I was a bit disappointed that I didn't make it to more of the New Director's/New Films series which ended its 37th season on April 6th and all three of the films I saw were all worthy of distribution. They include Trouble The Water, a Katrina documentary co-directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal; XXY, Argentine director Lucía Puenzo's narrative film about a couple's struggle raising their hermaphrodite teenager; and Slingshot Hip Hop, a documentary about the Palestinian rap music scene in Israel, directed by newcomer Jackie Reem Salloum.
Trouble the Water
Directors: Tia Lessin, Carl Deal
Executive Producers: Danny Glover, Joslyn Barnes, Todd Olson, David Alcaro
Producers: Tia Lessin, Carl Deal
Cinematography: PJ Raval, Nadia Hallgren, Kimberly Roberts
Editor: T. Woody Richman (additional editing by Mary Lampson)
Music: Davidge/Del Naja, Black Kold Madina
U.S., 2007, 94 minutes
Trouble the Water is simply the best Katrina documentary I've seen to date. No disrespect to Spike Lee (When The Levees Broke) or the other noble works that have come out since the disaster (Axe in the Attic and Katrina Diary to name just two) but this movie hits every note just right. Lessin and Deal went down to New Orleans just five days after Katrina hit with no clear idea of what they were going to find. To their good fortune -and ours-- they happened to meet Kimberly Roberts and her husband, Scott, a recently homeless couple at the Superdome. Prior to Katrina, the two had been living a very difficult existence in the impoverished Ninth Ward by selling drugs, something they touch upon in a one of the film's more moving moments. The disaster, as tragic as it was, ended up affording them the opportunity to learn more about themselves than they would have otherwise; one lesson being that they were living miserable lives and were grateful to make a change.
Adding to that life-changing revelation is the fact that Kimberly, who had gotten hold of a video camera not long before the hurricane hit, ended up filming portions of her experience. Those clips, are both horrific and funny and much of it ended up incorporated into Trouble the Water. Hearing Kimberly's remarks over her often manic camera work is another of the film's amazing aspects. Her anxiety is palpable as the water rises inch by inch, engulfing their home. Though her regional dialect is at times hard to understand, the spiritual change she goes through over the ensuing days and weeks is very clear. As she and Scott confront the enormity of their situation, rather than lie down and give up, they rise above their circumstances.
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Movie: 6 stars out of 5. Brilliant
DVD Quality: Flawless
Sound: Be prepared for huge transitions from silence to bursts of sound, but then again, you've seen the film, right?
Extras: 50/50.
While it's no secret that Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood was among my favorite films of 2007 and repeat viewings don't change that opinion. Paul Thomas Anderson has turned in a wide screen epic masterpiece for the new century. TWBB and Andrew Dominick's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (you just KNEW I was going to work that one in here, didn't you?) are a magnificent 1-2 punch for 2007 which was overall, one of the strongest years in recent memory, IMHO.
As for the DVD, the transfer is gorgeous. Needless to say, the film is presented in widescreen, enhanced for 16x9 TVs and on my 50" Sony, it looks gorgeous. The 5.1 sound is great, with Johnny Greenwood's stark and painfully appropriate score ringing through as clear as a bell.
On opening night, after the Texas Film Hall of Fame soiree, we headed back downtown for the SXSW Film Festival's opening night party at Buffalo Billiards. It's always a great night regardless of where it's help because like the opening of any other event where everyone's psyched to be there. Like the first night at summer camp, only with lots of booze.
See if you can spot the indieWIRE and SXSW staffers in this pic:
It's a great place to meet up with old friends as well as meet new ones, the ones you're going to be seeing at parties and screenings over the next 5 days. One of the films I really wanted to see but missed do to the influenza was Bi the Way, by Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker, the latter of which I met at the party, along with her mom who was in town to support the film (and her daughter, natch). Maybe if I'm nice, they'll sent me a screener!
After Buffalo Billiards it was off to the PureVolume Ranch, one of the many non-official week-long parties that turn downtown Austin into an artistic, booze-addled pub crawl. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
More from opening night after the jump....
This sign gave me visions of Joe Buck wearing a kimono while working in a massage parlor to pay off his modeling school debts.
I think I need more sleep.
NOTE: This entry has been updated to clarify the beneficiary of the Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards and to complete a sentence I, uh, forgot to finish last night.
So I'm a little behind in my blogging... Well, I have an excuse or two. First of all, I have a new gig! That's right, the Rabbi has gone and gotten hisself some legitimate employment. Or at least some legitimate part time employment with a really cool start up. It's a company called Cinelan and we're a short film distribution and syndication company. Check out the website and you'll see what I mean. It's really cool!
The other reason is that I went and got myself sick with the influenza. That's right. The good money I paid for a flu shot this year did me diddly since I went and got sick, anyway. Not only that, but I got sick at the exact worst time. Smack dab in the middle of SXSW. Lovely. Thanks are due, however, to my angels of mercy Mike Tully and Agnes Varnum, who both came by with soup and medicines!
Add to that getting stuck overnight in Fort Worth on the way down due to snow in Dallas and this has been a rocky trip. (Stay tuned for pix of the rattlesnake cakes that SXSW Film Festival producer Matt Dentler and I ate, though!)
Not only that, I am trying to get my apartment in shape to be sold. HUGE job. So to paraphrase Crash Davis, I'm dealing with a lot of shit!
Due to the aforementioned snow, I missed what was apparently a pretty amazing party at Lance Armstrong's house. This, I was not happy about. It was a pre-party for the Texas Film Hall of Fame awards ceremony, which I was able to attend the following night and it was a dandy of a night. An annual benefit for the Austin Film Society (and not an official SXSW do), the cocktails, dinner, ceremony and auction are held each year at Austin Studios, a couple of miles north of the downtown Austin area. This year's honorees were ZZ Top, Morgan Fairchild, Mike Judge, Jayne Mansfield (accepted by her daughter, Mariska Hargitay) and Urban Cowboy (accepted by Deborah Winger) and the night was hosted by non other that former CBS anchor and new legend (and born/bred Texan) Dan Rather. He's way cool!
The evening went far more smoothly than most events of this size and it was actually pretty fun. Not only that, they served their pre-show cocktails in actual glassware, something some film companies should think about (I'm looking at you, Miramax!).
Here, John Person and Eugene Hernandez have a chat before the ceremony. That's variety.com managing editor Michael Jones' hand on the left.
Mariska Hargitay's speech in honor of her late mother was genuinely touching and towards the end she teared up pretty good. So did I.
More pix after the jump.
So BMW of Canada recently ran a rather innovative ad campaign on the cover of Vice magazine, using a technique that displays a glow-in-the-dark ad when for the BMW 1 series when the lights go out. This is pretty cool, actually. According to mediaincanada.com, Vice had to print the covers at a plant, ship them to somewhere else to add the ad and UV coat them, then ship them back to the original plant for binding to the rest of the issue. Wow. One very interesting aside...do you think BMW knew that the cover model on this issue of Vice was porn uber-star Sasha Grey? 
My apologies for my lack in posting, of late. Been sick (more on that in a subsequent post...I know you're all waiting with baited breath) and got a new gig (ditto). Anyway, I am leaping (temporarily) over SXSW (I'll be back there, I promise) to write a little something about the triumph that was the first annual Cinema Eye Honors.
Held at Manhattan's IFC Center, the evening was a triumph for all involved and came off with nary a hitch. Cinema Eye Honors co-chairs Thom Powers and AJ Schnack were consummate hosts and the show was well produced by Pamela Cohn. Coming in at just under two hours, the program even included a short panel discussion moderated by Powers with directors Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), Esther B. Robinson (A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory), Manda Bala (Send a Bullet's Jason Kohn and Pernille Rose Grønkjær (The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun).
There was one odd and profoundly disturbing facet to the evening, one noted by several of us in attendance. Wither the distributors? With the exception of IFC's Lizzie Nastro, no one remembers seeing anyone from any nominated distributor, including ThinkFilm (12 nominations), Zeitgeist (9 nods) or Magnolia (5). That's appalling behavior IMHO and just more fuel for the "distributors don't care about docs" argument. All of those companies are based in New York and how hard would it have been to send a rep or two to the IFC Center to partake in the celebration on this important night? If this isn't accurate (there were a lot of people there and it's possible we missed someone) please let me know and I'll correct the record. Apparently reps for Zeitgeist were in the house. My bad.
Kohn's excellent film was the big winner on the night, picking up three awards, including Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking, as well as awards for its editing and cinematography. For a complete winners wrap up, check out indieWIRE's piece on the evening.
Kohn also had many of the best quotes of the night, including screeds on good docs being over looked and making his film "out of anger." When he was at the Sao Paulo International Documentary Film Festival he saw Marshall Curry's Street Fight screen to a near empty house while patrons were viewing....inferior product, elsewhere and it pissed him off.
He also pointed out that the Honors themselves were themselves born out of anger and he was right. I know, I was there. Over the course of a car ride at last November's Denver Film Festival, as AJ read the list of exceptional nonfiction films that had been excluded from the Academy's documentary short list, the level of disbelief and furor in the car rose. Well, AJ decided to do something about that and like a Busby Berkeley movie, 4 short months later, there we all were, gathered in a theater toasting the excellence in nonfiction filmmaking for 2007.
Kick ass, AJ!
What could be better than watching Harold and Maude on the big screen? How about a funny and touching introduction by Jonathan Demme who reflected on his long term friendship with the film's late director, Hal Ashby. At one point, taking an informal survey from the crowd, Demme asked who in the audience had never seen Harold and Maude before (a significant number) and who had never seen a Hal Ashby movie before (a relatively small number). Demme flashed a typically warm smile and warned the audience that they were in for quite a treat. Thanks to the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Young Friends of Film series, we got the opportunity to see the 1971 cult classic starring Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon, Cyril Cusack, Vivian Pickles, and Tom Skerritt in a small but unforgettable role. Also intrinsic to the movie's greatness, the amazing Cat Stevens soundtrack. By the way, Paste Magazine recently published the rumor that the soundtrack will be finally available for the first time; hard to believe but apparently true. Look for it soon.
Once again I have to weigh in on the whole Iron Man thing. It's looking WAY cool. Robert Downey Jr. is perfect as Tony Stark and the effects look great. Color me excited! Of course, it better grab all the coin it can before Indy 4 arrives!
First there came "I'm fucking Matt Damon" and it was funny and we laughed. And now? Jimmy has gotten his revenge and what sweet, sweet comedy revenge it is. Sure, the song's not as catchy, but this one's got Huey Lewis and Harrison Ford!
So recently, I've been thinking that John McCain just might have a serious chance to win in November, along comes this douchebag...again. Please Ralph, don't do it! I don't think the country can take it.
Sorry I've been so sporadic of late, but I've been concentrating on my new gig, working for a new short documentary publishing company called Cinelan. We launched it at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this month and it's a pretty cool new initiative. Check us out!
Oh. My. God.
Jane Fonda says a very bad word.....
And the remix....
A friend of mine reports that when she went to vote in Brooklyn on Tuesday and used a paper ballot, the only choices were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. From what I know, this is a violation, since John Edwards was still on the New York State ballot. I know, because I voted for him. I also am not sure as to why she would have been given a paper ballot (I forgot to ask), since according to this, there are only three reasons one would even receive a paper ballot.
Can anyone out there shed some light on this?
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