Indie Film // Current

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"Nashville" and Nashville's Tea Party Convention

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Opinion L.A.

Tea Party: Life imitating art in Nashville
February 7, 2010 | 9:41 am

Am I the only one to notice the coincidence that the Tea Party Convention met in Nashville, which is also the title of a 1975 Robert Altman movie about (among other things) an anti-establishment presidential candidate? Hal Phillip Walker, the standard-bearer of the Replacement Party, would have felt at home last weekend in Nashville.

Walker's populist platform included forbidding lawyers from serving in Congress ("Did you ever ask a lawyer the time of day? He told you how to make a watch, didn't he?"), taking on oil companies, abolishing the Electoral College and eliminating farm subsidies. Some of his positions, such as taxing churches, might not go over so well with some Tea Partiers, but the ethos of his campaign was distinctively populist/outsider. Consider this quote:

"Fellow taxpayers and stockholders in America. On the first Tuesday in November, we have to make some vital decisions about our management. Let me go directly to the point. I'm for doing some replacing. I've discussed the Replacement Party with people all over this country and I'm often confronted with the statement -- 'I don't want to get mixed up in politics,' or 'I'm tired of politics,' or 'I'm not interested.' Almost as often, someone said, 'I can't do anything about it anyway.' Let me point out two things. No. 1: All of us are deeply involved with politics whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. And No. 2: We can do something about it. When you pay more for an automobile than it cost Columbus to make his first voyage to America, that's politics."

Also, he was capable of surreal Sarah Palin-esque rhetoric: "Have you stood on a high and windy hill and heard the acorns drop and roll? Have you walked in the valley beside the brook, walked alone and remembered? Does Christmas smell like oranges to you?"

Was "Nashville" prophetic? You betcha!

.http://cinemascope85.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/nashville.jpg?w=299 Opinion L.A. Tea Party: Life imitating art in... more

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"HOLLYWEED" FINISHED

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HOLLYWEED "FINISHED"

GOOD ENUF ?

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6 days ago

Sundance Post-Mortem - The Village Voice

By Karina Longworth (The Village Voice)

The day before the Sundance Film Festival. I blogged about five films I was looking forward to at the festival. As so often happens at film festival overloaded with premieres, most of the films I was excited to see failed to live up to my expectations, while a number of titles for which I had zero expectations ended up making a much better impression. After the jump, check out the five films that I left Sundance unable to shut up about.

The Imperialists are Still Alive!
I didn't have time to write about Zeina Durra's Dramatic Competition entry during the festival, but I did talk to the director and the film's producer, Vanessa Hope, for my Sundance wrap story, which will be in the LA Weekly this week. I'm glad I let Durra's film sit with me for awhile before attempting to analyze it; while a number of Sundance films faded from memory virtually instantly, Imperialists stays vivid, troubling, seductive.

A subtle socio-political satire set in moneyed, multicultural expat circles in post-9/11 New York, Imperialsists stars Elodie Bouchez as a Paris-born, Middle Eastern mutt artist whose idyllic bourgie day-to-day (and a new romance) are haunted by her very personal connections to bombings in Beirut and terrorist panic in the States. Shot on grainy, gorgeous 16mm, borrowing its title and core ideological ideological inspiration from Godard, and its ironic wit, loose ensemble feel and glossy milieu from Whit Stillman (who has a winking cameo as a nightclub dancer, natch), Imperialists was like nothing else at Sundance this year. While so much press focused on "lost" American auteurs returning to the festival after a long absence (Derek Cianfrance, Debra Granik, even Lisa Cholodenko), they should have been heralding the arrival of Durra, a not-quite-fully-formed but potentially fascinating new talent whose global-minded work makes much of its competition seem positively provincial.

Lovers of Hate
Though Blue Valentine, another Dramatic Competition title about the dissolution of a marriage, got all the accolades (but, notably, left Park City without a jury prize), Brian Poyser's hilarious, unexpectedly suspenseful bizarre love triangle offers the more radical stylistic hybrid. Lovers of Hate puts the sparse means of production and naturalistic feel of mumblecore to the service of a genre film -- physical comedy with a gilding of near-horror -- fueled by the Swiss-watch comic timing of leads Chris Doubek (his nearly-wordless performance in the film's second half is silent-horror perfection) and Alex Karpovsky (between this, Beeswax and Harmony and Me, is swiftly becoming my favorite comic actor...in Austin, at least), and grounded by the bravery and emotional precision of actress Heather Kafka.

Teenage Paparazzo
Leon Gast won the Sundance Best Director jury prize for Smash His Camera, his stodgy, nostalgic portrait of original paparazzo Ron Galella, but the weirder, more relevant paparazzi documentary screened out of competition. Time will tell whether or not TV star Adrian Grenier has any real talent for filmmaking, but his willingness to intellectually interrogate the increasingly symbiotic relationship between celebrities and the media, while physically infiltrating the parts of that machine usually off-limits for a celebrity, lead to an up-to-the-minute understanding of the appeal of the products of paparazzi that Gast's film sorely lacks.

Continued...By Karina Longworth (The Village Voice) The day before the Sundance Film Festival. I blogged about five films I was looking... more