Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen are not given to extensive introspection. Ask why they created The Dude character in The Big Lebowski, and they’ll reveal that it simply amused them to envision a detective whose “mind is so befogged by dope” that he can’t put basic clues together. Ask why they set Blood Simple in West Texas, and they’ll explain that they knew people in the area who could help them make the film. Ask why the main character in Miller’s Crossing listens to a phonograph recording of “Danny Boy,” which then becomes the soundtrack for a brutal shootout, and they’ll just say, “Well, he’s Irish.”

Given this lack of self-analysis, it’s easy to understand why there were few instances of deep, sustained insight in the Coens’ two-and-a-half-hour conversation with journalist Elvis Mitchell before an audience at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where their work is being feted in a retrospective. Anyone expecting pearls of wisdom came away with pebbles of knowledge—but fascinating pebbles nonetheless, especially for fans of the Coens’ work. Here are a few of them:

Joel on their artistic inspirations: “Many people think we’re always referencing movies, but it’s the books those movies are based on that are more influential to us.”

Joel on the tortuous writing process behind O Brother Where Art Thou: “Sometimes you just figure out where to go . . . It took us a while to figure out we were writing The Odyssey.”

Ethan on their films’ tendency to have a strong regional flavor: “It’s hard to develop a story without seeing where it starts.”

Ethan on his son’s reaction to his films: “He says, ‘Is this going to be another one of your depressing movies where everyone dies at the end?’ ”

Joel on moviemaking: “One of the pleasures of movies is creating a world . . . it gives you a license to do certain things.” And: “Every movie ever made is an attempt to remake The Wizard of Oz.”

Ethan on “motormouth” characters who won’t shut up: “Whenever we write for George Clooney, he’s that guy.” Joel says that after wrapping up shooting on Burn After Reading, Clooney turned to them and said, “All right, boys, I’ve played my last idiot.”

Joel on the inspiration behind A Serious Man, which is set in a Midwestern Jewish community: “A lot of it was thinking about and reading Isaac Bashevis Singer stories.”

Joel on the operatic feel of some of their musical scenes: “It’s a direction we sometimes go even with subjects that don’t seem to call for that kind of treatment.”

Ethan on why there’s no soundtrack in No Country for Old Men: “It suffered with whatever [music] we put against it.”

Ethan on their films’ treatment of race and other sensitive topics: “We don’t give a shit about people’s sensitivities.”

Joel on movies with a message: “It wouldn’t be interesting us to make a movie to make a specific social comment.”

Joel on their early filmmaking attempts, which comprised single takes shot in linear order on a cheap movie camera: “The big advantage of that is that when you get it back from the drugstore, the movie is finished.”

Image by Wilson Webb, courtesy of Walker Art Center.

The new indie film Trash Humpers observes the lives of three fictional cretin-like outcasts who lead filthy and disgusting lives on the margins of society—lives that include, yes, sex with garbage. Is there any redeeming artistic value in this? I doubt I’ll find out, because I probably won’t go see it. (I have other plans.) But the film certainly is already doing what it apparently intended to do: generating heated discussion. In film magazines and blogs, writers are grappling with the unsettling questions that Trash Humpers raises.

Over at IndieWire, Eric Kohn writes that filmmaker Harmony Korine “challenges viewers (those willing to sit through the whole thing, anyway) to deny the movie’s mesmerizing appeal. … Only those compelled by the allure of attempting to comprehend its vulgar tongue-in-cheek appeal will access the fascinating madness beneath its juvenile surface.”

At Cinema Scope, Dennis Lim, in describing the the film’s ultra lo-fi look, proclaims, “Trash Humpers is a proudly cruddy-looking film by an aesthete who understands the power and utility of ugliness.” (Case in point: I was moved to learn about the film after being drawn in by the grotesquely engaging cover of Cinema Scope’s Fall issue.)

And at Variety, frequent Utne Reader contributor Rob Nelson writes, “The result, riveting beyond all rationality, is something like Jackass, except that here the stunts are dangerous only to standards of good taste—which, of course, is precisely the point.”

Sources: IndieWire, Cinema Scope, Variety

The proverbial bird sitting on a utility wire. It’s the image that, as the story goes, inspired Leonard Cohen to begin composing the legendary song “Bird on a Wire” in the 1960s. Fast forward 40 years to our present, technology-enabled day, and the iconic avian image is still inspiring musical art. Check out this charming music video on Vimeo by film director/musician Jarbas Agnelli, who interpreted birds sitting on utility wires as “notes” on a “musical staff”—just to discover what song the resting avians were silently singing. 

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Source: Jarbas Agnelli’s Vimeo

For today’s classical composer wishing to be taken seriously, writing a film score is a step in the wrong direction: Critics tend to snub those who engage in such lowbrow pursuits. Writing in the classical music magazine Listen (July-August), Damian Fowler assesses what he calls “The Fickle Genre” and points out that it can be hard for even very talented composers to shake this stigma.

One who has succeeded to some degree is John Corigliano, who created the Oscar-winning score for the 2000 film The Red Violin and then adapted it into a violin concerto that was recorded by Joshua Bell and hailed by critics. Another composer who’s still battling perceptions is Elliot Goldenthal, who scored Frida and, more recently, Public Enemies but feels he gets short shrift for his concert works, which include the Pulitzer-nominated opera Grendel. “I would like to change my name when I write orchestral pieces,” he says. Writes Fowler:

A student of both Aaron Copland and John Corigliano, Goldenthal says that people misunderstand the function of a movie composer. “It’s not as strange and different as it may seem, writing for the cinema and for the concert,” he says, pointing out that in the nineteenth century many composers wrote incidental music for plays. “Even Beethoven wrote incidental music, which he adapted for other works.”

Things may be changing. Composer wunderkind Nico Muhly, who has plenty of critical bona fides, wrote the score for the Oscar-nominated film The Reader. He harbors no preconceptions about film music: “I certainly never grew up with any thought that it wasn’t great music,” he says. “For me a culture high water mark is the score to Lawrence of Arabia.”

Source: Listen (article not available online)

Invite-only film downloading clubs hide in the darkest, most exclusive corners of the internet. Writing for Film Comment, a writer known as Quintín ventured into a clique he pseudonymously calls “Black Crow” and discovers the hidden cost of a place “where all cinephilic fantasies can come true.”

Though Black Crow grants access to all the 1940s Hungarian cinema that a film buff could ever want, members must contribute back to the community in uploaded material. “The goddess of Black Crow demands that the faithful pay tribute,” Quintín wrote. The community’s obligations were nearly impossible for the writer to fulfill, and he began obsessively checking his upload to download ratio. “From feeling like a billionaire, I began to act like a high-stakes speculator who bets his last penny on Wall Street during a financial crisis.”

Unable to sate the demands of Black Crow, Quintín was eventually kicked out of the illegal downloading community. “I learned that there is something worse than being denied entry into an exclusive club,” Quintín wrote, “and that is to enter the club only to be kicked out.”

Source: Film Comment (article not available online)

Our lives are surrounded by small and seemingly insignificant objects that, if we stop and think about them for a moment, were created by designers. Golf balls, barrettes, toothbrushes: They are not simply manufacturing accidents but very specific responses to our needs and wants and the designers’ aesthetic goals. The “Objectify Me” section of the website for the design documentary Objectified invites designers and design-watchers to muse on these small wonders with wonderful results. The golf ball prompts Craig Foltz to ask a series of whimsical questions. Debbie Millman recalls a juvenile obsession with barrettes that led to misdemeanor theft. And Alice Twemlow turns her gaze to the badminton shuttlecock, which

seems to me to contain all the time and space of a long summer’s afternoon on a large green lawn. In its delicately ribbed frame are encapsulated pitchers of lemonade, the drone of bees, the smell of mown grass and the sun-baked mustiness of the garden sheds where shuttlecocks rest along with broken croquet mallets, dog-chewed Frisbees and trapped flies.

Source: Objectified

Image by barkertrax, licensed under Creative Commons.

How much does it cost to spread 650,000 pennies on the floor in a delicate wave pattern, atop a bed of oozing honey? Including the tableau attendant and accommodations for the sheep, about $13,791.36. (1989 dollars, of course.) The installation in question is Anne Hamilton’s “privations and excess,” which The Believer details in the latest installment of Creative Accounting, a series that’s plainly perfect for those among us who love both the arts and getting down and gritty with the details. Ahem.

In past issues, the magazine has unpacked the fiscal details of an unnamed Flaming Lips album ($158,338.53); a modestly-made indie film ($15,4800), and a less-modestly made yet nonetheless indie film ($18 million), which kicked off the series last March.

 Source: The Believer 

Image by kevindooley, licensed under Creative Commons.

Ian Albinson and Alex Ulloa collect intriguing title sequences from film and television at their blog, The Art of the Title Sequence, where you can watch the opening credits roll on Dexter, Soylent Green, Iron Man, or even the much-maligned super-bomb The Island of Dr. Moreau, which can count its beautiful title sequence as, perhaps, its only merit.

Ulloa tells Creative Review (May 2009): “We want to be to the history and future of the form of title sequencing what the opening sequence to Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris is to cinema: an exploration of what is universally felt, but with some fresh discourse.”

Sources: The Art of the Title Sequence, Creative Review 

Without tickets, concessions, or a traditional screen, guerilla drive-ins retain a 1950s drive-in nostalgia without a lot less consumerism. According to Toronto’s Spacing magazine, guerilla drive-in theaters are reclaiming public spaces and screening films on the sides of buildings from Maine to Oregon, and even in Norway.

The participants don’t bother with permits or screening rights for the movies, but so far, the Guerilla Drive-In Victoria hasn’t had any problems with the law. A representative from the Santa Cruz, California, collective told Weekend Edition’s Scott Simon that the police once shut down a screening, but participants just picked up and moved to another location.

For more information, the website Instructables has detailed instructions of how to set up your own guerilla drive-in.

Image by  Eric Lewis , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Sources: Spacing (article not available online), Weekend Edition, Instructables

For many film buffs, there are no “guilty pleasure” movies. If you think a film is good, then preach it proudly, even if that film is Road House or Purple Rain. But that doesn’t mean people can’t change their minds. Phillip Lopate writes for Film Comment about a few films he’s seen in a new light, for better or for worse.

After an initial distaste for Annie Hall, Lopate eventually came to view Woody Allen as “an American Master.” On the other hand, it took him seven times viewing The Third Man with Orson Wells to see it as “tinny and calculating and shallow.”

For my part, I loved the Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn film The African Queen the first time I saw it, at the age of 17 while trying to impress a woman with my knowledge of classic films. Now I think it’s overwrought and ultimately unsatisfying. Dumb and Dumber, however, distracted me at first blush with its physical comedy, before I realized how funny the writing was in the film.

For a more juvenile take on the issue, read a list of “Five Shitty Movies that Everyone Loves,” including Braveheart and the Karate Kid.

Image from the film Dumb and Dumber.

Source: Film Comment 

Finding a girlfriend is difficult on the remote Kazakh steppe, where it can take a full day of travel to reach the nearest single woman. In the film Tulpan, the postpubescent protagonist Asa, freshly home from the Navy, sets out on a quest to find a wife and fulfill his dream of owning a herd of sheep. Director Sergey Dvortsevoy, who gained recognition with his 1998 documentary Bread Day, lends the film a hyper-realistic feel, allowing the humor and affection of rural Kazakhstan to linger naturally, like a slow-moving dust storm seen from a distance.

The film gives an inside-the-yurt view of Kazakhstani family life surrounded by the harsh steppe climate and depicted by many non-professional actors. Dvortsevoy told Reverse Shot magazine that the actors and crew lived together in yurts in preparation for the film. Two of the main actors and some of the child actors lived together for a month, even before the filming had started, to prepare them for the climate and to get the actors comfortable with each other. The result is a series of endearing familial scenes that feel spontaneous and unforced.

The beautiful desolation of the Kazakh countryside plays a central role in the film, as do the various sheep, dogs, and camels. One of the most talked about scenes centers around a rather graphic sheep birth that the main character is forced to perform. Considering the unplanned nature of the livestock, Dvortsevoy allowed the film to develop freely, changing the script and the film in the middle of production. He told Reverse Shot, “I didn’t try to think up a special approach, I just followed the material, followed the characters. Maybe I’ll use this approach again, we’ll see, I don’t know. It doesn’t come from calculation, from mathematics. It comes from my soul.”

Tulpan played as a part of the Premieres: First Look series at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

You can watch a trailer for the film below:

On March 1, 1981, Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands led a hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison. Sixty-six days later, he died at the age of 27, a shriveled-up version of his former self. British director Steve McQueen’s chilling, superbly crafted vision of the events leading up to Sands’ death doesn’t conform to predicable patterns of political filmmaking. The movie unfolds in distinct, commanding vignettes ranging from the elegiac (a prisoner’s hand caresses a bee) to the heart-thumpingly brutal (when riot police crack down on the inmates). Hunger does not simply chronicle a historic act of protest; it renders it timeless and transcendent.

This review is from the  March-April 2009 issue of Utne Reader.

How do people relate across racial and economic boundaries in post-apartheid South Africa? Cape Town artist Bryan Little designed a temporary public installation that broaches the question, based, he says, on “the names we call each other in the new South Africa.” Culled from the country’s 11 official languages, the names are both epithets and endearments, reflecting the divisions that persist as well as the connections being forged. Kees Jan Husselman used the installation as a backdrop for a poignant short film that gathers South Africans’ views on race, class, and the future of their country:

(Thanks, Wooster Collective.)

The laptop screen still can’t compete with the silver screen for cinematic grandeur, but what the computer lacks in scale, it compensates for in breadth and immediacy. Visitors to the Europa Film Treasures website will find themselves just a few mouse clicks away from a 1919 Hungarian Revolution parable from the director of Casablanca, a 1928 Russian mini-epic of animated marionettes, and an elegantly astute 1955 Macedonian documentary on a fraternal order of dervishes observing Ramadan.

This welcome trove of the motion picture medium’s formative juvenilia aggregates dozens (so far) of short-form relics—many with new original scores, most in pristine restorations, and all searchable by title, date, nationality, genre, director, cast, and more. Each is appended with a concise scholarly history, synopsis, and production specs; subtitles, where necessary, come in your choice of five languages. It’s the brainchild of compulsive film archivist and restorer Serge Bromberg, whose company Lobster Films houses more than 100,000 reels in its labyrinthine Paris offices and is one of the 28 European film archives from which Europa Film Treasures gathers its remarkable content.

The site isn’t all serious and scholarly. There are also pure entertainments—and impure ones—running a gamut from the 1917 John Ford western Bucking Broadway, in which a cowboy loses himself in New York City, to the understandably popular 1948 erotic short aptly known as The Apple-Knockers and the Coke. Best, and most web-appropriate, is that it’s a work in progress, adding content and interactive features regularly.

This review was originally published in the January-February 2009 issue of Utne Reader.

Image from Bucking Broadway by John Ford.

The winner of last year’s Tropfest Australia film festival was recently released over YouTube. The film, directed by Michelle Lehman, is funny, well-made, and absolutely compelling. You can watch it below:

(Thanks, Coudal.)

Not even movie stars are immune from the effects of recession. Illuminating an unexpected consequence of economic volatility, Minnesota Public Radio reports on research showing that our conception of beauty changes with the market. Reporter Nikki Tundel spoke with psychology professor Terry Pettijohn, who studied the phenomenon by analyzing the physical features of popular actresses during economic booms and busts. Tundel reports:

In the early 1980s, for example, the country was emerging from a recession. Things were looking up. That's when women like Sissy Spacek and Sally Field really made it big on the big screen. Both actresses, says Pettijohn, had young, almost cherubic features. The same could be said for a young Bette Davis, who had one of the most popular faces during the 1940s, another era where prosperity was on the rise.

The early 1990s, on the other hand, were a time of economic struggle. During those years, Emma Thompson and Sharon Stone were among the most celebrated actresses. Both had strong bone structures, smaller eyes and more mature-looking faces.

While Pettijohn found perceptions of female beauty varied with economic conditions, he told Tundel physical characteristics deemed attractive in men were unaffected.

With its 25th anniversary coming next year, book publisher 4th Estate (part of Harper Collins) asked design and marketing firm Apt to help with the celebration. The result is “This Is Where We Live,” a stop-animation video with scenery and figures made entirely out of the imprint’s books (more than 1,000 ended up being used).

The video is sweet and charming, and every viewing reveals another clever use of the material: Watch for The Corrections as a crosswalk and The Perfect Storm in the form of a fishing boat. After watching, take a look at the mind-blowing production stills and videos.

 

“We've seen the whole face of America change,” says Los Lobos drummer Louis Perez in Chicano Rock! The Sounds of East Los Angeles, “and that face is brown.” Chicano Rock!, a new documentary scheduled to air this Sunday on PBS, examines this demographic shift through a cultural lens, exploring the musical fruits of the twentieth-century influx of Mexican immigrants to the United States. A recent article in the Indianapolis weekly Nuvo previews the film and talks to its creator, Jon Wilkman.

In the documentary, Wilkman traces the lineages of several groups of Chicano musicians. He looks at performers like Lalo Guerrero, who channeled traditional Mexican sounds, as well as bands like Cannibal and the Headhunters, who drew more heavily from U.S. rock influences. Wilkman seems most interested in a third group that bridged the first two; for him, they tell a story that’s bigger than the music they made, helping us see the cultural give and take that occurs as immigrant groups settle into new lives in the United States.

“We are, like Chicano musicians, beginning to blend cultures, just like they blended musical sounds," Wilkman says. "It's not only a story about the past; it's suggesting what our future is going to be—not only musically but culturally.”

Image courtesy of Riza Nugraha, licensed under Creative Commons. 

(Thanks, AltWeeklies.)

Todd Sklar is hitting the road like a rock star. But instead of churning out guitar riffs, Sklar is entertaining audiences on his 22-city fall tour with screenings of four indie films, including his own debut feature, Box Elder.

The films on tour were all well received on the festival circuit but not widely distributed. Sklar hopes his new distribution model will help put the films before audiences that appreciate them but might otherwise not have access to them. As Anthem points out, when Picturehouse and Warner Independent Films recently closed up shop, it didn’t bode well for the future of indie distribution. But Anthem thinks Sklar’s “proactive search for a sustainable distribution model may very well prove to be the shining beacon of light that independent filmmakers are looking for.”

In addition to Box Elder, the tour is bringing On the Road with Judas, Registered Sex Offender, and In Memory of My Father to cities and college towns across the country. Find the full schedule here.

For film buffs dying to see a new documentary but short on change, the Canadian magazine Broken Pencil offers a fun little three-point plan for stealthily infiltrating film festivals in its Summer How-To Issue.

Fiona Clarke suggests that smaller film fests are more opportune for creating mock passes, but “don’t put yourself too high on the totem pole, someone might actually ask you a question.” She says the trick is to create an identity that is “simultaneously vague and with a hint of hyperbole to guarantee confused acceptance.”

If you can’t gain access with your “official pass,” why not try a disguise? Clarke suggests transforming into a tradesperson:

If you can pass as an electrician or plumber, use this. Get a small toolbox or equipment bag, look haggard and confused at the long line of people waiting at the theatre and walk up to the front. Dismissively inform the FOH manager of a “building issue” that the theatre management has called you in about and you were told you should be let through.

Plan B: You can be a courier that has “an urgent delivery of ‘paper-tape.’”

Clarke warns that building infiltration is highly tricky, but “most festivals in big cities rely on old, large movie houses for their screenings. These old theatres contain all manner of surprise entrances and hidden areas.” For additional tips, crack open a copy of All Access Areas, a book by the creator of Infiltration, a zine about “going places that you’re not supposed to go.”

But getting caught will come with a price (and it might be more than a festival ticket), so Clarke advises that it’s probably best to pony up for a ticket or else volunteer. We agree. While events like Sundance can spare a few lost dollars, your local film fest probably can’t.

Utne’s own Julie Hanus recently reported on some promising and ingenious ways in which the fair use doctrine is thriving, but technicalities are still tripping up artists who should be protected by fair use.

Producers of the intelligent-design documentary Expelled have been exonerated in court after Yoko Ono and EMI Records sued the filmmakers for including a 15-second clip of John Lennon’s “Imagine”—but not without some difficulty. The film was released on DVD without the clip while the case was pending, which, Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at the Industry Standard argues, is an unfortunate side effect of what should have been an open-and-shut case. What’s more, she points out, fair use might not be enough to protect those who can’t afford to defend themselves in court: “If a film with Hollywood producers has trouble using media clips, what hope does an average citizen have of using something without worrying about huge legal expenses that could result?”

But Anthony Falzone, blogging for Stanford Law’s Center for Internet and Society, hails the case as a victory for fair use, in part due to the efforts of Media/Professional Insurance to cover the legal expenses of Expelled’s producers and others sued in fair use cases.

At Slashdot, Ian Lamont reaches the same conclusion I did: It’s a bit ironic that the song sparking the lawsuit is Lennon’s utopian manifesto “Imagine.”

Image by orsorama, licensed under Creative Commons.

The fourth most popular film in America right now isn’t the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading. And it’s not Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna. According to Rotten Tomatoes, it’s Kirk Cameron’s new Christian film Fireproof. Made by a cast and crew of 1,200 volunteers, the Catholic News Agency reports that the film has grossed $6,804,764. That’s something of a miracle, according to the Guardian, considering the film cost just $500,000 to make.

Cameron, best known as Mike Seaver on the TV show Growing Pains and co-star of the Way of the Master anti-evolution DVDs, stars in Fireproof as a fireman who contemplates, and later rejects, divorce. In the film, Scott Tobias writes for the Onion AV Club, “Cameron acts like a childish jerk, even in the reconciliation phase, and the underlying reason is that he—and the movie—hates women.”

Image by Allan Light, licensed under Creative Commons.

The director of the indie film festival favorite Ballast is taking the feature to American audiences his own way: city by city, like a rock and roll group on the road: “I’m setting up a tour, like a band, traveling with the film for single screenings, as many as 70 over the next year,” Lance Hammer tells Rob Nelson in Film Comment (full interview available online).

In January, Hammer was the toast of Sundance for Ballast, a film set in the Mississippi Delta that used nonprofessional actors and a distinctly non-Hollywood style of pacing and storytelling. Film critic and Utne Reader contributor Anthony Kaufman, in his review for IndieWire, called the drama “tough” but “far from impenetrable,” “a crystal clear humanist vision of broken-down people who find a semblance of stability in each other.”

This summer, Hammer surprised the indie film world by backing out of a Ballast distribution deal with IFC Films, a development that Kaufman wrote about for IndieWire.

Now Hammer tells Film Comment that part of his motivation was to bring the movie to the Southern black audience—people like those whom the movie portrays.

“The people at IFC are the greatest people, really. They wanted to release the movie in the South, but they really didn’t know how to do it. And I thought that to not show the film to African-American audiences would border on racism. IFC is certainly not racist in any way, but they didn’t think the movie was going to make any money in the South. And they’re a company that has to make money in order to survive. The only way to attack something like that is to be in a position to say, ‘Well, I guess I don’t have to make money.’ I think it’s really important. And maybe it is possible for filmmakers to make that kind of approach work now that the box office has become so poor for small films in conventional release.”

Hammer points that there are audiences “rabid for film” at offbeat venues like rep theaters, film societies, museums, and film schools. “They come in droves to a special event because people trust the curators in those places. … For one screening, you can get as much money as you could in an entire week in a city like Seattle. More important, I feel like I’m accessing the core audience in a way that wasn’t possible with a distributor.”

Image by Lol Crawley, courtesy of  Ballast LLC . 

If you believe conservative media conspirators, the only reason a majority of film critics have embraced Pixar Animation Studios’ WALL-E is because of its anti-corporate take on our environmental future (or lack thereof). But in a recent piece comparing Pixar to competitor DreamWorks, Film Comment (article not available online) argues that the movie’s magic—like its studio—is all about old-fashioned storytelling.

“Why are Pixar films so vastly superior to DreamWorks’ sorry output?” Ken Jones asks, setting up his piece in the magazine’s July-August issue. It’s because Pixar, which also produced Cars, The Incredibles, and the Toy Story movies, respects “their audience as sentient human beings rather than average consumers. There is no compulsion to check off categories (up-to-the-minute hipstermism, fart jokes for the kids, blueish double-entendres for the teenagers and adults, a barrage of visual and aural cues that keep the action cynically grounded in hip-hop/mall/Internet culture), none of the relentless calculation that renders the average commercial product, animated or live-action, nothing more than pricey yet expendable box office fodder.”

Jones argues that the creative forces at DreamWorks, which recently released Kung Fu Panda, are so driven by profit and opinion polls that they’ve scared themselves out of taking risks or challenging audiences. As a result, their movies lack the sense of wonder essential for escape. “It’s not that Pixar is less concerned with turning a profit,” Jones writes, “but that they care about making movies as much as they care about making money.”

Listening to WALL-E writer and director Andrew Stanton talk about the project on a recent episode of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, you can’t help but conclude Jones is on to something. His tales about creating the characters and storyboarding the film make it clear that Pixar’s creative teams are given an unusual amount of freedom, as well as the time and resources necessary to execute originality. They’re also encouraged to challenge cinematic convention.

Stanton also addresses the political storm around his hit, which New York Times columnist Frank Rich concluded, unintentionally adding fuel to the echo chamber’s fire, was no less powerful than The Inconvenient Truth. The animator convincingly claims that when writing the script there was no “liberal” agenda. The circumstances simply fit the story arc of his main characters, who aren’t environmentalist, politicians, or blowhard pundits—just romantic robots in love.

Photo courtesy of Walt Disney Internet Group.

With its complex moral dilemmas and dystopian vision, The Dark Knight is an unlikely summer blockbuster and unquestionably dour as a superhero movie—but it’s still  performing ridiculously well at the box office and with critics.

Some of the commentary is inevitably political, framing the film as an overt 9/11 allegory. Andrew Klavan takes things a step further in the Wall Street Journal, making a favorable comparison between the latest iteration of Batman and the Bush administration’s absolutist approaches to geopolitics, applauding the Caped Crusader for demonstrating the same decisive, nuance-free heroism that Bush supposedly does.

What Klavan seems to be missing is that The Dark Knight portrays Batman as a deeply conflicted and flawed antihero; the film excels at illustrating the moral ambiguities inherent in fighting crime or governing a populace.

On his blog, Andrew Sullivan provides an articulate rebuttal to Klavan, ultimately focusing on the failures of Bush’s cowboy swagger, use of torture, and with-us-or-against-us version of diplomacy. Sullivan concludes that those who can’t or won’t do nuance are missing the point—perhaps deliberately.

Image adapted from a photo by Yosi:), licensed by Creative Commons.

The 8^th annual international Bicycle Film Festival (BFF) concluded its Minneapolis leg this past weekend with a hefty roster of screenings at the Theatre de la Jeune Lune. For Twin Cities residents, Saturday served as a bittersweet goodbye to the venue, which officially shuttered operations at the end of June.

The BFF screens its first films tonight in Los Angeles, and gets rolling this Wednesday in San Francisco, before moving on to Chicago and Boston during the month of August. After that, the jet-setting festival will travel to Toyko, Austin, London, Vienna, Zurich, Paris, Sydney, Melbourne, and Milano—before finishing its run this December back in Portland, Oregon. Here are some of this past weekend’s cinematic highlights—many of which citizens of next-up cities can partake in:

Road to Roubaix , a 2008 documentary directed by a pair of Davids (Deal and Cooper), tells the story of one of the world’s most brutal road races: the 160-mile Paris-Roubaix, which, as the name suggests, winds north from the City of Lights toward the industrial town of Roubaix, traveling along unforgiving cobblestone roads. Not all riders finish the historic race, but those who do complete the course in a single, grueling day. (The bikes take so much abuse, the filmmakers note, they’ll never again be ridden professionally.) Road to Roubaix relies on the triumph-of-human-spirit trope, but fairly so—one look at the hefty chunk of stone bequeathed to the victor, and it’s clear that riding in the Paris-Roubaix at all is a Herculean feat. Watch it for: the holy crap factor.

See the Road to Roubaix trailer here:

The Six-Day Bicycle Races , directed by Mark Tyson, is a jaunty romp through the origins of track racing, the jaw-dropping endurance cycling races that drew sell-out crowds to Madison Square Garden in the1920s. This sport phenomenon of the American Jazz Age required pairs of (handsomely paid) riders, one of whom was always on the track, to zoom about in a brutal, non-stop, no-holds-barred contest to accrue the most mileage. Hollywood and gangster glitterati would sweeten the pot for impromptu sprints by offering extra cash premiums—known as “prems”—to the winners, but the real cash was in the big race, where superstar cyclists earned enormous purses and ageless glory. Watch it for: geezers’ recollections of the sort of glamorous heyday you and I will likely never know.

The Urban Bike Shorts program offers a variety of views of cycling in the city. King of Skitch ought to be mentioned if only for the awesome, unexpected ending. (Watching bike messenger Felipe Robayo hang onto the back of a sports car and fly through New York City traffic isn’t bad either.) Pterodactyl “Polio” begins with a well-worn concept—the lone bicycle wheel, bouncing down the road—but rises to deliver a creative spin on the idea. The Trunk Boiz entertain in their music video Scraper Bikes, which is pronounced scrape-er not scrap-er, and explained here. Raven and the Bicycle Angel tracks a new biker’s determination to win the heart of (or just even a minute of conversation with) his bike-riding crush. And Fast Friday—at 27 minutes the “feature” of the bunch—does a respectable job documenting the rise of Seattle’s youth bike culture. Watch the program for: more track stands than you can shake a stick at.

Image courtesy of Kelly Riordan.

Waffle Bike is a “fully weaponized, mobile, waffle-making machine.” It’s also the name of a short film—documenting the bike’s maiden voyage in search of chickens, naturally, to lay the eggs for the batter—that played last night as part of the Minneapolis leg of the Bicycle Film Festival. The “Fun Bike Shorts” program offered 15 films in all, most clocking in well under 10 minutes.

In Waffle Bike, a perfectly clipped narrator chirps out Waffle Bike’s features, which include a Honda Harmony en2500 generator, a 9-inch Norweigan waffle maker, a small refrigerator up front, a tape deck (which plays through three 8-inch, 25-watt, all-weather trumpet horn speakers made in China), and two 12-gauge homemade shotguns. The film is charming and disturbing and funny—and the bike is the work of Tom Sachs, an artist who is also credited as the film’s director along with the Neistat Brothers.

While I was watching the film—maybe the sight of a lingonberry-topped waffle made me hungry?—I couldn’t help but think that short film programs are like tasting menus, except better, because instead of plowing through a dozen courses all prepared by a single chef, you get an erratic and wild tour, each course crafted by a different individual. Waffle Bike was an obvious crowd pleaser, but there were other gems in the batch, such as Balorda, from directors Luca Bedini and Marco Brandoli, which chronicles a three-day, wildly costumed, bacchanal bike ride that takes place annually in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. “We only have Lambrusco. No Gatorade. We only have pork. No energy bars,” a caped commentator declares, as the camera cuts to a gigantic cauldron of shredded meat.

Also not to be missed: My First Time, by S.C. Durkin, which splices interview footage of people recalling, well, their first time, to great comedic effect. Faster from Jeff Stark is a slick, two-minute glimpse of a biker racing against a New York City subway train, and in Jim’s Lines, Patrick Trefz documents a rider who drags a rake behind his bicycle and constructs elaborate, transient art in the sand of a beach. The only real disappointment of the bunch was the closer: Standing Start, 12 minutes of footage of Olympian track sprinter Craig MacLean, over which a narrator dramatically recounts some sort of Odysseus-based tale. It was a stunning misfire at the end of a series of films that otherwise served to surprised and delight.

The Bicycle Film Festival continues tonight and tomorrow in Minneapolis, before heading westward to Los Angeles, next up in a roster of 14 more U.S. and international locations. If you can make it to one of the festival stops, do so. Otherwise, you’ll have to be satisfied watching Waffle Bike on the not-so-silver screen:

Iranian documentaries are startlingly candid, coming from "an essentially totalitarian society," writes the documentary film magazine Point of View (article not available online). The trade-off: not all Iranian films at international festivals come with official approval, nor are they all allowed to be screened in Iran. 

That tension doesn’t mean Iran’s government doesn’t applaud its filmmakers. On the contrary—At the opening of Tehran’s Cinema Verité documentary festival last October, reports Point of View, Iran’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance praised documentary filmmaking as “a method of uprising against a world in which the truth is denied.” He also called it “a readily understood language which can be used in the struggle against evil.” 

The Iranian documentaries discussed are more modest and less cryptic than the minister’s statement, not to mention more revealing about Iranian society than the cultural minister might like. They give less-than-lofty glimpses into “individual experience” like incarcerated youth dealing with the effects of drug abuse (It’s Always Late for Freedom) and Iranian male-to-female transsexuals (the Sundance-screened Be Like Others). The films reminders viewers of Iranian citizens’ humanity and individuality, writes Point of View, “at a time when our everyday knowledge of Iran is predicated on cultural generalizations.”

 Image by Hamed Saber, licensed under Creative Commons.

Film analysis, architecture, and set design converge in We Make Money Not Art’s review of The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Location and architecture play a crucial role in nearly all of Hitchcock’s films, and some structures have become iconic: the bell tower in Vertigo, the apartment in Rear Window, the Bates mansion in Psycho. The review highlights just a few of the ways in which the films’ architecture informs and responds to the often twisted psychology of the characters.

It’s a lament we’ve long heard from cultural scolds: Entertainment these days is just too raunchy. Whatever happened to nice, decent, moral films and television? Whether the halcyon days of wholesome pop culture ever actually existed is debatable, but the CAMIE (Character And Morality In Entertainment) Awards intend to put the brakes on our culture’s collective backslide by recognizing films and shows that, according to the organization’s website, “provide positive role models for building character, overcoming adversity, correcting unwise choices, strengthening families, living moral lives, and solving life’s problems with integrity and perseverance—realizing some lessons of life come with pain and sorrow.”

The 2008 CAMIE awards were held last month, and the winners included such family-friendly films as Miss Potter and Bridge to Terabithia as well as the Hallmark Hall of Fame’s presentation of The Note. (In fact, four of the five nominees in the made-for-TV movie category were produced under the aegis of the Hallmark corporation, which has apparently cornered the wholesome TV-movie market.)

CAMIE is just one component of what Reason’s Greg Beato calls “Hollywood’s Decency Epidemic,” as the mainstream media, particularly big Hollywood studios, are dedicating unprecedented dollars to the sort of G-rated entertainment frequently advocated by religious groups and other conservative culture warriors; one example of this supposed paradigm shift is Fox’s new Christian media division, Fox Faith. But what neither Beato nor CAMIE seem to acknowledge is that money talks nowhere as loudly as in Hollywood, where the major studios collect the lion’s share of their revenue from 17-year-olds who pay to see shoot-em-up blockbusters and teen sex comedies.

All the same, after perusing the entries in CAMIE’s 2008 winners’ circle, this impressionable pop culture blogger is considering expunging the more salacious items on his Netflix queue in favor of more uplifting fare like The Ultimate Gift and Love’s Unending Legacy.

Image of A Fair Puritan by E. Percy Moran licensed under Wikimedia Commons.

Let for-profit DVD lenders fight for subscribers. The Film Connection lends DVDs on current issues for free, provided you watch with a group and use the film to fuel conversation. The premise is simple: “We believe that film can spark a conversation like nothing else,” Film Connection states on its website, “and conversation is the first step to making a better world.”

(Thanks, Minnesota Women’s Press.)

Image by Brave New Films, licensed under Creative Commons.

Call it minstrelsy or blackface, just don’t call it history. Donning black makeup and acting out a racial stereotype—a Jamaican drug dealer, a shackled slave, a black celebrity—is as enduringly American as apple pie (slathered in chocolate ice cream). Recent examples include college campuses recoiling at blackface charades enacted by their students. And government employees dabbling in bronzer. These days, however, troupes of blackface performers no longer tour the country, and blackfaced actors no longer appear in big-budget Hollywood films. Right? Wait a minute, what about this summer’s Tropic Thunder?

Yes, that’s Robert Downey Jr. in black makeup, and, of course, we all love Robert Downey Jr. Almost as much as we love black makeup. But let’s look for nuance.

First, Downey’s character in Tropic Thunder: He plays a white actor who undergoes a sort of blackfacing surgery to play a black character in a war movie within the action comedy. I suppose this set-up satirizes movie roles that project black stereotypes to begin with—a brush of parody over Downey’s blackface—but... Really? They couldn’t come up with any other jokes? I know mainstream comedy recycles past yucks over and over again, but haven't we gone down this road enough?

Then again, the Tropic Thunder trailer made me laugh, even Downey’s racial mugging, which seems sly and knowing (might it be a case of having your cake and eating it, too?). What’s more, the movie has that patina of respectable Hollywood artistry, in no small part because hard-edged absurdity-guru Ethan Cohen shares credit for the screenplay, which was cowritten by the film's director, Ben Stiller. So, there’s likely some wit and intelligence nestled in between the action and broad comedy. The question of whether or not the movie is offensive will have to wait until we fork over nine bucks to see it. In other words, it looks like money in the bank. And isn’t that what blackface is really all about?

If your idea of ultimate genital danger is a pair of zip-fly jeans and a burned-out light bulb, you haven’t seen the movie trailer for Teeth. The film, which is the subject of a great analysis by Nerve, tells the tale of a high school student with a unique anatomical feature and her unfortunate bedmates. Nerve contextualizes the film by exploring the history of vagina dentata mythology, from the demon Asmodeus of Judeo-Christian legend to toothed vaginas in Native American parables.

—Morgan Winters

Rotten Tomatoes is a movie review aggregator that scores films on a “freshness” scale of 0 to 100 percent. In some cases, as with the recent cinematic catastrophe Meet the Spartans (2 percent freshness), the reviews showcase more comedic ability than the film itself. I’ve compiled some review highlights into a greatest hits recap. Enjoy:

Meet the Spartans isn’t a real movie, so this isn’t a real review, either.¹

Yes, crotch-flashing celebutantes and macho gladiator epics are rife for spoofing. It’s just too bad the job has been entrusted to Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the witless, Dumpster-diving duo who wouldn’t know satire if it puked on their faces.² When the comedy revolution comes, Friedberg and Seltzer will be the first ones shot.³ The filmmakers have one basic joke—that there’s something a little bit gay about all these buff Spartans—and they work it into the ground, trotting out every dumb homosexual panic joke in recorded history.⁴

This thing is so utterly lackluster, so without spirit or humor or energy of any kind, that the characters have to tell you what the joke is.

“Oh, look!” they say. “It’s Paris Hilton!” Like that.⁵

What’s the point of making a parody that’s dumber than the stuff it parodies?⁶ For example, the film starts with an old man examining an infant while a narrator tells us that in ancient Sparta all the babies were carefully checked for defects. This is a fine setup for a lot of potentially funny sight gags: What might this baby’s “defect” be? Then comes the reveal: It’s a baby Shrek. Why? Because Shrek the Third was recently a popular movie. The baby Shrek says something with a Scottish accent and then pukes all over the old man. Why? Because puke is funny. Aren’t you laughing just thinking about it?⁷

It’s so bad even Carmen Electra should be embarrassed.⁸ Electra proves herself a national treasure as our highest-priced whore.⁹

In their deeply ingrained tradition of something less than mediocrity, Friedberg and Seltzer make their annual locustlike descent on theaters leaving a trail of ruthlessly murdered brain cells in their wake.¹⁰

It’s not even a movie. It’s just a thing.¹¹ I’m moving to Europe.¹²

—Erik Helin

(Sources: 1. Sun Media; 2. Detroit News; 3. EricDSnider.com; 4. Mountain Xpress; 5. Sun Media; 6. Newsday; 7. EricDSnider.com; 8. Detroit News; 9. Village Voice; 10. Mountain Xpress; 11. Mountain Xpress; 12. Village Voice)

California’s Salton Sea isn’t just a body of water, it’s an epic tale of environmental tinkering gone wrong wrapped up in a storyline that involves real estate fever, massive fish kills, congressman Sonny Bono, and more than a few sunburned eccentrics. High Country News tells part of the strange tale in its March 3 issue. For a cinematic, even weirder take on the sea and its characters, check out the documentary film Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, now out on DVD, which is reviewed in the March-April Utne Reader.

—Keith Goetzman

Sex. Violence. Rebellion. While these are synonymous with success in today’s box office offerings, films containing allusions to—or, heaven forbid, actual examples of—such behavior were guaranteed a red light in Hollywood after the creation of the Production Code Administration in 1934. Thomas Doherty chronicles the film industry’s last-ditch effort to save itself from the censors’ scissors in his new book, Hollywood’s Censor, and in an excerpt published in Reason.

The Production Code Administration was tasked with upholding the film industry’s self-inflicted Decency Code. Producers and directors had generally ignored the code, but with a major boycott spearheaded by the Catholic Legion of Decency draining box office coffers, and with Roosevelt’s New Deal regulatory paroxysms pointing west, Hollywood producers knelt at the feet of censorship and kissed the insipid ring of values-based entertainment by agreeing to self-regulate film content.

—Morgan Winters

You may not have heard of the most popular, and perhaps most violent, Brazilian film of all time. Tropa de Elite, which came out last year in Brazil and is now in limited release in the United States, follows Captain Nascimento of BOPE, an elite military police battalion, as he prepares Rio de Janeiro for an upcoming visit from the pope. This involves the gruesome torture and murder of countless Rio residents, suspected drug dealers, and crooked cops. The film has been widely criticized for its depiction of brutality against civilians and its seeming advocacy of vigilante violence.

In an article for In These Times, Homes Wilson examines the film and the political undertones of its stunning popularity. The problem with Tropa, Wilson believes, is that the consequences of its gratuitous violence are ambiguous. Whether it is interpreted as destructively immoral, as director José Padilha intended, or as a necessary evil in Brazil’s war on drugs completely depends on the viewer’s point of reference. “If the filmmakers had purposely set out to weave Rio violence into a fascist propaganda piece,” Wilson writes, “it’s impossible to imagine them doing a better job.”

Recalling a police barbecue he attended after watching Tropa, Wilson describes the cops’ excitement about the film by comparing it to geeks’ love of Star Wars, leaving us to wonder what a Tropa de Elite convention might look like. If Brazilian police view the film’s vigilante violence against civilians, some of them children, as glorious rather than cautionary, then Brazil may be moving in a frightening direction indeed.

—Morgan Winters

Digital cameras aren’t just light receptors, like the film from more traditional cameras. They’re handheld computers, interpreting light messages and forming them into something that looks like an image. Digital photo technology so far has been focused on creating a realistic rendering of what’s in front of the camera. In the future, Bryan Haynes writes for the American Scientist, digital cameras could interpret and even change the recorded reality. Haynes envisions cameras that could “render images in the style of watercolors or pen-and-ink drawings,” shift points of view, or use light reflections to see around walls.

—Bennett Gordon

(Thanks, 3 Quarks Daily)

The film documentary Czech Dream, recently reviewed in Utne Reader, chronicled an audacious prank in which a fake superstore was created, working a bunch of shopaholic Czechs into an opening-day frenzy. Now a different bunch of Czech tricksters, the art collective Ztohoven, has seized the limelight by hacking into a public TV weather broadcast and inserting a mushroom cloud into a panoramic shot of the Krkonose mountains. Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times places both hoaxes into a long tradition of Czech “tomfoolery.”

—Keith Goetzman

Like all graphic designers, I’m faced with the eternal question: Is Helvetica a typeface I should use? Or should I avoid it at all costs? The film documentary Helvetica, which is now out on DVD, may provide some answers. Helvetica is chock full of legends from the design and type worlds weighing in on the most ubiquitous of typefaces. Not surprisingly, their answers pretty much depend on when they came of age as designers. Designers have alternately embraced and reviled Helvetica since it was introduced in the American market in the late 1950s, and the debate continues to this day. Is it the typeface of capitalism, or socialism? My conclusion from watching Helvetica is that it is both. The designers of the ’50s and ’60s were correct to embrace it for its neutrality, and designers of the postmodern era were correct to reject it for its stodgy corporate connotations.

—Stephanie Glaros

Director Martin Scorsese recently released The Key to Reserva, a 10-minute Internet-based commercial for Freixenet champagne provocatively billed as an adaptation of a “lost” Hitchcock manuscript. The short has two storylines. One tells the truncated tale (owing to an incomplete manuscript!) of a man anxious to find a key that unlocks a box containing a bottle of fine champagne bearing a top-secret message. The second, hidden in the open as they say, is the story inside the story: a supposed making-of “documentary” that sets up the drama—a lost Hitchcock script found! Scorsese directing it!

The film is shot in a very recognizably Hitchcockian style, and Hitchcock references abound. Some are glaring, like the classic Bernard Herrmann score and Saul Bass-style credits. Many more require an expansive knowledge of the primary sources—like the R.O.T. initialed handkerchief (North by Northwest), the brutal stabbing (Dial M for Murder), the camera’s red flashes (Rear Window), the key and the bottle of Freixenet (both Notorious), and the Hitchcock blonde (don’t even get me started). But beyond being just a shower of references, more impressively, Scorsese pulls off stylistic allusions—like the crane shot backing out of the orchestra (Young and Innocent) and the overhead shot of the protagonist’s ascension of the stairs (Vertigo).  

As for whether Scorsese succeeds in making a Hitchcock, well, no—though I would argue that he has succeeded in pulling off a terribly funny joke about making one. The manuscript claim is sold convincingly, and Scorsese, to his credit, never shoots us a wink. Ultimately, the very preponderance of references foils the ruse—not to mention that Scorsese’s pacing is too fast, which underdevelops the suspense. 

As for the much-anticipated Hitchcock cameo: Scorsese’s Spellbound poster would hint that Hitch should be playing a violin, and the orchestra, frustratingly, seems to bear a large percentage of portly, bald men—certainly a staged distraction. This is a tough one, but just when you might have given up, hold it right there—in the production room scene with Scorsese, is that an uncredited Pat Hitchcock, Hitch’s daughter? Now that would be clever.

And what about that picture just outside the balcony door? Is it a young Scorsese? Or maybe cameos are just for the birds.

—Jason Ericson