A possibly coked-up Rainer Werner Fassbinder displays greatness as he dances with screen-icon Hanna Schygulla in this clip from Rio das Mortes. Makes me laugh.
Pain Shack/Sing the Blues Journal
Marissa and I got married so our independent movies were put on the shelf for a minute. After a pleasant honeymoon, things are back to normal. We’re on our way to wrapping up Sing the Blues, Pain Shack is stuck on Pain Shack Island, and we’re working on a screenplay for our next movie, which is tentatively called Liar.
The guy who used to make music for RSStB got distracted by other things, so I started scoring episodes myself with Garageband, even though I don’t know how to play any instruments, barely able to string three notes together on a synthesizer. A couple months ago, an RSStB viewer named Mathias messaged me on Facebook and offered to let me use his music in our work. His style fits the tone of our films so I jumped at the opportunity. He’s been a great help, sending me high-quality files of instrumentals if they aren’t already up on his website. Good help is hard to find, especially for free. Mathias’ stuff is all I’ve been listening to in the car for weeks. I’ve grown to love his music. I listened to it on the drive to my wedding. His song “Tramp” was featured in the trailer I posted for Sing the Blues. He plays a variety of instruments. He has a lo-fi indie sound mixed with a psychedelic guitar rock influence. The experimentation with noise and ambient sounds give his tracks a modern edge, especially since they’re recorded at home. His electric guitar solos could melt Jack Black’s face. Check out his bandcamp page and like him on Facebook.
Here’s one of his most recent songs:
I just caught a little bit of Eating Raoul on cable and it reminded me how much I love Paul Bartel. He died of a heart attack when he was only sixty-one. He acted in almost a hundred movies, always delivering a uniquely Bartelian performance. What I admire the most are the movies he directed. Eating Raoul may be his most successful and best. I can’t believe I was in elementary school the first time I saw it. Marissa and I rented it in LA when I was showing her some of the great cult classics.
An auteur is a director who claims authorship of a film, like the author of a novel. Auteurs are involved in all aspects of the production. The film is their baby. Most directors of studio films are hired hands. They don’t do much more than what the producers tell them to do. Rarely does a director get final cut of a film. Highly regarded directors usually do, and if they don’t, they probably won’t do the film. Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorsese are some directors who will always have final cut. Nobody’s gonna tell them to cut scenes or throw music somewhere it doesn’t belong. Lynch said that his experience working on Dune taught him to always secure final cut. Louis CK didn’t have final cut on Pootie Tang and look at how that turned out. CK’s evolved as a filmmaker, but compare his FX program Louie with Pootie Tang and you’ll see the difference final cut makes. Whether or not Bartel always had final cut, he was a true auteur. Eating Raoul is filled with the kind of weird stuff only Bartel could bring to life. The static electricity, the Spanish condoms, Raoul’s uniform of a t-shirt with red suspenders; these are the subtle details that make Bartel’s films distinctly his own. Recently the Criterion Collection announced that it would release Eating Raoul, which is amazing because I don’t know of many other silly 80s comedies in their library. It’s a testament to Bartel, who is missed.
Bartel’s second film, 1968’s Secret Cinema, predicted The Truman Show. When Bartel was a hired hand for Roger Corman, he made one of Corman’s most indelible films - 1975’s Death Race 2000. Lust in the Dust is one of the only movies that stars Divine that isn’t directed by John Waters. Scenes from a Class Struggle in Beverly Hills is Rules of the Game re-imagined as a satire of Los Angeles. I haven’t seen Private Parts, his first full-length feature. I tried to find it for years but it was out of print. A DVD is back in print, but I love torrents too much to resist. I look forward to finally seeing it.
Movies
(SPOILERS) The Avengers, directed by Joss Whedon, plays like a video game, which I’m convinced is the exact intention of the producers. Gotta sell those games. First level: Nick Fury vs. Hawkeye; second level: Black Widow vs. Bruce Banner; third level: Thor vs. Iron Man vs. Captain America; fourth level: Hulk vs. Black Widow; and it just keeps going on like that for seemingly forever. I literally fell asleep. The story is spread thin between too many characters. The internal conflicts and character arcs are marginal. I guess Tony Stark changes a little bit by the end but not really. There aren’t any main characters in the ensemble. I used to be obsessed with comic books so The Avengers is nostalgia. However, Whedon’s film is more like Star Trek than I remember. Some of the dialogue is pretty awful, too. “You say ‘peace’. I kinda think you mean the other thing,” Nick Fury says to Loki. I slap my palm against my forehead and the sequel goes into production. I can’t blame Whedon because he probably delivered what the studio ordered. You’ll love it if animated explosions are your thing.
Chronicle, directed by Josh Trank, is about a socially awkward teenager named Andrew who begins to tape-record his life to document his abusive father. Andrew, his cousin Matt, and a popular kid named Steve gain telekinetic powers after the trio is exposed to a glowing blue thing they find in the woods. The whole film is shot in the “found footage” style of films like Project X and Paranormal Activity, which I usually hate. If I find out a movie is like that (usually hidden in the marketing for good reason), I lose any desire to see it. Surprisingly, Chronicle is one of the best superhero movies I’ve seen. The “found footage” approach allows for an intimate character study. Andrew is a more fully-realized character than Matt, the story’s hero. Matt’s underdeveloped arc is the film’s greatest weakness. The filmmakers set up a satisfying downward spiral for Andrew but Matt’s budding responsibility doesn’t get as much screen time. This makes the story slightly unbalanced. Trank found a creative way around the limitations of “found footage”. After a certain point, Andrew begins to move his camera telekinetically, showing off some great dynamic camerawork.
This is the first trailer for our no-budget feature movie Sing the Blues.
Movies
(screencap from God Bless America)
4:44: Last Day on Earth stars Willem Dafoe as a dude coming to grips with the end of the world. It’s like a bad Melancholia; one Skype conversation after another. Abel Ferrara is a competent director but he has awful taste. When I imagine his movies, I picture Christopher Walken dancing to nineties jazz in King of New York, a nun with a shotgun, or Ferrara himself muttering to a camera as he drags his feet through the Chelsea Hotel.
God Bless America, directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, is about a guy named Frank who goes on a killing spree, targeting mean and shallow people, with an emphasis on stars of reality television. He’s joined by a homicidal teenage girl named Roxy, echoing Boltie from Super. Goldthwait skates the edge of morality by portraying Frank as a nice guy who refuses Roxy’s advances. Joel Murray’s (Bill’s brother) performance as Frank is full of red-faced rage. Goldthwait’s movies are as subtle as his old stage voice, but his writing has fire; Bic lighter flame but fire nonetheless.
Haywire, directed by Steven Soderbergh, is a step down from the director’s last film. Mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano has a lousy screen presence. I think Soderbergh thought she’d bring an authenticity to the fight scenes in Haywire. She can do the moves, execute the fight choreography, and that’s the limit of her acting range. She doesn’t look like she’s actually fighting. She looks like she’s trying to get through the shoot. There’s a scene where she’s driving backward through the snow and Soderbergh holds on her for like a two minute uninterrupted take and she looks bored.
21 Jump Street is kinda funny. The reviews make it out to be some metafiction masterpiece like the Donald Barthelme’s Snow White of Hollywood comedies and I don’t know about that but the movie kept me entertained.
In this video, I talk about Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki.
Independent Movies
Alexander the Last, directed by Joe Swanberg, is one of the first “mainstream” mumblecore films. Swanberg had directed a handful of features before Noah Baumbach came to his aide as a producer on Alexander the Last. It’s a loosely-structured drama about a young married couple and a few characters in their orbit. A lot of the dialogue seems improvised, which works especially well when the amazing Jane Adams, as a stressed play director in Chicago, blocks an awkward sex scene between two actors. The improvised feel doesn’t work as well when Justin Rice’s character performs a cringeworthy reading of a poem by Edgar Alan Poe as his wife gets naked and writhes on his lap. Hats off to Swanberg, though. He’s a relevant if only for what he’s done with self-distribution and for his prolific output of films, and he’s about to get embraced by the horror community for the work he did for the heavily anticipated V/H/S.
Frownland, written and directed by Ronald Bronstein, is an ugly film with a sharp voice. Not much happens in the plot. I didn’t know anything about it upon my first viewing. It passed like a dream, kinda like when I saw Stranger than Paradise. Frownland is great. Bronstein’s one of the most interesting new voices in American independent cinema. The film pulls me into the director’s anxiety. The lead’s performance is demented. The musical score reminds me of 80s Troma movies. Frownland will teach you how to interpret it, and if you’re not entranced after the first thirty minutes, then it probably isn’t for you.
Pain Shack/Sing the Blues Journal
We have over ten minutes of Sing the Blues shot and edited. I didn’t like the way a certain scene turned out so we re-shot it earlier tonight with better lighting, microphone placement, and camerawork. I want a professional audio mixer. I’ve spent so much money on junk to avoid having to buy a real mixer. The Zoom H4n is OK but its pre-amp is a little noisy. Editing with Final Cut X is frustrating. On the timeline, I have to put my edited footage on top of a gradient to get the types of cuts I want. FCX automatically does all kinds of “cool” things for the user, so I work on top of a gradient to fool the program into not automatically deleting large blocks of footage when I trim clips (play with FCX and you’ll see what I mean). I’m switching to Adobe.
Sing the Blues has been much easier to shoot than Pain Shack because a majority of Sing the Blues takes place in our apartment, so our shooting schedule isn’t dependent on outside factors. Pain Shack is ambitious and difficult to shoot because it calls for a lot of blocking, stunts, dynamic camerawork, and FX work. Sing the Blues is basic mumblecore principles, conversations in an apartment.
Big Budget Movies
The Hunger Games, directed by Gary Ross, deserves its positive reviews. I guess. It’s being compared to Battle Royale but The Hunger Games has more character development than 2000’s Japanese shocker. Unlike Battle Royale, which breaks into violence early in the film, it isn’t until the midpoint of The Hunger Games that the competition begins. We get an hour of Katniss Everdeen’s struggle to develop her identity before teenagers start to kill each other. The violence is glossed over by frenetic editing. There’s subtext in the story, an attempt to speak on political themes and gender roles. Katniss has a masculine-sounding name, almost phallic, whereas her love interest, and opponent in the games, Peeta, has a feminine name. Katniss has a clear internal conflict. She doesn’t want to kill anybody but she wants to return home to her family. In the end, she makes a moral choice. Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is solid. The Hunger Games is a little corny (CGI monsters at the end look shitty) but it’s much better than Twilight. I probably like it more than The Matrix, which got so stupid and convoluted by the end of the series. Hopefully Suzanne Collins’ trilogy won’t suffer the same fate but I don’t expect much from these high-profile adventure movies. It’s absurd to me that some people think Amandla Stenberg was miscast as Rue because apparently the book describes the character as having a dark complexion. How can a person even care about something as trivial as the race of a character in a movie and still consider themselves a person? Trashy racist morons can’t read and think too much about shallow ideas.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, directed by Brad Bird, is ehhhh. It has its moments. People ride this movie’s jock and it’s alright but it’s no Knight and Day (j/k never saw Knight and Day). The part where they use the video screen to trick the guard in the Kremlin is nice.
Sing the Blues Journal
Here are a couple images from our upcoming movie Sing the Blues. Shooting is going decently. We spent the majority of Saturday testing audio levels. We learned from this helpful blog to set the recording level on the Canon EOS 60D to one notch above the quietest setting, set the volume on the Zoom H4n to 55, and adjust the H4n’s recording level according to where the mic is placed. There were some problems during the first days of shooting when Charlie told us he’d help and then didn’t respond to our phone calls and texts (as usual). When we finally went to film at his apartment in Detroit, his difficult roommate told us to take our shoes off (first thing he said, before “hello”) so we found a different apartment to shoot in at the last minute. Charlie’s friend Kyle welcomed us in and it worked out in our favor because Kyle’s apartment looks much better on camera than Charlie’s.
Here’s an update on the movies we’re making. I’ll continue to post these production journals, detailing every aspect of the no-budget filmmaking process. In this video, I talk about set design and audio recording.
Movies
Beyond the Black Rainbow, directed by Panos Cosmatos, is blue and red. It’s a strange fusion of grindhouse parody, Kubrick emulation, and dread. I caught the actors glancing toward the camera a few times, which makes me wonder if Cosmatos held up cue cards. Seems like ninety-nine percent of Canadian genre movies are stylistic parodies of old exploitation flicks. Magnet picked up Beyond the Black Rainbow for distribution, hammering another nail into the distributor’s coffin. The movie’s greatest flaw is its length. Could’ve whittled this story down into a short. It begins with a creepy scientist as he experiments on a young woman in some kind of laboratory. Then it goes into a brief sequence of unbearable black and white crap that might’ve looked good if it weren’t so out of focus. It returns to the doctor, more green is added to the production design, and then the movie ends with a whimper. Cosmatos places an exhausting emphasis on style. I’m reminded of a quote by San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle. In a review for Miranda July’s The Future, LaSalle writes,
“it would be a mistake for this talented artist to get lost in a certain way of doing things before she fully knows what she wants to do or is capable of doing. After all, style is not a way of saying something but rather a consequence of having particular things to say.”
Animal Movies
(screencap from The Turin Horse)
The Turin Horse is a heavy Hungarian movie directed by Bela Tarr. It’s over two hours but contains only thirty uninterrupted takes. Loved it. Don’t watch it unless you have patience. It’s an intimate look at the routines of a poor family and their horse. The concentrated filmmaking brings us in on a repetitive existential malaise. It’s an interpretation of the mental breakdown of Friedrich Nietzsche. In black and white. Told you it’s heavy.
War Horse, directed by Steven Spielberg, isn’t as good as The Turin Horse. John Williams’ swollen score attempts to tell us everything we should feel.
We Bought a Zoo should’ve been called We Bought a Zoo Near Target because there are eight thousand references to the retail giant in the first forty minutes. There’s plenty of other product placement, too - iPods, soft drinks, Home Depot, monkeys. Movie sucks. Waste of a good cast. I was pulling for Cameron Crowe but now I don’t think he’ll recover from the nosedive he took after Almost Famous.
