Thom Andersen's 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself is not out on DVD yet but you can check out this clip of how houses in LA have been portrayed on film. Funny how the light, hillside emptiness seems to add to the cliche that LA is indeed a vacuous place for props of evil antagonist.

Note the final scene in the clip from Lethal Weapon. For those of us on the flat lands, it's what we sometimes secretly, ashamedly pray for.

Now this is a film festival I can get behind. Folks outside the American South call them 'hominy' but I have lovingly known them as grits since I was 2 years old. Plus, this sounds like a really fun festival that indie filmmakers have a good chance of getting in and getting their work seen (and judged!)

Go here to check out the details.

It has been stewing in my brain lately that literature-my first love- and film- a close second- are beginning to lose their power, for lack of a better word, in my life. The writer at N + 1, commenting on Roberto Bolano's new novel 2666 seems to lean his horse shoe right against the stake

In Bolaño, literature is a helpless, undignified, and not especially pleasant compulsion, like smoking. At one point you started and now you can't stop; it's become a habit and an identity. Nothing is so consistent across Bolaño's work as the suspicion that literature is chiefly bullshit, rationalizing the misery, delusions, and/or narcissism of various careerists, flakes, and losers. Yet Bolaño somehow also treats literature as his and his characters' sole excuse for existing. This basic Bolaño aporia—literature is all that matters, literature doesn't matter at all—can be a glib paradox for others. He seems to have meant it sincerely, even desperately, something one would feel without knowing the first thing about his life.

Bolaño's incoherence—books mean everything and nothing; the writer is hero and jerk—has come to seem one of the few plausible literary attitudes these days. Considered simply as a job, writing is erratically paid but with flexible hours: potentially not so bad, especially with the hedge funds laying everybody off. But as a vocation? Look around, and all you see is literature and publishing faltering in tandem. People read less and less; worse yet, they're right to. It's clear that, besides the occasional small or large check, most writers—ourselves included—write out of vanity and compulsion. One believes in being a writer more, it seems, than in writing. What is it, again, you once had to say? And who, supposedly, wanted to hear it?

I know, I know there are still really talented artist producing work that hungry readers and film goers are eager to experience. And they will continue to until the cows come home. I'm just saying that for some of us the cows are just about to nod off.

Folks, I hope this year will be more fortunate than its predecessor in each and every way. I hope all your creative efforts come to fruition and your inspiration is right on time. May cynicism be kept to a healthy rattle and nihilism completly eradicated.

May your day jobs continue (if you need them to) and may other revenue streams grow more and more.

In short, Happy New Year!

SE poses what I think is the question at the heart of the DIY low-budget filmmaking here in the USA by way of the film industry in Nigeria or "Nollywood."

...most Nollywood movies are made for less than $10,000 (the price of many DIY/ultra-low budget/real indies in the US - $10K or less) and they are popular with ordinary people (as opposed to the art/foreign/indie film loving subculture). Can we duplicate this in the US? Can we make low budget indie movies that appeal to the "ordinary" person?

Check out this energy-filled trailer to Nollywood Babylon.

Cold and wet around the Southland but it could be worse of course. LC will stay around the City of Angels wrapped in a parka juggling the despair of being with It's a wonderful life.

Ending wish/rally/blurt for 2008 is a mangled quote from Franz Kafka: "When it comes down to you or reality, bet on..reality."

Folks, have a wonderful Christmas, etc., etc.

The first nine minutes of Sujewa Ekanayake's doc "Indie Film Blog Road Trip" in now on-line for your viewing pleasure. Sujewa  explores the synergy of blogging about indie film and/or making films through interviews with some pretty cool names- Anthony Kaufman, Chuck Tryon, Tambay Obenson - just to name a few.

This is so cool because you get to put a face to the blogs you read and hear about ,musings where this whole thing might be going, and tons of other topics as well. Back to the editing bay, SE, so we can enjoy the rest!

 "The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with the birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes."

As 2008 draws to a thankful close (and don't come back again!) some folks are musing aloud about the state of the business of filmed entertainment. Does 'reality' programming make good financial sense? Will Ponzi schemes (illegal and legal) affect Hollywood capital? How long will this internet youtube thing really last?

Questions like these not only keep Executives up at night but also the manufactuers of sleep aids in the black of healthy profits.

But I would rather light a candle than curse their darkness.

I propose-no matter how hard or worn-out the cliche is- that execs and creative personnel concentrate on damn good stories and writing from the get-go. Force-feed the kids if necessary, dammit. Otherwise, when you keep feeding people junk- I hesitate to use the word "food" here- matter' is more to the point- like the gems from "The Love Guru" below, then you are really just relying on the audience's desire to escape into a dark, smelly theater or a depressed, shuttered living room with a cheap flatscreen and regionless DVD as their only companions, as opposed to being genuinely entertained.

Rajneesh: [answering cell phone] This is Chip from Dell Computers...

Guru Pitka: If your Uncle Jack helped you off an elephant, would you help your Uncle Jack off an elephant?

Jacques Grande: Don't look at me with that tone of voice or I will punch you in the shirt!

Guru Pitka: Give me a pound. Lock it down. Break the pickle. Tickle, Tickle!

Not a very good business model.

Because this is one I can understand deep in the marrow of me bones, I could not resist passing along this Defamer sighting of our favorite boozer, world savior, waterboarder, Kiefer Sutherland  out and about on the town. Hopefully, he was not driving.

"This was my first Kiefer sighting, and as such, lived up to everything I had ever dreamed it would be. He was sloshed, and making loving, physically affectionate small talk with a young couple. (The girl was cute, and had a mohawk. The guy was nondescript.) At one point he was talking so kind of—oratorially—we really had no option but to stop our conversation and take it all in. We have no idea what he was saying—but not because it was too loud. We just couldn't understand what it was he was saying.

Screenwriters could not hope for a better Christmas present than having their projects picked by Sundance Screenwriters Lab for next months intense work with pros and industry folks. What kind of projects did they go for?

Here are the annoited 12

2009 January Screenwriters Lab Fellows and Projects:

Benh Zeitlin (co-writer/director) and Lucy Alibar (co-writer) "Beasts of the Southern Wild": In this epic comedy set on the crumbling grounds of the Louisiana delta, a 10-year-old girl desperately tries to hold on to whatever love is left for her despite the imminent death of her father and in defiance of the impending Apocalypse.

Kirill Mikahnovsky (writer/director) "Fuga Mortis" (U.S.A./Russia): In modern-day Havana, a city where everything is for sale, an adolescent hustler is willing to beg, steal, or do just about anything else to get his sister off the streets.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (co-writers/co-directors) "Howl" (U.S.A.): A hybrid feature about the creation of the ground-breaking poem by Allen Ginsberg and the resulting 1957 obscenity trial--an opening volley in the coming "culture wars."

Mishna Wolff (writer) "I'm Down" (U.S.A.): Adapted from Wolff's memoir, I'M DOWN tells the story of a white girl living in a black community who strives to be cool enough to hang with her white but very "down" father.

Sally El Hosaini (writer/director) "My Brother Is The Devil" (U.K./Egypt): Two brothers must face their prejudices head on if they are to survive the perils of being young, Arab, British, and Muslim on the streets of gangland, post-9/11 London.

Alejandro Landes (writer/director) "Porfirio" (Brazil/Ecuador): After years of futile waiting for his pension, a Colombian man confined to a wheelchair hijacks a place with his unwitting teenage son in an effort to draw the attention of the President to his plight.

Andrew Okpeaha MacLean (writer/director) "On The Ice" (U.S.A.): In the remote arctic village of Barrow, Alaska, a young Iniut man tries to help his best friend get away with a murder.

Carlos Contreras (writer/director) "On Speaking Terms" (Mexico): The existence of a rare indigenous language is threatened with extinction when the last two practitioners have a fight and refuse to speak to one another.

Todd Rohal (writer/director) "Scoutmasters" (U.S.A.): When a well-meaning but immature Scouting Leader kidnaps his adopted Sudanese nephew to indoctrinate him into the joys of scouting, his good intentions are quickly thwarted as he leads his troop down a darkly comic road of chaos, death, and destruction.

Ritesh Batra (writer/director) "The Story of Ram" (U.S.A./India): A chance encounter over the radio waves leads to an extraordinary friendship between the Prime Minister of India and an ordinary tea vendor.

Elgin James (writer) "Untitled Elgin James Project" (U.S.A.): A homeless teenager on the streets of Boston gathers a crew of throw-away kids to battle drug dealers and inner city gangs with a pact to help the less fortunate.

Avi Zev Weider (writer/director) "Zeroes and Ones" (U.S.A): In creating an intelligent machine out of discarded computer parts, a young woman completes her grandmother's fractured story of survival at Auschwitz and emerges from her own secluded life.

 via Indiewire

This.

It is not for nothing that in weird times, one might turn to French farce to make sense of it all. if you love the films of Tati, then the translation of The Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint's comic novel "Camera" is right up your alley

Not much happens in “Camera.” The hero takes driving lessons, falls in love, goes on a desultory journey. Who, then, is the opponent, the examiner, the rule-­setter? Why, reality itself. In the first of several almost perfectly paced passages in which he ­waxes philosophical, the hero muses that “in my struggle with reality, I could exhaust any opponent with whom I was grappling, like one can wear out an olive, for example, before successfully stabbing it with a fork.”

This will become a film, mark me words. Tom McCarthy reviews the novel for the NYTS.

To me, this films-and oh, so many more- are much more fun to write about than actually see but you might feel differently. Here is the lovely and talented film journo and scholar Karina Longworth on the liner notes for the DVD release of Frank V. Ross' Hohokam

As Ross himself told ShortEnd Magazine, 'Plot is a dead end. Morals are a dead end. Themes are a dead end. Everything is a dead end but the characters.' With his HD camera trained on capturing the minute details of his actors' naturalistic behavior (and the almost surrealy bland suburban landscape which contains them) as unobtrusively as possible, Ross drops us into the lives of this 30-ish, working-class couple, stays a few days until his characters come to a natural catharsis point, and then pops right out again. That we forget that what we're watching is fiction and assume these lives go on without us is evidence enough that, when it comes to avoiding 'dead ends', Ross is on to something."

(December 9, 2008)  The Journal of Short Film released Volume 13 (Fall 2008) today.  The JSF is a quarterly DVD that, to date, has published over 140 filmmakers from 12 countries.  With its thirteenth volume, the JSF has officially come of age. Its place as one of the greatest repositories of short films has been assured.

My friend Paul is one of the few people I know who can call himself a World Traveler with a straight face (or in my circle, a sober face as many chums 'travel without moving' if you know what I mean) He is about to go as far down on the planet as I believe one can

This is my third and final night here and I'm sitting in the lobby of the hotel at 10:30 in the evening looking out at the snowcapped mountains in the background of Ushuaia. I am filled with anticipation as tomorrow I embark on my 9 day trip to Antarctica. Since being here I've had the opportunity to talk to a few people who have just returned from the "White Continent". They have all raved about their experiences and have told me I will have a fantastic time --- "just bring some sea sickness medicine" they said. So along with all the cold weather clothing I have packed I stopped into a pharmacy today to get just that. This will be it for a while as I'll be out of reach, so check back in about 10 days for loads of pictures of icebergs, glaciers, penguins, sea lions, and some whales amongst other things.

Go to his travel blog Phileus Phogg and live vacariously through his written and  stunning visual posts.

This one, sadly like much of Paul Schrader's work these days, has slipped under the radar despite being a story about the holocaust or more accurately, what happnes to a clown afer his whole family is wiped out. Here is Schrader on the challenges of  trying to adapt excellent books to the screen

I'm a huge fan of Yoram's book, so I have to preface all my remarks by saying that we made a very good adaptation in this film, but we cannot approach the greatness of the book. The greatness of the book is defined by its literary quality, by its words. When a book is really a literary masterpiece, rather than a narrative masterpiece, you can never quite do it justice, because it is what it is. You are never really going to do The Sound and the Fury or Lolita. You can get pretty close, but you can't really nail a book whose very language is its greatness. The reason that Philip Roth's books have failed to make good films is because he writes about despicable characters who are redeemed by language. When you translate them into film, you have despicable characters, but you don't have language.

(Read the whole interview at Greencine.)

Filed under 'why didn't I think of that?' I might even submit a spec script for Part II to the genius producers.

Sample Pitch for sequel: "Thai toughs follow Bandy from Thailand to Cleveland, OH where she has found work hosting a local karioke. Having lost the precious mojo that she learned in the streets of Cowboy Soi, who should arrive in the bar to help her find it but an alcoholic burnt-out Mr. Miyagi."