LADY VENGEANCE: TRAILER HAPPY, FEBRUARY 2012

By Farihah Zaman

Trailers have the ability to psyche us up, freak us out, turn us off, and lead us very, very astray, but the heightened anticipation (they don’t call them teasers for nothing) is part of the fun, regardless of how accurate a representation of the film that cleverly constructed little bugger ends up being in the end. Here’s a little commentary on a selection of recent genre trailers; let’s both judge a book by its cover and appraise the cover itself.

THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS (Justin Kurzel, in theaters March 2nd)

I always feel wary of trailers that start off with “true story” or facts and figures and location information, as if these are the film’s strongest selling point and said framing is required to appreciate it, but this trailer definitely evokes a grittily menacing Australian suburbs vibe pretty quickly. The tension between what initially appears to be a family drama and something far more sinister is established by setting carefree scenes of play against ominous music and beautifully overcast skies, and the choice to only show the eerie aftermath of violence, like a body wrapped in plastic, is chillingly effective.

PLAYBACK (Michael A. Nickles, in theaters March 9th)

Films about serial killers who tape their handiwork? Hardly a new concept. Movies in which technology is haunted by evil? The Japanese are on top of it, with everything from One Last Call to Ringu, baby. The confluence of those two classic ideas? Well that could be interesting, but only if appropriately executed. I wish this trailer made the crossover seem fresh but their cliche handling, with the jerky J-horror movements and quick cuts interspersed with TV blizzard imagery, doesn’t inspire confidence that some exciting hybrid is going to emerge. Plus, this trailer makes me feel sad for Christian Slater.

SILENT HOUSE (Chris Kentis & Laura Lau, in theaters March 9th)

Elizabeth Olsen is exploding faster than Jessica Chastain in 2011, so casting her in a film in which, like Martha Marcy May Marlene, she is the focus of nearly every frame seems equally prescient. While the … Read the rest

THE MICRO-BUDGET CONVERSATION: IS ENOUGH…ENOUGH?

By John Yost

When and how did Edward Burns become the mouthpiece of micro budget cinema?

That’s a question I asked on Facebook after a late night holiday bender and noticing the ridiculous amount of press Ed got for making a film that certainly didn’t cost him 9K. Then I thought, who really does make a film for 9K? If you add up all the favors and salaries that are not getting paid you’re in the hundreds of thousands. Then I thought, oh man is there any such thing as micro-budget at all? Or is it like the myth of cover girl beauty. (Isn’t he married to a model, by the way?) Then before I could kill myself, Lucas McNelly commented in defense of Ed. Lucas and I have been communicating on and off, and recently, FCF has started development on a documentary of his A Year Without REnt and this experiment we call indie filmmaking.

Now don’t get me wrong, Ed Burns is a good filmmaker, and I think it’s great that he is jumping into micro-budget filmmaking with both feet. Lucas made a good point that he is also making low-budget filmmaking acceptable to a wider audience. All good things.

I think my biggest problem with Ed being the mouthpiece is the expectation it sets. By having a large arsenal of personal favors and resources far beyond the scope of any micro-budget filmmaker he sets a false expectation to the filmgoing audience. The industry often does the same thing by taking a film that cost hundreds of thousands to make and finish, fudging the numbers to put it in the four-digit range, and then using that as it’s selling point. This is the same as taking someone who is a size 12, photographing them, and then using Photoshop to make them look a size 4. We cultivate an audience that has disjointed expectations between budget and product. They demand a certain quality of product, yet no one can truly make that product with the tools (or body) they are given. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not surprised this has happened in … Read the rest

THE MICROBUDGET CONVERSATION: THE SUCCESS OF FAILURE

By John Yost

Well after a great holiday, and another Sundance, we are back for a new season of the conversation. This year we’re going to try and expand the definition of micro and see it as more of a state of mind and community, as oppose to a budget. I’m looking to hear from more filmmakers, see how they are expanding the limitations of technology, and see how the new model is effecting the old. We are also working on a project you’ll be hearing more about as the months roll on. Our hopes is that it will be some of the first steps in sustaining a career in micro, and expanding a community of professionals…stay tuned.

Winter can  be a season of rejection and failure in the film community. Many of us didn’t get into Sundance, but watched from the sidelines, and even more of us just got rejection letters from SXSW. However, failure is an essential part of the creative process and this week Mike Newman urges us to embrace it. – JY

For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I wasn’t physically locked up behind bars, rather my mind was trapped behind the confines of institutionalized schooling. I swear this ties in to filmmaking, just bear with me. We’re told that we go to school to receive an education, but I beg to differ. Indoctrination is really the point. I can’t really remember much of what I was taught in all those years, except that we should play it safe, follow the rules, listen to authority, and fit in with the crowd. This is not a recipe for success and definitely not a blueprint to reach our fullest potential. It’s a road-map to mediocrity.

The irony of it all is that the best lecture I got wasn’t in any classroom; it was on my college graduation day in June of 2004. It was a simple lesson. I don’t remember much of what was said during the ceremony except one distinct part of it that has been imprinted on my brain for eternity. My commencement speaker told us … Read the rest

TONEELGROEP AMSTERDAM STAGES “CRIES AND WHISPERS” AND “DISGRACE”

By Lauren Wissot

One of my biggest complaints about Broadway theater is the lack of artistic risk. (Indeed, one could make the case that Julie Taymor’s cursed production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark had the media riveted more by its performers’ injuries than by its Hollywood blockbuster budget. The safe Great White Way had become dangerous again!) Which is why it’s been like a breath of fresh air to take in several English-surtitled productions from Toneelgroep Amsterdam (headquartered a very easy hour’s train ride away from the International Film Festival Rotterdam), where in lieu of bodily harm to actors there’s a couple of Belgian directors willing to challenge not just an audience but themselves as well.

Both the company’s artistic director Ivo van Hove and Thalia Theater Hamburg’s Luk Perceval have each decided to tackle intensely philosophical works, pieces laden with heavy artistic baggage outside the cloistered theater world. By staging versions of Ingmar Bergman’s critically acclaimed 1972 breakthrough Cries and Whispers (which had a brief run at BAM’s Next Wave Festival back in October) and Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, respectively, these Belgians are out to beat the odds, choosing to tread territory where the chances of failure are certainly higher than that of success. And both pull their productions through with respectful inventiveness.

Like the novel it’s adapted from, about a white professor’s morally complicated journey through sex and race relations in post-apartheid South Africa, Perceval’s Disgrace is bleak as hell. From the opening, in which we see the vain and self-entitled David Lurie seated onstage surrounded by black mannequins mingling in a frozen tableau – then watch as he’s grilled on his relationship with a student by two actresses positioned in the audience – Perceval has announced his intention to make the ever-present tension of Coetzee’s homeland visual. Often utilizing a third person narration the character of Lurie recounts his downfall and the horrifying – though sensationally staged – violent act at his daughter’s farm on the Eastern Cape that shakes his entire belief system. Usually relying on the device of mere storytelling with very little action … Read the rest

LADY VENGEANCE: INTERVIEW WITH SUNDANCE FILMMAKER EVE SUSSMAN

By Farihah Zaman

Although Sundance is predominantly known for indie dramas and social issue documentaries, the New Frontiers section provides a loving home for particularly odd ducks. Unlike many projects in New Frontiers, which are presented as installations or other new media formats, Eve Sussman’s whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir was screened in a conventional theater. However, the film’s text, 300 bits of voiceover, 150 pieces of music, and 3,000 images are live-edited by an algorithmic computer dubbed the Serendipity Machine that creates a randomized sequence, meaning each screening is entirely unique. Not only does Sussman’s piece turn the idea of the mystery genre on its ear, it plays with the very idea of genre itself, as well as chronology, and convention, and every other building block of narrative as we know it.

Fresh from a successful three-show run at Sundance 2012, Sussman spoke with Lady Vengeance about storytelling and the nature of human perception.

LADY VENGEANCE: How did you conceive of whiteonwhite?

SUSSMAN: Well the title is named after a Malevich painting; White on White and Black Square are the two seminal pieces of Suprematist work, which is about transcendence through art, and pure feeling in art—getting away from representation. But as I was becoming interested in trying to make a piece about that painting, the actor I worked with, Jeff Wood, who was also at Sundance with us, became really interested in space travel. So his literal interest in space converged with the sort of conceptual, theoretical ideas of White on White. Malevich used these sort of megalomaniac theoretical concepts where he would call himself the chairman of space, and he would talk often about the idea of space, whether it was the space of the picture plane, or literal space as in the cosmos; you could sort of read it as a double entendre. And so we started conflating those two ideas, the idea of space and the idea of Suprematism and White on White and pure transcendence.

LV: How did this idea lead you to shoot in Central Asia?

SUSSMAN: Because Jeff kept talking about space I said, … Read the rest

MEDIA CURRENT: END TO CROSS-OWNERSHIP RULES?

By David Rosen

In December 2011, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-2 to propose loosening media cross-ownership rules relating to a television or radio station and a newspaper.

Under the new rules, cross ownership of a newspaper and either a television or a radio station would be allowed in the top 20 markets such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, Dallas-Ft. Worth and Boston. The FCC isn’t expected to vote on the final rules in April 2012 at the earliest.

Cross ownership rules were originally intended to limit media concentration particularly with regard to broadcast stations, cable stations, newspapers and websites.

In 2007, the FCC attempted to revise the 35-year-old ban on companies owning TV stations and a local newspaper in the country’s top 20 markets, saying it was no longer needed.  However, a federal appeals court lifted in the FCC plan, sending the back to the FCC for more consideration. Last year, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski defended the agency’s earlier attempt to loosen cross-ownership rules, so the recent proposal did not come as a surprise.

According to the FCC, “the public interest is best served by these modest, incremental changes to our rules.” It believes the proposed rule strikes a proper balance to restrict media consolidations by including two limitations. First, it limits TV station participation to stations not among the top four ranked in the market. Second, it requires that there be at least eight independently owned and operating major media outlets remaining after the transaction is completed.

The FCC plan does not propose lifting what is know as the “duopoly rule” that limits the number of local TV stations a company can own in a single market. (However, in December 2011, the National Association of Broadcasters [NAB] appealed to the Supreme Court to take a case in an effort to strike down the duopoly rule.)

The FCC’s decision raised the ire of many Democrats in Congress. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) led a bipartisan group of 25 senators to have the FCC delay its vote, insisting that the public hadn’t had enough time to consider the … Read the rest

MEDIA CURRENT: YOUR TV FUTURE

By David Rosen

Internet Video (IV) will play an increasingly important role in the distribution of independent “film.” Even for the few who still shoot, edit and distribute on 16mm or 35mm stock, your future – if only for marketing and promotion — is tied to the digital 1s and 0s that are redefining media and communications.

IV distribution is restructuring release “windows” and revenue recoupment.  Revenue opportunities through DVD sales are shrinking; the TV market (with the exception of HBO, PBS and some made-fors) is evaporating; international commitments are tougher to snag; and the once higher mark-up on educational sales is a thing of the past.

For indie makers, IV distribution promises a new opportunity to reach viewers, recoup the production investment and go on to make one’s next film. However, the IV market is like the 1848 California Gold Rush – everything was possible, but few found gold.

It is impossible to predict the future of indie film distribution, but three conferences on how the commercial television business are addressing the disruptive impact of the Internet offer some useful insights. They paint a dismal picture of what’s coming and how indie filmmakers might be able to take advantage of these changes.

The Social TV Summit focused on how the industry has been adapting to “out-of-the-box” changes; the Future of TV Forum focused on the industry’s efforts to keep technological disruptions “inside-the-box”; and the TV of Tomorrow sought to thread the needle between the two approaches.  As one industry wag proclaimed, the old “www” for “World Wide Web” now means video “whatever whenever wherever.”

Broadband Internet is a disruptive technology challenging established ways of doing business for movies and television. It challenges the TV business in three critical ways: (i) it represents a new way to distribute programming content through either Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) or Over-the-Top (OTT) methods; (ii) it offers a new, more interactive or social media experience through services like Twitter and Facebook; and (iii) it is spawning the incorporation of second (and sometimes third) interactive devices (e.g., computer, smartphone or tablet) as part of the viewing experience.

Three additional factors are adding … Read the rest

THE MICROBUDGET CONVERSATION: WHAT IS OUR END GOAL?

By John Yost

As the editor of this column it is my job to choose the contributors, shape the voice, and move the column in a forward direction. The last post really struck up a good conversation, and it is now clear that my decision to move the blog in a new direction would be a welcome change. This does not mean, however, that we will stop talking with micro-budget filmmakers on timely topics and take the time to check in on their latest projects. Despite what some people feel, one of the functions of this column is to help contributing filmmakers get the word out about their latest endeavors, fundraising, and upcoming releases. This is not a thinly veiled attempt at advertising — this is just good form. I will be working hard to add new voices like genre, documentary, and perspectives of industry professionals, as well as more diary entries from filmmakers in different stages of production and distribution. These new topics and subjects will hopefully spark a large amount of chatter that I hope to put back into the conversation as well. So if you have something you just have to say…write it up and email it my way.

In an effort to close this season and move into the New Year, I’d like to take a moment to look back, reflect, and give my opinion. Think of this as a “Letter from the Editor” post.

Authenticity.

This has been the year of the honest, transparent filmmaker. The large majority of contributors I’ve met talk about being honest about your limitations and how to use them to your advantage. The real debate in my mind is, will this last? Will we continue to be more open about fundraising? Will we search our hearts for what we really want as a filmmaker and move towards that? Will we work harder to make content that truly reflects who we are as opposed to what festivals and foreign markets like? Will we be brave enough to forge a new industry that relies on community, honesty, and hard work to carry us through tough … Read the rest

LADY VENGEANCE: LAST MINUTE GIFT GUIDE FOR GENRE BUFFS

By Farihah Zaman

Still not sure what to get your comic-book-obsessed little brother? Forget to pick up something for mom that satisfies her cinematic blood lust? The following gifts are Lady Vengeance approved, and most arrive just in time for December 25th.

For the Low-Brow Art Lover:

Crazy4Cult: Cult Movie Art (Gallery 1988/Kevin Smith, $25)

The currently out-of-fashion but undeniably hard-working Kevin Smith has teamed up with the LA-based Gallery 1988 to collect the best in good, pulpy, sometimes downright dirty artwork inspired by cult films. The aesthetic style and subject matter is fairly diverse, meaning there’s something for everyone.

For the High-Brow Art Lover

Stanley Kubrick Photograph (Stanley Kubrick, $250)

From 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Shining, Kubrick was the master of thoughtful, witty, and unnervingly beautiful genre film. VandM and the Museum of the City of New York show us he was also a damn good photographer, exhibiting that penchant for the bizarre, the menacing and the secret as he did in his beloved films.

For Those who Didn’t Mind the Revised Spelling of Syfy:

Sharktopus Double Bill: DVD (Declan O’Brien, $8) and T-shirt (NBC Store, $26)

In honor of the DVD and Blu-Ray release of another fantastic low budget Syfy original revolving around a crazy beastie hybrid, give that special someone a one-two punch with a copy of the film (thanks, Anchor Bay!) and the graphic t-shirt they should obviously be wearing while watching it.

For the Thoughtful Comic Book Collector:

MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus (Pantheon, $25)

Art Spiegelman’s all-mouse graphic novel about the holocaust is legendary, and his reflections on the book and its influence are equally sharp and articulate. This behind-the-scenes book is also unique in that it comes with a DVD-R with related historical documents, audio interviews with Spiegelman’s father, the artist’s sketches, and more.

For the Politics Buff who Has Everything:

On the Art of Cinema (Kim Jong … Read the rest

LADY VENGEANCE: THE GENRE FAN’S GUIDE TO JIM HENSON

By Farihah Zaman

By now many have experienced the clever, goofy, unfiltered joy of The Muppets, a film whose  success reflects the plight of its characters – out of the spotlight for far too long and working their way back into the the public consciousness. While the film’s potent mix of charm and nostalgia is undeniable (if you didn’t tear up during the performance of Rainbow Connection, you’re inhuman), it might leave some of us hungry for more, and I don’t mean the soft stuff. While the film is true to one facet of Henson’s work, he was a mad, prolific genius who got involved with many projects in which the touches of the dark or surreal that only made the occasional appearance on his most populist fare like The Muppet Show and Sesame Street were allowed to fully develop.

Below, ten of the most wonderfully weird works from the sometimes-twisted mind of Jim Henson.

VISUAL THINKING (1960s)

In some of his earliest work Henson seemed fascinated by brain function and found creative, comical, but seriously strange ways of exploring it visually. Embedded in this episode of the very kid-friendly series Sam and Friends is not only an early Kermit, but a bit that imagines what it would be like if we could give words, thoughts, and music physical shape, a sophisticated joke in addition to being a pretty meta- meditation on what Henson does; make imagined creatures, fictional worlds, and abstract ideas a physical reality.

TIME PIECE (1966)

An experimental short combining live action, archival footage and animation that was nominated for an Academy Award, Time Piece is a highly rhythmic journey through time via the explosive moments contained within the quotidian, such as the instant a bowling ball hits the pins, the spark of a lighter jolting to life, or the freefall that occurs after the “boing” jumping up from a diving board. Henson connects seemingly disjointed images through his protagonist, who runs  back through the history of human culture, and single elements such as a distinctive color, sound, or type of action.

 … Read the rest