Ray Pride

Urban legend holds that a pirated DVD in China that says "For Your Consideration" fetches a few more renminbi at the night market than one that's crystal clear. (We're still talking only about a matter of a few cents.)

More piracy: Among the agreeably provocative filmmakers I recently encountered at a European documentary festival was one who allowed during an informal afternoon wine-and-cheese discussion that of the five filmmakers having a smoke at the front of the room, he'd been able to download complete copies of three of their festival-circuit babies which, supposedly, ought still be virgins. (He also cited a friend whose feature had played at a Chinese festival without the director's knowledge; someone had told him he'd seen it in a medium-sized city, much to the filmmakers' surprise; the group was showing it off of a bootlegged copy of a DVD screener provided to a programmer at another festival.)

Trend-spotting seems a fruitless venture these days, reminding me of an ancient children's story, German, if memory serves, very aggravating and repetitive, about a bear that wants to climb a mountain, he wants to climb a mountain to see what he can see. And when the bear gets to the top of the mountain, what does he see? The other side of the mountain. Or, to jump the rails only one more time, and to make a more adult metaphor, let us recollect Dorothy Parker's slightly inebriate reaction to her entrance into a discomfortingly disappointing cocktail party: "What fresh hell is this?" (Which also happens to be a line pirated shamelessly by screenwriter Michael Leeson for Kathleen Turner in "The War of the Roses.")

If you're thirty, you've likely seen all the variations. You know how stories are told, how stories are told badly or well. Why do we keep watching? The answer is, many people don't. Or patterns change. And the film/DVD/cable industry is always a few steps behind figuring out a fresh master plan, and everyone's concerned the film industry will go the way of the record industry: free to everyone but its creators.

Technology permits this kind of data promiscuity, as well as encouraging all manner of mash-ups: Quentin Tarantino continues his magpie pillage with this weekend's "Grindhouse" (shown to Chicago critics after Newcity went to press), and you wonder why his elbows don't snap off from forming all the quotation marks around almost every line and every shot of his work to date. ("Grindhouse" we can talk about next week.)

Among the movies that were previewed in time for reviewers, the septuagenarian socialist Ken Loach's "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" (pictured; see Tip of the Week), a gorgeously shot, politically contrary story revising British versions of Irish history. "Wind" joins a lovingly curated batch of movies marketed by IFC under their "First Take" series, which I've described when Mark Cuban's seemingly stalled HDNet venture burbled out Steven Soderbergh's "Bubble." Prior titles include Caveh Zahedi's self-lacerating essay film, "I Am A Sex Addict," and Hou Hsaio-Hsien's limpid yet opaque beauty "Three Times," and upcoming are Lars von Trier's latest, "The Boss of It All," and Julia Loktev's masterful "Day Night Day Night," a taut, austere drama about a young female would-be suicide bomber's preparations, with brilliant cinematography and sound design. These are the kinds of movies that need to persist if "art" is to remain in the cinematic universe alongside the commercial, but how do you make even the smallest amount of money in this jaded, over-informed, under-analyzed culture? (Besides, without these examples, where would Hollywood lift those cool camera moves and post-narrative niceties?)

What's the First Take trick? While the movies open in a few cities during the theatrical run, at the Music Box or Siskel, say, they're also available as video-on-demand from Comcast all across the country, in even their smallest markets, day-and-date with the New York City release. (Then they wind up released on DVD by Genius Products with a Weinstein Company logo preceding a bevy of trailers.) The hands and minds behind IFC seem to be developing the most workable of various models to make smaller movies or foreign-language films accessible, the titles that alternative weeklies have always championed and are sometimes called "specialty" or "art house" titles.

Meanwhile, former mogul Michael Eisner, king of the House of Mouse for decades, is pimping "webisodes" or "mobilogs" or "indifferent crap" for a series of shorts called "Prom Queen," a serialized soap opera that apparently appropriates the conceits behind the Lonelygirl15 trendlet; hello, MySpace and Verizon Wireless. I mean, honestly, isn't that one of the most embarrassing things you've ever heard an idle multimillionaire do with all the time and money on his hands?

Are we entertained yet? Does anyone who's "non-pro" (to use the charming Variety-speak for those not "in" the industry) have the breath to even care? I just have a couple of hours to decide how much caffeine I should (or shouldn't) ingest before the 191 minutes of Rodriguez-Tarantino zombie-love and hot-rod foot fetishism. Is there life after opening weekend? The subject's not going to go away, but many kinds of movies probably will. Should they?

(2007-04-03)

Also by Ray Pride

Blair Witch Hunt
There are a couple of techniques put to impeccable use in the largely first-person "The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair" which fall outside of traditional boundaries of "documentary," which, of course, is why documentaries fascinate today: the willingness to be frisky, the imperative to be personal and to personalize
(2007-03-27)

Tip of the Week
Producer-director-editor Philip Gröning's "Into Great Silence," a humble 162-minute documentary about a silent order of monks in the French Alps' Grand Chartreuse monastery--shot without crew or lighting--is long, but, as you would expect, meditative
(2007-03-27)

The Mourning After
Earnest research and many conversations resulted in "Reign Over Me," the powerful Adam Sandler-starring drama about a widower unable to forget the loss of his family
(2007-03-20)

Tip of the Week
Perversely inconsequential, the unlikely, knowing anecdote "Colour Me Kubrick" is a delight, with an unlikely John Malkovich impersonating Alan Conway, a dissolute bounder of a low order who gamboled shamelessly about London in the 1990s, pretending to be the elusive Stanley Kubrick
(2007-03-20)

Moving Pictures
(2007-03-13)

Tip of the Week
(2007-03-13)

Tip of the Week
(2007-03-06)

Killer Looks
(2007-03-06)

Young American
(2007-02-27)

Euro Bash
(2007-02-27)

Tip of the Week
(2007-02-27)

Tip of the Week
(2007-02-20)

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