And Another Clown College Graduate Bites the Dust
March 27, 2006 in Broad View Posts
This — how do you say in English? — blogger, right, blogger breaks her self-imposed silence to point out a debacle that validates her long-held suspicions about Morgan “Supercilious Size Me” Spurlock’s not-so-secret hostilities fueling his last adventure in clowndom. Let the record show that his heretofore covert rancor toward the very Americans whose interests he claimed to represent is now out of the bag. Meow.
In other news: My alleged redesign is taking forever and I must disclose that I also have been moonlighting at a publication that supposedly requires qualifications of every sort for every item it dispatches. Reportedly. You may speculate that it is my job to insert said legal loopholes. A source close to the author says you’d be correct.
More soon. And of a less glib, more clear-spoken nature!
Not in My Backyard (The Tenants)
January 31, 2006 in Broad View Posts
Just saw a really miserably half-baked movie, The Tenants. It stars that tall drink of water, Dylan McDermott Mulroney, as a clever friend calls him, and that too-tall drink of water, Snoop Dogg, as two writers eating each other for breakfast in an otherwise-vacated Brooklyn apartment house. Via a blank-faced traffic-in-woman paradigm named Irene. I think. For a minute I thought this film’s one asset was its rather beautiful set design, but even for a low-budget movie, its anachronisms were hard to overlook. (Um, who carried a doggy pooper scooper in early ’70s Red Hook? Who drove a Prius, for that matter?)
Why bother to rant? A critic’s job is to filter crap movies so that those with more honorable occupations don’t have to waste their leisure time. But I just got back from Sundance, where pretty much every American independent dramatic feature was crap. The few ones that didn’t completely shank, like Little Miss Sunshine, were bought and sold before you could utter the words NOT CRAP. Which is the only possible reason why a movie as weak-sister as The Tenants scored distribution besides its bankable stars.
Why have American indies hit such a complete wall? Why are the only good films shown right now coming from overseas? Why are the few American dramas that don’t suck and aren’t completely derivative, like Forty Shades of Blue or anything by Andrew Bujalksi, languishing in unheated art houses in overly rarified cities like NYC or LA while Starsky and His Boyfriend King Kong subsume two screens at every megaplex theater?
Given that so few movies that I see really rock, and given that the marriage of commerce and art is what distracts most of us who in a different era would be burning bras or the Capitol, I’m very curious about who’s buying what — and whom. Look for a series of interviews about distribution here at The Broad View in the months to come. As well as an imminent redesign. And if anyone wants to help me with said redesign, give me a holler. Not, I might add, a holla. Hollas are so 2004. So speaketh this broad.
Huzzah.
Meanwhile, Back at the Ski Lodge
January 30, 2006 in Broad View Posts
AWOL but not, I hope, forgotten. I’ve lately been residing at Flavorpill Sundance, where my partner-in-crime JKG and I have been skiing down the slippery slope of mainstream indie film culture in Parka City 2006. Actually, it’s been insanely fun, so go take a gander. And in the next few weeks expect a revised Broad View, significantly better than ever, but still pink. Mama loves her pink.
Oh, and wish me happy birthday, please. The 35th mark has come and now gone.