The Screengrab : j. hoberman

Hard Economic Times May Translate into Hard Sales at the Box Office

Phil Nugent — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The New York Times reports that, in these economically troubled times, business at movie box offices is rallying. Better than that, really: "with ticket sales this year up 17.5 percent, to $1.7 billion," the industry is enjoying "a box-office surge that has little precedent in the modern era." And with attendance up "by nearly 16 percent", if the trend continues, "it would amount to the biggest box-office surge in at least two decades." If this is surprising news, it's partly because it means that there might have been something to the immediate, kneejerk reaction to the recession, a reaction that smart people have been debunking in recent weeks. When the economy first went off a cliff, two thirds one heard a lot was that people went to the movies a lot during the 1930s Depression, and also that, if the '30s early talkies and the American movies of the 1970s are any indication, great movie eras are often born of what the old "Chinese curse" calls "interesting times." According to the Times, though, actual statistics pointing to a history of rises in moviegoing during bad economic times tend to be thin on the ground. And besides, J. Hoberman argued in a Village Voice piece a few weeks ago, even if it had been the case in the past, it wouldn't be now: "A reorganized and self-regulated Hollywood bounced back in 1935, but times were different then. Movies were America's universal culture. Now, they're not even close. Like then, the technology is changing—but in a far different way. Movies are expendable. Folks will give up $12 tickets, cancel Netflix, and cut cable to save their high-speed Internet connection."

Talking to people at the multiplex, one finds that there is indeed a connection between the current rise in moviegoing and the current dip in everything else, but people may be using a different calculus than Hoberman envisioned. The Times talked to one harried mom who dropped, not $12, but $15 a head to get her four daughters in to see the 3D Jonas Brothers concert movie. As she explained her logic to the Times, “Spending hundreds of dollars to take them to Disneyland is ridiculous right now. For $60 and some candy money I can still be a good mom and give them a little fun.” This notion that dropping sixty bucks "and some candy money"--at the theaters I go to, that might mean another sixty bucks--is a bargain compared to what it would cost to storm the Magic Kingdom may be a sign that the mindset of the last few decades is going to die hard. (So is that TV commercial I saw the other day that seems to tout, as a money-saving gesture, spending upwards of $70 on a Wii music player as an alternative to a night out clubbing.) It could be that, after a period when more and more people became devoted to expensively cocooning, the chill in the air makes people want to once again be entertained in the company of other people, giving them a taste for shared enjoyment that might be a socially healthy development. And what about the second half of that prediction, that bad economic times produce better movies? Of course, the first movies to go into production post-crash haven't appeared yet, but in the meantime, people seem eager to line up for the Jonas Brothers in 3D, Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail, Taken, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Baby steps, baby steps.

New Yorker Films Shuts Its Doors; Back Catalog of Foreign-Indie Classics to Be Auctioned Off

Phil Nugent — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Founded in 1965 by Dan Talbot, New Yorker Films has been recognized for some forty years as one of America's premier distributors of foreign films. Talbot originally set the company up when he had his own theater, also called the New Yorker; it was a brainstorm born of frustration over the difficulty he was having programming his own theater, given the haphazard and slovenly way in which even important international movies were then brought into the American market. Beginning in 1965 with its acquisition of Bernardo Bertolucci's Before the Revolution, New Yorker Films took on a life of its own, becoming the support system through which movie lovers in the United States were able to gain access to work by Godard, Fellini, Bresson, Chabrol, Fassbinder, Eric Rohmer, Werner Herzog, Ousmane Sembene, Wim Wenders, Pedro Almodovar, and the more recent auteurs of the Iranian New Wave, as well as such homegrown independent directors as Errol Morris, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, and Wayne Wang. Now comes word that New Yorker Films "has ceased operations". Reacting to this bland announcement posted on the company's website, Eugene Hernandez posted a fuller report on indieWIRE. After first reporting that neither Talbot nor New Yorker Films' Jose Talbot "have been available for comment", indieWIRE later added the text of an email the site received from Lopez: “I have sad news. The parent company of New Yorker Films has defaulted on a loan. The assets of New Yorker were used as security on the loan. The lender has informed us that it intends to foreclose on these assets. New Yorker stopped doing business yesterday... We are in total shock that after forty three years this has happened.” Rumors that New Yorker Films was in trouble were apparently strong enough to put a damper on the Spirit Awards ceremony this past weekend.

New Yorker Films was a revered institution, and it sometimes behaved in a manner befitting a regal force that expected its full due of obeisance, in keeping with J. Hoberman's description of the company as having long been "the only game in town." They were notorious about charging excessive rental fees for their prints and not offering bulk discounts to the most faithful customers in their chains of poor starving classrooms and rep theaters. And the quality of both their prints and DVD releases could be erratic. (As the wolf at their door began to growl, they also made the dubious cost-saving move of dropping me from their DVD screeners list, apparently oblivious to the terrible fate that awaits any company that fails to kiss my shoe.) But even though there are more distribution options available today for international and independent films, there will never be enough, and the number of valuable and interesting foreign movies that are never made available to the eyeballs of American movie fans is always a favorite topic of conversation among those critics and film writers with a global reach. As Richard Brody notes, this unhappy development also leaves open the question of what will happen to "perhaps the richest back catalogue in the business". Brody notes that "it’s worth remembering that, unlike book publishers, whose wares are widely distributed to libraries (it’s bitterly sad when a publisher goes out of business, but the back catalogue is already out there), film distributors hold the prints of the movies they own rights to; those which are out on home video have a second life, but the 35mm prints are, as of now, locked up, and revival houses wanting to screen them are simply out of luck." According to the New York Times, Talbot says that "The library could be auctioned off as early as next week." Whether it will somehow manage to remain intact is still to be seen.

J. Hoberman on "Che" in VQR

Phil Nugent — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

The excellent new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, which is devoted to the fifitieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution, includes a J. Hoberman essay on Steven Soderbergh's epic biopic Che, starring Benecio Del Toro as Ernesto Guevara. "Within eighteen months of his death, this instant immortal had been embalmed—in the form of Egyptian matinee idol Omar Sharif—by Twentieth Century Fox, as the subject of a tediously self-important and ridiculously old-fashioned Hollywood biopic. Early evidence of the hyperreal: noting the production’s budget, John Leonard observed in the New York Times Magazine that making a movie about revolution was considerably more expensive than the revolution itself, 'about $10,000 an hour.' ” Hoberman describes the intentions behind that clueless turkey (which co-starred Jack Palance, in a Silly Putty nose, as Fidel Castro), as having been "in the tradition of Fox’s 1952 Viva Zapata—a melancholy, heartfelt, prestigious, star-spangled tribute to revolutionary failure" starring a "hardcore New Left action tough guy." Actually, as Che's resurrection via T-shirt image (the history of which was described in the recent documentary Chevolution shows, he was the guerrilla as rock star. Consciously or not, most of his modern fans understand him as being part of the lineage of hip rock martyrs that includes Jimi, Janis, the lost Rolling Stone, and the Lizard King. More recently, Gael Garcia Bernal played the hunky young (pre-"Che") Ernesto in the Sundance-friendly The Motorcycle Diaries, based on a road trip the lad took with a buddy, a trip that was immortalized in a book that appeared more than twenty years after his death. Directed by Walter Salles (with Robert Redford acting as executive producer), it was a gorgeous-looking movie that gave receptive audiences the chance to admire it's hero's liquid eyes and bone structure while he visited peasants in pastoral settings and felt his yet-unformed social conscience become all tingly.

Is Soderbergh's Che a history lesson or the latest act of what Hoberman calls "co-optive commodification"? It "remains a film object—a thing to be experienced. The movie demands to take its time, with both parts taken in at a single sitting." Hoberman, who saw the film at last year's Cannes Film Festival before Soderbergh took a scalpel to it, reports that "Many initial viewers were confounded to the degree that Che appeared as a non- or even an anti-biopic. Despite a stellar performance by Benicio Del Toro, who had initiated the project some years ago with Soderbergh as producer and Terrence Malick attached as writer and director, Che presents its subject almost entirely as the protagonist in the context of two specific events. Moreover, the director seemed to keep his distance and reserve his judgment. Skillfully didactic, as well as nervily dialectical, this feel-good/feel-bad combat film thus had less in common with the touchy-feely Motorcycle Diaries than with Peter Watkins’s spare, self-reflexive reconstruction of the Paris Commune, La Commune (Paris, 1871)." However, since its premiere, "Soderbergh has tweaked his movie's first half in ways that soften its strangeness and blunt its intellectual range." These additions, which interrupt the story of the revolution with flash-forwards to Che's life as a political celebrity during a trip to New York, serve the purpose of "Annotating the past with the 'present' and tightening the movie’s overall sound/image connections," even as "these inserts do allow for another sort of dialectic, but their presence serves to subtly normalize Soderbergh’s distancing strategy. (Or what was taken to be his strategy. “With all the subtitles, we thought it was Jean-Luc Godard,” a colleague joked.)"

"Che," Hoberman writes, "is an act of will rather than a work of art, overtly concerned with technical issues—the revolution’s and its own." In short, it is a movie by Steven Soderbergh, a director who (with his first feature, sex, lies, and videotape) helped invent independent American moviemaking as a concept (and, in part, as a marketing concept); who, with his comeback movie, Out of Sight, showed how just how much smarts and technical pizzazz could be applied to a solid piece of romantic-action-comedy goods while accepting the material on its chosen level; and who has spent the last decade or so veering from one extreme to the next, trying to find the ideal balance between commercial work that won't rot the brain and experimental work that tries to speak to at least part of the mass audience. As Hoberman sees it, "Che is superb filmmaking—forcefully edited, purposefully repetitive. Everything is foreshadowed; each sequence has its parallel. There is no scene that cannot be seen as part of an ongoing argument." But how many movies made by big Hollywood players wouldn't be embarrassed by a phrase like "an ongoing argument"?"Soderbergh is less a driven auteur or even an enthusiastic cinephile than he is a highly intelligent technician who sets himself a problem and goes about solving it. "

The Rep Report (January 9 - 15)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 Made in U.S.A. has long been one of the best-hidden features from the director's '60s golden age. Godard claimed the "Richard Stark" (i.e., Donald Westlake) novel The Jugger as the credited basis for the script, but nobody bothered to get Westlake's permission or cut him a check, with the result that the writer managed to get a proper release of the film in the U.S. squashed. So its appearance at Film Forum for two weeks starting today counts as big news even for the Forum, which has taken to showcasing Godard's color classics from his Pop Art phase at the rate of about one a year. The funny thing is, the movie's connection to Westlake might be just another admiring reference point in a movie that features characters named "Donald Siegel" (for the veteran b-movie director who would ultimately hit paydirt with the original Dirty Harry and "David Goodis" (for the crime novelist whose Down There provided the basis for Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player), as well as villains named "Richard Nixon" and "Robert McNamara", and that Godard claimed was his attempt to remake The Big Sleep with his then-wife and muse Anna Karina in the Bogart role. (Her male co-star is Jean-Pierre Leaud, as Don Siegel.) This splashy affair, described by J. Hoberman as "more devoted to the vulgar modernism of mid-20th-century pop than any movie Godard made before or would make after," also features a cameo by Marianne Faithfull, singing "As Tears Go By" in the first full bloom of her misspent youth. It's being shown in a gleaming new 35-mm. print.

The first half of Film Society of Lincoln's Center' annual "Dance on Camera Festvial" is underway and runs through this weekend, with the usual invaluable collection of performance shorts and features and documentaries, including a tribute to Busby Berkeley that makes room for a screening of his 1943 surreal choreography classic The Gang's All Here. The series concludes next weekend with the Indian musical The Chosen One/Ishanou and an American Masters documentary profile of Jerome Robbins.

Related Stories: Donald Westlake, 1933 - 2008

2008: Still Combing the Wreckage

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

The results if the Village Voice/L.A. Weekly year-end critics' poll are in. The snarling, pointy-headed elitists who make up the core voting bloc went with a kiddie cartoon and box-office smash, Andrew Stanton's Pixar instant classic WALL-E, a choice that meets with the Screengrab's hearty approval. "Sometimes", writes Voice Grand Poo-bah J. Hoberman, "the movies really are universal." However, Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, which finished out of the Top Ten at #12, deserves recognition as the year's "prize critical cult film...Despite generally mixed reviews, Demme’s independent feature received a higher percentage of first- and second-place votes than even WALL-E, meaning that the people who liked it really liked it." Hoberman detected an optimistic strain in many of this year's top films, not just WALL-E and Rachel but also such favorites as Happy-Go-Lucky and (its ending aside) Milk, extending even to Let the Right One In, "an unexpectedly touching treatment of child vampirism", and his own choice for best film of the year, "the relatively cheerful" Flight of the Red Balloon. Maybe if this optimistic vibe can be fully tapped, the Voice itself will be able to last another year.

One last, must-see on-line portal for tributes to the year past: "Moments of 2008", parts one and two, at the Museum of the Moving Image's "Moving Image Source" site. Here, a lively selection of writers and film folk, including Guy Maddin, Karina Longworth, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jonathan Lethem, Todd Gitlin, Joshua Land, Dennis Lim, Scott Foundas, and others, cite their own most thrilling "moving-image highlights", with results that include movies both new (Man on Wire, Before I Forget, Madden's own My Winnipeg) and old as well as TV (The Wire, The Wire, The Wire) and news and politics. Also among those participating: David Hudson, whose work at GreenCine Daily has set a high standard, and provided invaluable assistance, to the Screengrab and all on-line film writers. Hudson has just gravitated over to IFC's fil blog The Daily, leaving the GreenCine site in the capable hands of Aaron Hillis. We offer our thanks for past services and wish them both well in the coming year.

Nathan Lee Loses His Voice

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

When film critic Nathan Lee signed on at The Village Voice in October 2006, he said, in reaction to the staff cuts and other problems then plaguing the paper (even as it was patting itself on the back on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary): "I came into this at a point where the Voice had been bought," he said. "The change was done; it had happened. I'm coming into it afterwards and my sense is, 'What is still valuable here; what can we still do? How can the Voice continue to have a strong, lively, influential and really smart sense of film coverage?' That's what I'm really invested in at this point." The paper turned out to be invested in other things, and now, eighteen months after claiming his first-ever regular staff position ("I've never had health benefits in my entire adult life"), Lee has been let go, from the Voice. Lee's own announcement of the unhappy news reads as follows: "In great Village Voice tradition, I was abruptly laid off today for 'economic reasons.' My employment at the paper ends immediately: someone else, alas, will be tasked with specifying the precise shade of periwinkle frosting atop the cupcakes in My Blueberry Nights. And so I am, as they say, 'looking for work,' though presumably not as a staff film critic as such jobs no longer appear to exist."

Lee, a gifted writer with his own idiosyncratic taste and a brawler's verve, who earned attention for his work in the New York Sun and The New York Times, will surely land on his feet. It's not so clear how much of the Voice's reputation as a vital force in film coverage will be left standing by this latest development. The paper that served as a home base for such writers as Andrew Sarris, Manohla Dargis, and David Edelstein (now keeping house at, respectively, the New York Observer, the New York Times, and New York magazine respectively), still has a living landmark in J. Hoberman (whose thirty-year-career at the Voice is currently serving as the basis for a tribute at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), but the paper had barely recovered from the firing of section editor Dennis Lim and writer Michael Atkinson around the same time as Lee's hiring. Lee's firing may revive talk that the head office (which, make no mistake about it, has also done its best to decimate the other Voice arts sections) has been urging the paper to do more to hype big films and cut back on the more cerebral writing about avant-garde and offbeat fare. As S. T. VanAiresdale has noted, "New York newspapers have now lost four full-time film critics in the last month." If Lee's departure really stings, it may be partly because he's a hot property and also partly because there was a time when you expected better from the Voice.

The Rep Report (March 7-14)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: An inspiration to late bloomers everywhere, the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (born in December, 1908) made his first film in 1938 and managed to make a dozen more pictures over the course of the next forty years, but he started to buckle down in 1979, when he made his breakthrough with Doomed Love. He's made more than thirty works since then, and has churned out a movie a year since 1990. "The Talking Pictures of Manoel de Oliveira" (March 7-30) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is an ambitious retrospective salute to the remarkable career and little-seen work of this distinctive and filmmaker as he apprroaches his centennial.

BAM is also paying tribute this month to J. Hoberman, the brainy and idiosyncratic film writer, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his settling in at his regular perch at The Village Voice. Running from March 10 through April 3, the schedule begins with Eraserhead, the subject of Hoberman's first review for the Voice, and includes such "personal favorites" of the critic as King of Comedy, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuffle, Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, and John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. (Pleased as punch, the Voice has posted Hoberman's 1992 review of Naked Lunch, a stellar example of the kind of fireworks that Hoberman can set off even when writing about a movie that many sane people wouldn't watch again if blindfolded.)

The Rep Report (February 20--27)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

LOS ANGELES: The films of Sergei Paradjanov aren't like most of the films made in the Soviet Union in the sixties and seventies, and not really much like anything else, either: floating, visually poetic works full of charged symbolic imagery. Their meanings may not always be readily clear, but that wasn't enough to keep the government authorities from deciding that whatever they were supposed to mean, it pissed them off; the director, who died at the age of 66 in 1990, just when it was becoming possible for artists such as himself to get some breathing room in their home country, was subjected to official harassment during the most creatively fertile years of his career and spent four years in a labor camp. From February 22 to the 29th, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is showing six of Paradjanov's films, including his breakthrough Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, the masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates, and the late works The Legend of Suram Fortress and Ashik Kerib, made in the 1980s after the filmmaker was obliged to take a fifteen-year layoff.

BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives pays tribute to one of the most highly regarded and least mass-audience-friendly of living British directors with "Closely Watched Films: Terence Davies" (February 20 - February 27). This ambitious retrospective is built around screenings of Davies' autobiographical works, the feature films The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives and the three shorts that comprise "The Terence Davies Trilogy", as well as his adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible, with the director himself in attendance. On February 23, Davies will walk an audience through his breakthrough film in a discussion titled "Distant Voices, Still Lives: Shot-by-Shot." The theater will also screen his version of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth with Gillian Anderson. J. Hoberman captured what sets Davies apart, and what gives his work its fascintion, when he wrote of that one that “Davies’s sense of the material is closer to a Mizoguchi geisha drama than Masterpiece Theatre."

What a Character

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Can you handle another year-end top ten list? Can you handle it? We don't think we can, but the L.A. Weekly's Ella Taylor is determined to try our patience. At the very least, she takes a fresh approach to it: in her run-down of 2007's most interesting on-screen characters, she rejects the conventional wisdom that this year's prime crop of good films reeked to an unseemly degree of masculinity and cites an unusually high number of strong woman characters haunting our cineplexes, from Catherine Keener to Lili Taylor. She particularly bigs up Meryl Streep, who, rather than dominating Oscar fare as usual, turns the trick of having "redeemed two bad movies"; Amy Ryan's "hard but not cold" single mother in Gone Baby Gone, and, in an interesting defection from a number of critics who found the female characters in Knocked Up to be half-formed caricatures, Leslie Mann, who "brings to the controlling-bitch-wife role that makes women squirm a kind of cathartic, rhythmic lyricism" that's "full of hilarious menace". The piece isn't exactly a vital chapter in the history of cinema circa 2007, but it does serve as a refreshing tonic to an increasing number or critics who praise this year's movies because of their unrelenting and unapologetic masculinity.

Elsewhere in the Weekly, there's plenty more end-of-year stuff, as J. Hoberman introduces the 2007 critic's poll; Luke Thompson argues that torture-porn and the new wave of shock-horror has captured the attention of critics but failed to capture moviegoer dollars at the box office; Nikki Finke provides a postmortem recap of the star-crossed temper tantrums and I-dare-yous that lead up to the WGA strike; and Scott Foundas argues that, at a time when America isn't exactly making friends in the rest of the world, Hollywood is the best diplomatic organization we have to offer this year.