Stay tuned???

Thank you.

http://www.hulu.com/embed/P8tYMcSCTg3qnzkgKyWFsA/301/361

The first video is “Can You Tell”, from their first album The Rhumb Line. This video won Best Music Video at the 2009 Finger Lakes Film Festival (where my film, Strong Enough For A Man screened, thank you very much). This song got me through this past summer:

The second video is for their song “Boy”, which is featured on their 2010 album The Orchard. It’s a catchy song, and I dig Wes Miles wearing an Empire State Games shirt in the video. There are better songs on this album, IMO (“Foolish” and “Massachusetts” especially), but this a great song nonetheless.

According to the Summer 2010 issue of Cinema Scope, the Safdies kept notebooks titled Go Get Some Rosemary (the film’s original title) where they would collect their childhood memories. Later, they wrote a 45 page script “that had every scene from the movie in it”. The Safdies were helped along by their father/former kidnapper, who gave them 300 hours of home movies from their childhood.

You can learn more about Daddy Longlegs and where it’s playing by going here. Meanwhile, two of their earlier shorts, We’re Going To The Zoo and I Think I’m Missing Parts, are available for viewing for $1 at MUBI.

Meanwhile, Harmony Korine has turned to crowdsourcing to fund his next project, God’s Joke. I gave the production some money, let’s hope he can produce something coherent.

François Ozon’s latest film, Potiche, debuted to great anticipation Saturday Night at the Venice Film Festival.

Potiche deals with Catherine Deneuve having to take over an Umbrella Factory after her husband takes a leave after being taken hostage. Ozon says he was inspired by the 2007 election between Segolene Royal (whom Ozon supported) and Nicolas Sarkozy. The Associated Press summarizes the beginning of the film:

The movie strikes a comic tone from the start, with opening credits that evoke the opening sequence of the 1969-74 American sit-com “Love American Style.” Deneuve’s Suzanne is out jogging in a red track suit with triple white stripes down the side, her bouffant tucked into a hairnet. As she performs calisthenics, small woodland creatures catch her eye and appear to greet her: She is clearly a woman without a care in the world.

Ozon’s been downhill since the high water mark of 2003′s Swimming Pool, which this blogger saw as a horny, newly minted college graduate. Time To Leave and especially Angel had their moments, but Ricky was, at best, disappointing. Ozon is at his best when he’s oversexed and camped up, and the trailer above evokes the tone of an earlier, campier, Ozon film, 8 Femmes. Hopefully this is a return to form for Ozon.

Wendy & Bonnie’s label went under soon after the album came out, and their producer getting poisoned to death by morphine definitely didn’t help matters. Such a shame, because their music certainly fit in well with the zeitgeist of the time. Decades later, the band began to gather a following with groups like Stereolab and Broadcast (two favorites of yours truly) embracing their music. In 2003, The Super Furry Animals sampled their song “By The Sea” for their song “Hello Sunshine”.

So here for your listening enjoyment is “The Paisley Window Pane”:

Joe Swanberg has two movies coming down the pipeline. But if you really need a Swanberg fix, Joe will be appearing in Adam Wingard’s A Horrible Way to Die, which will be premiering at the Toronto Film Festival on September 14th. Here’s a trailer of the film:

Joe and his wife, Kris, also have a personal collaboration forthcoming, as they are expecting a baby boy later this year.

Chad Hartigan’s wonderful debut, Luke and Brie are on a First Date is currently available at Amazon.com’s Video On Demand, and will soon be available at Netflix. Here’s a trailer for that film:

Happy Birthday, Joe and Chad!

Mulholland Drive is not a favorite of screenwriting gurus. In particular, Linda Seger expressed disdain for the film in her book Advanced Screenwriting: Raising Your Script to the Academy Award Level. In that book, Seger criticizes a lot of more offbeat films, but she reserves a special ire Mulholland Drive, which for her embodies what she calls “The Condescending Stance”:

“Some writers figure that they’re so much smarter than the audience that they write deliberately obtuse films to stroke their own egos. In their minds, they’re superior to their audience. They think that their movies always work and that any percieved unclarities, not the writers’ art or craft.

Why can’t anyone figure out Mulholland Drive? Is this a good thing, that it never adds up in spite of so many moments of brilliance? Some critics and audience members loved the fact that it seemed like a puzzle. We’ve been watching movie puzzles for years, and are mesmerized by their complexity. But even the critics couldn’t put this puzzle together in a coherent way. The pieces didn’t fit to create a whole.”“

In his essay “Identity as Subterfuge”, published in The Psychoanalytic Review in December 2007, by contrast, supplements Bartyzel’s postmodern breakdown viewing it through the lens of psychoanalytic thinkers Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott. Young draws on Klein’s object relations theory to offer that Diane, Betty, Rita, and Laura Harring’s Camilla, are, one person, Diane Selwyn. Young cites the love making scene between Betty and Rita as an illustration of Diane’s narcissism:

“My reading, however, is that the sexual act is masturbatory in nature, by which erotic gratification is a metaphor for self-absorption, a physical attempt at psychological reparation between the true and the false selves. Granted, Betty’s sexual desire is directed toward Rita, but it must be remembered that Rita is an internalized model of Camilla Rhodes, whom Betty desires to become, not necessarily to be with. Therefore, the sexual description is not literal. At the point where Betty and Rita make love, the latter has, at least, superficially, transformed herself into the likeness of the former (via the wig), substantiating the idea that the unfolding act is indeed a solitary one.”

I’ll concede with Seger that a lot of gifted writer/directors, including Lynch (though not in Mulholland Drive, IMO), have fallen prey to cinematic masturbation at some point. But Bartyzel’s and Young’s essays repudiate Seger’s smug pedantry by utilizing the work of postmodern and psychoanalytic thinkers to offer enriching interpretations of Mulholland Drive. Perhaps Seger, who holds a Master’s Degree in Theater from Northwestern University (and a Doctorate in Religious Theology), doesn’t like it because it’s not easy to dissect under the microscope of Aristotlean dramaturgy. There are many ways to interpret Mulholland Drive, and Bartyzel and Young offer only two explanations.

FOR FURTHER READING

Linda Seger, Advanced Screenwriting: Raising Your Writing to the Academy Award Level. pp. 24-32. Silman-James Press, 2003.
J.J. Murphy, Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work. Chapter 10: “Dream Logic and Mulholland Drive, pp. 201-219. Continuum, 2007.
Johnny Young, “Idenity as Subterfuge: A Kleinian and Winnicottian Reading of David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive“. The Psychoanalytic Review, pp. 903-925, December 2007.
The Fansite Lost on Mulholland Drive offers several different interpretations of the film’s narrative.