We’re back – and my pal Brother Wease and I talk about movies and, of course, the political conventions if you click here.

My pal Brother Wease and I chew the fat today about why TV shows like “Prime Suspect” get cancelled, why sex addiction is a real thing – and the latest movies, if you click here.

Dec. 13
Better late than never, here’s the link to my podcast with Brother Wease from Sat., Dec. 10, in which we discuss everything from Occupy Wall Street to Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

I was in a screening at the Toronto International Film Festival on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and by the time the movie was over, the World Trade Center had fallen.

It feels like I’ve been here every year since, though I know I missed at least a couple TIFFs in the past decade.

So it seemed only appropriate that I fly to the 2011 TIFF on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 itself – full circle and all that. (More…)

I’ve been meaning to write about the supposed phenomenon of the woman with the cell phone in the extras for the DVD of the Charlie Chaplin film “The Circus” for a couple weeks, since I first heard about it and then watched it on a website. But then I’ve also been meaning to write about the fact that someone is about to teach a college course on the subject of Lady Gaga. (Suggested title: “Understanding Madonna.”) Ain’t it funny how time slips away.

And what I wanted to say about the whole Chaplin thing was this: Lord, what fools these mortals be. OK, so someone else said that first and better. Or perhaps this: There’s a sucker born every minute. Again, not mine, but apt. (More…)

The best performance I saw all day Friday at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival?

That would have to be the Park City shuttle bus driver who, in the midst of a heavy snowstorm and heavier 4:30 p.m. traffic, went from a bus stop at the curb across two lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic to make a left turn at a stoplight less than a block away. Now THAT deserved a standing ovation. (More…)

So now what?

That’s the question I’ve asked myself recently after watching any number of worthy but small movies. I come out of the screening room – or turn off the TV because I’ve had to watch a DVD screener – and thought, “This is a nice little movie – but who will ever have the chance to see it?”

Maybe these films will have a life on DVD or on cable or video-on-demand. But how will anyone hear about them if they wind up painted/tainted with that “straight-to-video” label?

Most of them, it seems, will barely be released into theaters, so they join the slurry of movies that seems to increase daily: films which, just a few years ago, would have had an arthouse release at a minimum. They’d have been reviewed, seen, remembered.

Recently I wrote about David Hollander’s film “Personal Effects,” which starred Ashton Kutcher and Michelle Pfeiffer – and which was going straight to DVD after one-night-only screenings in Los Angeles and New York. Or “The Deal,” a witty little film about the movie world that William H. Macy co-wrote, co-produced and starred in with Meg Ryan.

And the list goes on. In March, I screened several films at a film club I host that were getting extremely limited releases before heading to the DVD/on-demand universe: “Reunion,” “Sherman’s Way,” “The Cake Eaters.”

This week, the movie “The Escapist,” a British prison-escape drama, hits video-on-demand two days before its limited theatrical release in New York.

Indy-film guru John Pierson explained it to me a year ago at South by Southwest, when I was trying to peddle a documentary I’d made (still trying). The number of screens available for independent/foreign/documentary films isn’t growing. Neither is the size of the audience for these films – at least not the audience willing to leave its home to pay to see a movie in a theater.

But the number of these movies being made has mushroomed. Literally thousands of films were submitted to Sundance this year for a couple hundred slots. Everyone seems to be operating from the model of 20 years ago when, as John Sayles once told me, “If it had sprockets, you could sell it.” Or the model of five or 10 years ago, when selection to a major film festival meant your film had a good shot at being released.

So what of the thousands that don’t get selected? Or worse – the hundreds that DO play the festival circuit without ever attracting a buyer? It makes you shudder to think what would happen to first film by Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch, John Cassavetes or Steven Soderbergh, if they were just starting out today.

Several factors have come into play, most of them in the last two years alone. Most of them were well underway before the economic downturn that kicked into high gear last fall. And we’re not even talking about the threatened extinction of print film critics at daily newspapers and weekly newsmagazines, who championed these films and brought them to the public’s attention.

Let’s start with the loss of several companies critical to the health of well-made but challenging-to-market movies. In the past two years, the arthouse labels of several of the major studios have vanished: Warner Independent, New Line, Fine Line, Picturehouse, Paramount Classic/Vantage – poof! Gone. 

That’s had a huge impact on movies that, even 18 months ago, would have been snapped up and sent into theaters with strong marketing campaigns and critical, if not audience, awareness.

“All the distribution outlets that used to be part of the scene are no longer here,” says Anna Boden, co-director of the upcoming “Sugar,” which was made by Picturehouse, then orphaned when Time-Warner shuttered Picturehouse. (It subsequently was picked up by Sony Classics.) “It’s a scary time for a lot of independent filmmakers.”

Greg Mottola, whose film “Adventureland” opens this week as well, says, “The independent film world has changed so radically. It’s hard to sell a movie because so many companies have gone under. It’s hard. It’s grim. ”

The studios obviously have no interest in releasing tough, serious films – except in December – and the mixed results for intelligent, imaginative studio movies such as “Duplicity” (great reviews, disappointing box-office) or “Watchmen” (big – but not big enough – opening, huge drop-off) probably have studio execs running even more scared, narrowing their focus even further to only the most surefire of the surefire (as if anyone knows what that is).

Obviously the paradigm has changed – radically and suddenly – in terms of smaller films. “Nobody is buying anything,” producer Ted Hope told me recently. As Mottola put it, “No one is interested in a modest profit.”

It will all change permanently the day the satellite dish/internet interface is made both cheap enough and easy enough that we’re all be able to stream movies from the Internet to our family-room TVs, the kind we used to go to the local arthouse to see.

And it will change when someone figures out how to publicize unknown movies to that home audience – to create a market for new movies that don’t ever make it to theaters, not because their quality isn’t top-notch but because their potential profit margin is too small for a studio to pay attention to.

For years, people have predicted the death of the movie house, based on the rise of home video formats, digital cable/satellite, and the gains in home-theater picture and sound.

The movie-theater experience isn’t going to disappear. There will always be movie theaters. But the movies that make it there will be the blockbusters and tentpoles, the special-effects extravaganzas, sequels and remakes.

And that will kill the movie theater experience – for all the independent films out there. It’s happening already.

So now what?

 Print This Post

The saddest moment during the Oscars in my household Sunday night came when the cache of saved footage ran out on the Tivo and we were no longer able to fast-forward through the commercials – and the boring parts. (We tuned in a half-hour late after watching “The Amazing Race.”)

There was an abundance of both commercials AND boring parts. And this in a year when, for the first time in personal memory, I really didn’t care who won. “Slumdog”? OK. “The Reader”? Sure. “Milk”? Why not? Just get on with it and get it over. (More…)

Who was robbed in Thursday’s Oscar nominations?

Sally Hawkins: Winner of the Golden Globe and the New York Film Critics Circle awards, Hawkins gives the year’s best performance – brave, funny, touching. Working with Mike Leigh, she carved the role out of her own feisty, life-filled spirit. It’s an amazing creation, delivered by the tiny, towering Hawkins – the portrayal of a lifetime. But she’s not nominated – and Angelina Jolie is? For the overwrought, overheated, overacted “Changeling”? Obviously, tears count for more than smiles at the Academy. And apparently the subtlety, the complexity and the sheer imagination of Hawkins’ work was overlooked in favor of Jolie’s shamelessly tear-stained performance. Or maybe they just were overwhelmed by her skill on roller-skates. It’s telling that “Happy-Go-Lucky” was also overlooked in all major categories except original screenplay.

“The Wrestler”: Yes, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei received acting nominations. But the movie itself – one of the fiercest, most moving, most resourceful independent entries of the year – was shut out in the major categories. (More…)