The sweet irony of Paul Osborne’s documentary, Official Rejection, a backstage tell-all of American film festival culture, is that the film has gone on to be something of a fest favorite around the country. I first reviewed the film at last year’s Deadcenter Film Festival in Oklahoma City, where Paul and I agreed we would find time for an interview. Finally, we have come together to chat about his film, which is still running the festival circuit, and movies in general. As Sundance 2010 begins, we thought it would be a perfect time to discuss what festivals represent in the dreams of filmmakers and what they really are. Believe it or not, a lot has changed since Paul made the film, so listen in as he explains where we stand today. Other points of interest: my own bitching about Blu-Ray, the films Paul is most excited to see, and the two of us compare war stories on both sides of the critic-filmmaker lines.

 
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Ed. Note: My microphone suffered some fits of serious crackling for this one. I’ve been trying to scrub it out but I’m finding it impossible. I’ll fix the problem by the next Candlercast. Sorry for the ear-strain.

After a great deal of discussion on our bests of the decade podcast, we are finally ready to let you in on our director of the decade: Steven Soderbergh. He won an Oscar, made a slew of successful films while keeping his arthouse street cred, legitimized the RED Camera, and pretty much just blew everyone out of the water in the last ten years. But don’t take my word for it, Sunrise provided a great writeup of the man and his decade. Let us know in the comments if you think we chose wisely (or not).

The way in which Steven Soderbergh starts off this decade is with such veracity and force with Traffic and Erin Brochovich, it is a wonder that he not only maintains such consistency towards the end, but implements a fascinating success that is important not only for him as an artist, but for us as an audience.

Leaving the nineties as a “Sundance” poster boy with questionable box office draw, he made a sudden turn with 1998’s Out of Sight and opened the decade with winning one of two Best Director nominations, to which only Michael Curtiz’s 1938 double nomination loss comes close in comparison. While Curtiz was just as much of a workhorse, what makes Soderbergh’s nomination so amazing is the metaphoric weight of self-challenge it represents. This challenge, as it were, is extended beyond his own growth as an artist into the ever-growing challenges he places upon his peers and audience. Read on…

I first met filmmaker Blayne Weaver back at the Deadcenter Film Festival in June, where his film Weather Girl was playing. You can read what I thought about it back then in this post, but we’re way past reviewing the film at this point. Weather Girl will be making its television debut tomorrow, Septermber 23, 2009, on the Lifetime channel. You heard right, Lifetime.

Blayne took some time out of his schedule to chat with me about this current film, his next project, and topics as varied as digital distribution, Inglourious Basterds, and screening your film on a PS3. In other words, if you take the time to swallow this whole interview, you’ll be in for more than one surprise. Check it out and check the movie tomorrow night, on Lifetime.

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I’m sorry, but I am going to have to hike up my crotchity old man pants and whip my suspenders; it’s time to do a little ranting about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).

Recently, outgoing President Sid Ganis announced that next years Oscar ceremony will feature 10 Best Picture nominations instead of 5. This unprecedented (at least in 60 years) announcement was followed by a few lesser publicized changes. The rules for Best Original Song are now such that there may not even be an award every year and supplemental awards, such as the Thalberg or the Honorary Oscar, will be distributed at a separate event. It is great to see AMPAS blow the dust off of the arcane rule book they have been following for nearly a century, but other changes are needed. Like what, you may ask? Good thing you came to the candler blog.

Axe the Best Animated Feature Category, and Fast

Part of the thinking behind expanding the Best Pic pool is to give films that rarely make it into the running a fighting chance. Comedies, summer blockbusters and animated features are rarely nominated, but only one of those genres has been pushed out of the running completely. Instituted in 2001, with the first award going to Shrek, the Best Animated Feature award was meant to get gold into the hands of animated filmmakers whose work accounts for an incredible amount of box office grosses yet is rarely honored at the annual ceremony. Instead, it has pigeonholed all animated films into one giant lump that is out of the running of the Academy’s top honor.

Over the last decade, Hollywood and audiences have taken note of animation auteurs. So many people are required to make an animated film, the makers often get lost in the shuffle. However, Brad Bird has now become a marketable name, as have Andrew Stanton and John Lasseter. (These are all Pixar guys, I know, but hey, they’re the major studio) As films become more closely linked to specific names, they start to feel more like works of art rather than DVDs to keep the kids happy in the back seat. With a bigger Best Pic pool, there is no longer a need to push animators into a corner with this useless, offensive award. Read on…

The comedy short has a long and illustrious history in cinema. In modern times, the art is still alive but exhibition spaces are limited. As a result, film festivals have become the number one destination for these little films. deadCENTER has its share of shorts programs, but I was only able to check out the comedy section because I needed a laugh. Did I get one? Let’s take a look.

Ten For Grandpa — dir. Doug Karr

This slick little short follows a man wondering who his departed grandfather really was. The camera flows between scenes, across time, and across rooms to create the illusion of fluidity. This is extremely well executed, but I do wonder how much of this film actually qualifies as comedy. If anything is a joke, it seems to be the efforts the filmmakers went to to pull off these shots. Every time we enter a new space we are supposed to be wowed into a laugh; the form is so over the top for such a little film. The choice of the 2.35:1 aspect ratio seems like an arbitrary choice; the piece may be funnier with more vertical space. Of course, we would lose that slickness. Ten for Grandpa is tight, well executed, well acted, and fully realized. Overall, it is a very strong piece and I want to see more from all involved.

The Last Page — dir. Kevin Acevedo

The best part of this short is the Dodge College opening logo. Its self-assuredness provided me the biggest laugh all day, but sadly, all logos must end. The film goes on to depict the terribly tired premise of a writer envisioning the final page of his novel. The writer goes for a walk ends in him getting into all kinds of “wacky trouble”. I realize this is a student film, but still, it is fraught with problems. Again we have an unjustified 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The biggest issue of all is the runtime. At 22 minutes, the piece is more than twice as long as there is story. Most offensively, the laughs are unexplained. Why, Mr. Acevedo, is it funny when a rotund woman grabs the writer’s crotch? If you are out there, defend your joke. And to the professors at Dodge College at Chapman University, please guide your students to kill their favorite babies and cut their pieces down to size.

The SPAM Job — dir. Padraic Culham

Stone faced after the last bit of drek, I was determined not to laugh once through this cheap-looking documentary, but it wore me down over time. I couldn’t help but chuckle by the end. Through interviews and photos, the story of one prankster’s stolen spam becomes clearer and clearer. It sounds dumb and that is the point. The joke here seems to be on us for making it through the whole damn story. This “cheap” feeling I mentioned only adds to the charm of the piece, you simply don’t expect how far they are willing to take this joke about a can of spam ending up in different locales across the globe. The piece is a little fat, could be cut down to size. I could see this as a sketch on a late-night comedy show, that is if Mr. Culham and friends have any other notes up their sleeves.

Cherchez la femme — dir. Idit Dvir

Comedy has a darker side that is briefly explored in this short. A man dressed like a taco wants to kill himself over a woman until he finds a friend in another suicidal man with far different love troubles. Slowly we learn that the man’s wife cheats on him while he is home, so the taco concocts a plot to kill her off. The film takes too long to get to very little payoff, though one of the purest laughs during the shorts program came out of the film. Once the murder is imminent, the murderer must continue having sex with his victim through tears. As an audience, we are left with no emotional output except laughter because our other options simply won’t do given the rest of the film. This one laugh is impressive, but it doesn’t make up for the slow pace of the rest of the film, not to mention the pre-required misogyny one needs to find humor throughout. Ms. Dvir assumes a lot about her audience’s beliefs: that walking tacos are funny, that promiscuous women are sluts, and that murder is a natural progression from anger. Focusing in on these muddled corners will help to make better work in the future.

Tom’s Day Off — dir. Justin Stanley

Sigh. I believe in film criticism as a tool to help filmmakers better their work over time, but when I am given nothing to work with I feel there is nothing I can offer. This is how I feel about Tom’s Day Off. It’s such a mess that I would rather the filmmaker, Justin Stanley, go make something else and bring it back so I can actually give some critique. Apparently, after being dumped a lanky bank employee chooses to rob his place of business. Then he ends up in the back seat of a student driver’s vehicle with no plan. There are no laughs, no plot, no aesthetic quality to speak of. Mr. Stanley probably thinks he’s a genius with his use of an inner monologue interspersed with diegetic dialogue. The bigger question is what place this film has in any film festival. The 10 minutes of space this took up could have been used so much better.

Miracle Investigators — dir. Jeremy Dehn

The program finished off with this crowd pleaser. Overall, this is a lame mashup of kung fu action and outdated church humor. Still, the laughs are there, and that is respectable for a student film thrown into this mix. The film follows two priests charged with meting out justice against perpetrators of false miracles. Unfortunately, this goofy premise never really comes to fruition. The film bumbles along from joke to joke with a plot that hardly makes any sense. It seems that it didn’t matter since the laughs were there. The makers of this film would do better to cut it down to about a 5 minute sketch and really focus in on each joke. Nonetheless, a valiant effort.

The internet has been touch and go the past two days, and I’m on a friend’s computer instead of my own, so I can’t add the usual flair you have come to know and love to this post. Even with the fest completed, this continues to be an intensely film-related vacation. After a buffet breakfast at a place called Ingrid’s Kitchen, I headed over to the best bookstore in Oklahoma City, Full Circle. Designed with all kinds of nooks and crannies and rolling ladders, it is a store whose selection is not only Okie specific, but wide ranging. It’s design encourages discovery and their staff are super friendly. No one paid me to say that, seriously.

I went to Full Circle because my friend, Sunrise Tippeconnie, was signing a book in which an essay of his is featured. The book is Sooner Cinema: Oklahoma Goes to the Movies and I’m in the process of reading it. Quite interesting. This state has a long history of making movies and being portrayed in them. Which brings me to my next point.

The talk of the town right now is Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me, which is shooting here right now. The film has brought stars Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba, and Ned Beatty. During the final day of deadCENTER they had blocked off streets downtown and filled them with 1950s cars. Last night I headed to Cookie’s, a tiny bar with a lot of heart, for the Cast and Crew more-than-halfway-through-production party. It was a nice time with some wonderful karaōke singers. The only celeb to show up was Mr. Beatty, and he was a gentleman.

I love hanging out with film crews. They are so much more tolerable than filmmakers because they rarely want to talk about movies. After the bar I went straight to a Sonic for the second time today. For those of you who don’t know about Sonic, well, you just have to drive until you find one. I got an Ocean Water Slushie and some onion rings. They tasted delicious after drinking a Pacifico cerveza.

We are off to the Wichita Mountains now, probably no more film to deal with today. I still owe you all some reiews and you’ll get them, but probably not until I’m back in New York. Poke around the site in the meantime, there’s a lot going on here.

On a rainy Friday afternoon, I managed to spend some time with Israeli filmmaker Nati Baratz. We met at Manhattan’s Film Forum, where his film, Unmistaken Child, began it’s U.S. theatrical tour last Wednesday and will be playing there through Tuesday, June 16^th. Clutching an umbrella that flopped in and out which he offered me as a canopy repeatedly, he and I chatted about his career, his film, and the current state of documentary cinema.

The film is his first theatrical venture. A graduate of Tel Aviv University’s film program, Mr. Baratz made two documentaries for television, but as he tells it, he was a hired gun on those projects, taking them on in an effort to keep his chops up. Unmistaken Child follows the buddhist monk Tenzin Zopa on his search for the reincarnation of his late master, Geshe Lama Konchong. For more specifics, you can read the candler blog’s review, but you would do better to just go see the film.

We began to discuss the positive critical reception of his film, though Mr. Baratz was quick to point out that not all viewers are pleased with his work. ” Some people want me to give answers, to give explanations, like more conventional documetaries. This is fair enough, but it’s not the film I made.“He’s right. Unmistaken Child features only sparse interviews with the main subject, Mr. Zopa, and a handful of overlayed text, giving the viewer the bare minimum of literal context. “People want me to criticize things, to go deeper. Most don’t even realize how much information there actually is in the piece, because I made this for Westerners, not Buddhists.” Read on…