awards, and in that section screen first features from around the world, several of which have gotten funding from Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund, which supports moviemaking in developing countries. The Spectrum section features heavyweight films and filmmakers (Rachel Getting Married is playing here and is currently number one in the audience popularity voting). Another picture that’s created buzz here in the Spectrum section is Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn’s Bronson. Based on a true tale, it’s probably the most cheerful movie about a violent, sociopathic criminal you’ll ever see. The other main programming section, “Bright Future” refers not to the film’s subjects but to the promise of their young makers. It was in this section that I saw Exhausted as well as Perfect Life, Chinese filmmaker Emily Tang’s formally adventurous, emotionally bleak tale of two lost women in contemporary China and Hong Kong.

Receiving its world premiere here in “Bright Future” is The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi, by American director Ian Olds. A few years ago Olds and his filmmaking partner, the late Garrett Scott, made one of the best Iraq docs, Occupation: Dreamland. In that film Scott and Olds visited a group of soldiers stationed in Fallujah in the days leading up the Marines’ invasion of that city. It was, simultaneously, a war diary, recruitment expose and a melancholic portrait of military life. Olds’ new doc is the ambitiously realized tale of an Afghan “fixer” – a paid consultant to visiting Western journalists – who is kidnapped and then beheaded by the Taliban, and it is similarly complex. Opening with notice of his protagonist’s death, Olds creates an intimate, warm but ultimately tragic portrait of Naqshbandi, a cheerful, generous man who is abandoned by his government, becoming geopolitical collateral damage in the War on Terror. Look for The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi to appear at other festivals in the U.S. later this year.

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Focus CEO James Schamus flanked by
Strand Releasing's co-presidents Marcus Hu
and Jon Gerrans

Film festivals are bubbles, and none more so than Sundance. You arrive in the mountains of Park City and descend into a world of non-stop screenings, parties and random encounters with friends and colleagues. You travel from theater to theater in little shuttle buses and, if you’re not mindful of your diet, cobble your meals together from multiple hors d’oeuvres tables. And for a week or ten days, news from the outside world is filtered to a low, tinny frequency, like the un-noticed hum of a fluorescent light. The news emanating from the festival, the talk of film acquisitions and audience response (or lack thereof), is just so much more important than anything that might be happening back in the real world.

This year, of course, is different. Those of us at Sundance are mindful of the fact that we are that tinny frequency the rest of the world is tuning out.  By the middle of yesterday, a low-level anxiety began to circulate among civic-minded (and status conscious) festgoers. “Where are you watching the inauguration?” we asked ourselves. Some of us at late parties realized that if we wanted to catch a few hours of sleep it would be in our condos as we woke up. Others made bigger plans. L.A. publicist Mickey Cottrell organized a screening soiree while Slamdance staged an inauguration party hosted by one Martin Eiesenstadt, the fake McCain advisor created by fest founder Dan Mirvish.  And there was a large-screen viewing party at Main Street’s Spur Bar and Grill, where Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells’ photoblogged pictures of the attendees. (If you don’t read much in the press about Children of Invention or Five Minutes of Heaven, that’s because these films had the unfortunate luck to be press-screened opposite the inauguration.)

As you may have heard, Sundance seems subdued this year, but that’s only if you’ve been here the last few. Theaters are full, parties are well attended, and there’s a strong dialogue going on about the films and filmmakers debuting here. It’s the deadening sense of overcrowding that’s gone, and that’s a good thing. “There are less people here, but the right people are here,” one filmmaker friend said to me. And while the buzz meter may not be amped to the distortion level, there are strong films and good discoveries here as well as some business. Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre is Focus’s film at the festival, and it’s a big hit, with audiences and critics both knocked out by Fukunaga’s strong storytelling sense and his ability to immerse an audience into a dramatic and unfathomable world. Other strong titles include Oren Moverman’s riveting, ambitious The Messenger; An Education, the Nick Hornby-scripted tale of a teenage girl’s life lessons in early-‘60s Britain (its young star, Carey Mulligan, who also appears in The Greatest, is the breakout actress of the festival); Dana Perry’s fearless and complicated documentary about her son’s suicide, Boy Interrupted; The Vicious Kind, a small-scale, well-crafted indie about family rage and anger with a great lead performance by Adam Scott; Emily Abt’s Toe to Toe, a D.C.-set story about two girls’ friendship across the city’s racial divide; and the eccentric and delightful Big River Man, John Maringouin’s loopy, Herzogian doc that comments on global warning by detailing the epic journey and mental breakdown of Slovenian swimming star attempting to traverse the length of the Amazon.

There’s also much talk here of new forms of distribution and the tough specialty film business climate.  Steven Soderbergh showed up to help IFC announce a new program by which films will be available on VOD concurrent with their fest release.  Scott Kirsner hosted a panel that dealt with filmmakers self-distributing their films, and Focus CEO James Schamus joined others including Film Department head Mark Gill, Paradigm Consulting’s Peter Broderick, and This is That’s Ted Hope, on a panel that mused on the future of the film business.  About all the talk of “new models,” Schamus remarked (and I’m paraphrasing) that there’s no one new model; the Focus model works for Focus, he said, while other companies and filmmakers need to consider their own strengths and not attempt to duplicate what others are doing.

Earlier, at the festival, Schamus offered a lovely speech that found the future in the past. At a dinner celebrating the 20th anniversary of Strand Releasing, the vital specialty distributor that has exposed U.S. audiences to the works of filmmakers ranging from Gregg Araki to Fatih Akin, he said that Strand would be the future of independent film because they’ve always been the future. They’ve always been about bringing us new filmmakers and new cultural ideas, and over two decades they’ve repeatedly figured out how to complete their mission anew amidst always changing circumstances. And with that statement, which articulates a solid goal for not just distribution companies but the rest of us too, I’ll head back out to the movies.

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Critic Lauren Wissot attended last week's New York Milk press conference and mixes her comments on the event with her thoughts on the film.  Referencing the contrast -- and similarties -- between the 1970s of the movie and today, Wissot reports:

"The director drew a connection between the 'new energy' of a different time to the latest national activism in response to Prop 8. Screenwriter Black saw parallel strategies, with Proposition 8 a descendant of the pre-Prop 6 initiatives of Dade County and Wichita, where anti-gay measures (neither of which included any mention of homosexuality in their wording) passed thanks to Anita Bryant and her own religious fervor. Yet when one woman tried to define the debate in terms of 'religious faith vs. gay rights,' Penn stepped in to immediately correct her. Neither Prop 6 nor Prop 8 have anything to do with religion, he pointed out, but of simple 'hatred and intolerance,' the very opposite of faith. And, he added, that issues (words) do indeed kill. People take their own lives when you take away their hope for the future – another Milk and Milk theme."

Her full report can be read at the link.

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FilmInFocus congratulates writer/director Cary Fukunaga, whose first feature, Sin Nombre, is due out from Focus in 2009, for being awarded a prestigious 2008 USA Rockefeller Fellowship. Fukunaga is well known to FilmInFocus readers as he has blogged about his experience making Sin Nombre, and I've written about him, his filmmaking background, and his goals for the film on the site.

Here's what the Rockefeller Foundation wrote when announcing the award:

Cary Joji Fukunaga directs realistic films that deal with social issues. His work is informed by his extensive travels throughout Southeast Asia, Europe, and Latin America, where he studied and photographed the aftermath of neocolonialism. His short film Victoria Para Chino, a powerful and haunting look at the dangerous journey of Central Americans who cross the Mexican border, won 23 international awards, including a Student Academy Award, and was shortlisted for a 2006 Academy Award. His debut feature, Sin Nombre, to be released by Focus Features, reprises the theme of Victoria Para Chino, focusing on young men who cross the border by riding the tops of trains. He developed the script at the Sundance Director’s Lab and used nonprofessional actors from Central America. C.A.

Fukunaga joins this year filmmakers William Greaves, Andrew Okpeaha MacLean, Lourdes Portillo, Jay Rosenblatt and Ela Troyano as a Rockefeller Media Fellow.

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In Variety David Rooney is reporting that the New York City Opera has commissioned an opera based on the Annie Proulx short story "Brokeback Mountain" upon which Ang Lee's film was based. The composer will be Charles Wuorinen, who is currently adapting Salman Rushdie's novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories for City Opera.

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As Peter Bowen notes in a blog post below, Focus CEO James Schamus and Showtime Chairman and CEO Matthew Blank were honored by the Museum of the Moving Image the other night, and a couple weeks earlier, the two of them were seated by the Hollywood Reporter and asked them to discuss the ins and outs of this business. Head over to the link for an insightful talk on issues involving film production and distribution in the early 21st century, an excerpt of which is below.

Schamus: I say to my film students at Columbia when they say they want to get into the film business, "There is no such business. It's all TV business." All the film side is is getting people to help you pay for your ad campaign for your TV show and DVD because literally all they are doing is chipping in to cut away at the cost.

THR: For a cable network, branding is an important concept -- but does it come into the mix with Focus?

Schamus: Branding is shorthand for a lot of different things. The Focus brand -- whatever that is -- is a big deal for us. What the brand means is a kind of articulated conversation ongoing with a group of people who are very diverse, who may or may not go for this one but may go for that one. They need to know that what the brand means is that they are being invited to a discussion that they may or may not want to take part in, but that they need to know about. It's much more powerful in my sphere because it's a very inexpensive way of getting people's attention.

Blank: If I were an important filmmaker, and if I could get a meeting with Focus, Focus is a brand. But on a consumer level, nobody goes to a movie because it's a Focus movie -- they go to a movie because it's "Atonement." But (Schamus') ability to make the "Atonements" of the world comes from being Focus. In our case, we have to get people to pay a certain amount of money every month for the brands. And now as you go into the digital world, you know, Focus may be a brand.

THR: Right, Focus recently developed a Web site called Film in Focus, which is like a film magazine. How does that help you as a specialty film label?

Schamus: We're starting a conversation with a small core of people. We're slowly building a space, and you can see where this is going. At a certain point, we know we're going to have to be in a much more direct relationship with our consumers, besides delivering our films to them. And also -- in curating and keeping them part of that curatorial process -- letting them participate. We are accruing an attitude, a rhetoric that means we are empowering our core to be in that space and know that it is going to be delivering incrementally over the years exactly the kinds of things they want.

 

 

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