ManOnWire Tagged Articles at Cinematical

After time off for good behavior, Indie Roundup returns with an opinionated look at recent news.

Awards. The Cinema Eye Honors seek to recognize "the breadth of the [documentary] genre." Their second annual awards were handed out on Sunday, with James Marsh's superb Man on Wire deservedly taking home prizes for Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking, Production, and Editing. Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir received awards in the International Feature, Direction, and Graphic Design and Animation categories. Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze won the Audience Choice Award and Debut Feature Film honors, while Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World was recognized for Peter Zellner's cinematography. More information on the films is available at the official site of the Cinema Eye Honors.

Deals. IFC Films acquired Alexis Dos Santos' Unmade Beds and plans to make it available via their IFC in Theaters or IFC Festival Direct on demand offerings later this year, according to indieWIRE. Dos Santos previously made Glue, which drove me nuts with its motion-sickness handheld camera work, but his work has won critical acclaim and may, come to think of it, play better on television rather than on a big screen. Heresy, I know. Unmade Beds is described as "an exuberant, warmly romantic film about youth culture."

Adam Wingard's Pop Skull, "a sonic fury of abstracted imagery bathed in menacing splashes of light and sound," has been picked up by Halo-8 Entertainment and will received a limited theatrical release before hitting DVD in July. The description comes courtesy of my friend Collin Armstrong at Twitch. The film follows an Alabama drug addict battling personal demons and, oh yeah, murderous ghosts in his house. We've embedded the trailer below (if you dare).

After the jump: A fashion doc, a film critic, and Gen Art.

400 Screens, 400 Blows is a weekly column that takes an in-depth look at the films playing below the radar, beneath the top ten, and on 400 screens or less.

Every year critics are subjected to who knows how many dozen documentaries; most probably don't bother to see them all, and others will be reluctant to admit that most of them are the same. Oh, the subjects are different. One may be about war in Asia and one will be about war in Europe and another is about politics in the U.S.A., but they're the same in structure and tone and rhythm. We usually get the big three: talking heads, stock footage and photographs, and sometimes some "re-creation footage."

Here are some pointers for future documentarians. 1) Don't do that thing where, if the subject starts crying, you discreetly keep the camera rolling, and then use that footage in the final film. If your cutting is otherwise neat and smooth during the rest of the film, then if you suddenly pause over a weeping shot for the first time, it's annoyingly obvious why you're doing it (see My Architect). 2) If the police or someone else tries to make you turn your camera off, pretend to comply and leave it on. It's very cool and it gets the audience on your side (see Street Fight). 3) No fancy graphics, unless your movie is funny (see Bigger, Stronger, Faster). Animation is still cool -- see Chicago 10 and Waltz with Bashir (208 screens) -- but it could get old, fast, so approach with caution.

Last-ish but not least-ish so far as awarding year-end, um, awards goes, the Online Film Critics Society has decided to honor Wall-E with its top prize, not to mention Best Original Screenplay and Best Animated Feature.

Numbers-wise, The Dark Knight and Let the Right One In co-dominated with four awards each. Christopher Nolan took home Best Director for the former, which also won Best Supporting Actor for Heath Ledger's performance, Best Cinematography and Best Original Score. The latter won Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Foreign Language Film, and both Breakthrough awards -- for director Tomas Alfredson and young actress Lina Leandersson.

It was then The Wrestler with two wins (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress), and one awards each for Wendy and Lucy (Best Actress), Man on Wire (Best Documentary), and Slumdog Millionaire (Best Editing). Truth be told, I'm kind of glad to see the love spread around, although I say that with an already established fondness for most of these films, and even if I wasn't the biggest fan of Wendy and Lucy, I can admit that it got just the award it deserves.

For a lot of movie geeks, it's unnerving when the Oscar nominations are announced and there are films on the list that we haven't seen. (Except for the short-film categories, because no one's seen those.) This happens most regularly with documentaries, which often play only for a week or two at the local art house, if they play there at all.

On Jan. 8-10, Tribeca Cinemas in Manhattan will do its part to help this problem by screening six of the 15 docs that are on the shortlist for the Oscar nomination. The filmmakers, all of whom are alumni of the Tribeca Film Festival, will be on hand to present their work and participate in Q-and-A's. The event is sponsored by the Tribeca Film Institute and Gucci (because when you think of high-quality documentary filmmaking, you think of Gucci).

The films on the schedule are: At the Death House Door (about a prison chaplain who ministers to Death Row inmates), The Garden (about a community garden in South Central L.A.), I.O.U.S.A. (about America's debt problem), Man on Wire (about the crazy French guy who walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers in 1974 -- this will probably win the Oscar), Pray the Devil Back to Hell (about Liberian women bringing peace to their country after years of warlords), and They Killed Sister Dorothy (about the murder of a Catholic nun and social activist in Brazil).

Full details on the screenings are here. If you're in the NYC area, this is a great opportunity not just to see the films (Man on Wire is out on DVD anyway), but to meet the filmmakers. Every now and then, the rest of us get envious of you NYC dwellers. Every now and then.

The Dark Knight
I'm so tempted to just begin and end with The Dark Knight. Even stacked against a myriad of films, this sucker would hold up. In this case, Batman picked the perfect time to slide his way onto DVD shelves -- nothing else comes close to the power of Heath Ledger's Joker surrounded by the likes of Bale, Eckhart, Gyllenhaal, and Oldman. I doubt I need to extol the virtues of this film, so I'll just say: BUY IT, as a single-disc, double-disc, limited edition, or Blu-ray. Click here for all the details.

Horton Hears a Who!
But ... if you want something a bit more family oriented, Horton is the way to go. This new CG feature, based on the classic Dr. Seuss tale, was a stunning collection of famous comedic voices attached -- Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, Carol Burnett, Will Arnett, Seth Rogen, Dan Fogler, Isla Fisher, Jonah Hill and Amy Poehler. Best of all -- it doesn't suck like the Grinch remake or that Cat in the Hat, as Jeffrey M. Anderson reviewed. Buy It on DVD or Blu-ray.

Note: Extreme Movie came out December 5. Do I need to even say: SKIP IT?

There's a reason that us critics tend to hold certain films in excessive regard -- because after seeing hundreds and hundreds of them every year, to champion one or two or a dozen across those fifty-two weeks is a chance to bring attention to something that deserves it, something distinctly non-mediocre and perhaps unconventional.

Dear Zachary: a letter to a son about his father falls into that category. Erik praised it effusively from its Slamdance premiere and beyond; soon joining his ranks would be Monika; and it currently lingers second to only one on my own tentative top ten list for 2008. We get it. According to Rotten Tomatoes, 33 out of 34 critics get it. In fact, it seems like the only ones who don't get it just happen to make up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

With all due respect to my esteemed colleague Elisabeth Rappe, geeks are not the only ones who learned important lessons from watching movies this summer. Herewith is my personal, arthouse summer school summary.

Werner Herzog cast a disapproving eye on the ugliness he discovered at Antarctica's McMurdo Station ("they even have a yoga studio and an ATM!") and was skeptical about the sanity of some of the real-life characters he met, which is partly why Encounters at the End of the World was so entrancing. What I learned: Evidence for gay penguins is skimpy, but they have been known to have threesomes.

The Wackness (pictured) didn't became the breakout hit that some had hoped for, but it did showcase the talents of rising star Olivia Thirlby and director Jonathan Levine. What I learned: Never kiss Ben Kingsley in a telephone booth.

Nanette Burstein's filmmaking techniques were much more off-putting than her ultimately winning subjects in American Teen, another would-be smash that didn't live up to box office expectations. What I learned: Never break up with your girlfriend via text message, especially when a documentary filmmaker is interviewing her.

Unexpectedly, Tell No One became the breakout limited-release mystery thrill ride of the summer, and Man on Wire proved that impassioned high wire walkers can make dreams come true and enthrall audiences to boot. What I learned: It's good to be French.

Now it's your turn, all you indie-loving, doc-devoted, world cinema aficionados: what did you learn from the movies this summer?

Was it good acting, literary source material, or the prospect of a naked beauty that lured people to this weekend's top box office draw? With a $17,000 per-screen average, Isabel Coixet's drama Elegy easily led all comers, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. Despite Christopher Campbell's negative review, the combination of Ben Kingsley, Penélope Cruz, and a Philip Roth novel evidently proved to be irresistible. We'll see what happens when the film expands to 25 markets in two weeks.

Another film that resonated well in New York, Steven Sebring's doc Patti Smith: Dream of Life, took home $8,080 from its sole Gotham engagement, while wine lovers pushed period comedy / drama Bottle Shock to a per-screen average of $6,145 at 48 locations. The presence of Toby Keith did not scare up very many beer drinkers to come see his comedy / adventure Beer for My Horses, which opened at 91 locales to the tune of $2,483 per screen.

Among the holdovers, immigration drama Frozen River ($8,071 per screen, 7 theaters, 2nd week of release) and adult thriller Transsiberian ($5,192 per screen, 14 theaters, 4th week) did well.

Three other films expanded notably, with predictably mixed results. Wildly acclaimed doc Man on Wire stretched beyond Manhattan into 59 theaters and earned a healthy $4,576 per screen average. In its third week of release, the slick doc American Teen pushed into 76 theaters but could muster only $1,802 at each location. Its expansion will still continue into the Top 60 markets this Friday, per Variety. Period romantic drama Brideshead Revisited unwound into 349 theaters and made $3,034 per screen, giving it a total of $3.3 million in three weeks.

It wasn't that long ago that documentaries carried the stigma of being educational first and entertaining second. As with foreign-language fare, an audience for them lingered on the fringe, and an industry was willing to offer them their very own awards, but they really weren't terribly high-profile box-office prospects... that is, until the '04-'05 summer successes of Fahrenheit 9/11 and March of the Penguins made it seem perfectly okay for audiences to see, and for studios to market, a film without so much as one measly explosion in it.

But then along comes American Teen: a film openly marketed as - and arugably assembled to be - anything but a documentary that finds itself underperforming in its current limited runs (it goes wide this Friday). Last May, I witnessed a group of young women leaving whatever indie they caught at Washington D.C's Landmark E Street Cinema as they approached the film's poster and wondered aloud if someone was remaking The Breakfast Club, with a tone that suggested neither horror nor concern, nor any great interest in the big, fat what-if scenario placed before them.

What I wonder now is, at what point did we begin to craft documentary filmmaking specifically to the masses, and then what happens when the masses simply don't show?

While The Dark Knight battled The Mummy on the mainstream charts, indie fans enjoyed much cooler movies. In its third week of release, Brad Anderson's Transsiberian continued its strong run, raking in $15,100 per-screen at the two locations where it's playing, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. The film has grossed $125,000 so far. Also set in a cold clime, Frozen River, Courtney Hunt's "single mother smuggles illegal immigrants" drama, took in $10,471 per screen at seven locations on its opening weekend.

Two other debuting indies had decent results: black and white romantic comedy In Search of a Midnight Kiss made $7,300 at the two theaters where it opened and British comedy Sixty-Six scored $5,700 per-screen at its two engagements. No figures were reported to Box Office Mojo for documentary America the Beautiful or for Japanese melodrama Love and Honor.

indieWIRE highlights the success of holdover Man on Wire, James Marsh's completely charming and suspenseful doc, which earned $12,500 per screen at four locations. They also point to the returns of two films in their second week of release: period drama Brideshead Revisited ($5,284 per screen at 94 theaters) and high school doc American Teen ("a rather disappointing" $4,487 per screen at 39 locations). I saw the former on Sunday afternoon (packed, people lined up for the next screening) and the latter on Saturday afternoon (maybe 15-20 people). Different crowds, definitely, but Brideshead Revisited is much more likely to gain as it opens further.