INDIEFEST08—Stuck

Stuck is a thrillingly outrageous howler. Its IndieFest audience was yelling at the screen even as they were laughing and shouting, "Bravo!" This under-the-radar thriller came highly recommended by David D'Arcy when we swapped tips at the Toronto International. D'Arcy wrote it up for The Greencine Daily as "a dark tale of an accident gone awry—if that's not a conceptual oxymoron." Twitch teammate Andrew Mack likewise praised how director, Stuart Gordon, took a "horrible story of inhumanity" and "turned it into an excruciatingly funny and dark film that surprises as much as it shocks." Mack concluded: "Car crashes should never be this entertaining but thank god this one was."

Blake Etheridge prefaced his Twitch interview with Gordon, scriptwriter John Strysik, and actress Mena Suvari with a detailed synopsis of the real-life atrocity on which Strysik based the film's script.

Variety's Joe Leydon likewise caught Stuck at Toronto's Midnight Madness and described it as "ingeniously nasty and often shockingly funny as it incrementally worsens a very bad situation, then provides a potent payoff with the forced feeding of just desserts." He characterized the film's violence as "more unsettling and most hilarious" precisely for being emotional, not physical, as Suvari's character Brandi "gradually reveals the full measure of her sociopathic selfishness." That reveal is an "excellent counterpoint" to Stephen Rea's "pitch perfect performance" as he gradually recognizes and faces the dark force of her selfish inhumanity. As Leydon writes, Rea's performance as Tom suggests "the best hope for a loser is to be placed in a situation where you have absolutely nothing left to lose." Being placed in that situation is exactly the horror in this piece where the monster, as Film Experience identifies, is "towering self-involvement."

The perfectly-pitched performances of the film's ensemble coupled with Gordon's astute choices of where to accent the inhumanity with humor secures Stuck's winning affront. It's a sleazy little gem with a B-flick kick. Mena Suvari—who boldly forsakes the rose petals of American Beauty for the sharpest of thorns while "donning cornrows for a certain white-trash edge" (Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club)—comes off as vulnerable, confused and frightened as this crisis begins and only gradually shatters the audience's trust as she reveals herself as a ruthless creature of self-interest.

Russell Hornsby, as her strutting dealer boyfriend Rashid, delivers a comic turn channeling—as Mack wryly observes—"the cowardly lion from The Wizard of Oz."

Stephen Rea is the woeful everyman in Gordon's cautionary tale of choice. Down on his luck, skirting the gravitational pull of homelessness, he is repeatedly offered dead-end options in the guise of choice. Throughout the film and within the subsidiary performances, each individual has the moment of choice when they can be humane or not—whether the landlord ransoming belongings for rent, the social service worker using a malfunctioning computer as an exclusionary fence, the policeman patrolling "public" space, Latino neighbors unwilling to help or become involved for fear of deportation, or Brandi and Rashid gripping a victim's life in their inept hands—Gordon etches the horror of the wrong choice or—as David D'arcy wraps it—"There are always plenty of reasons for doing the wrong thing, and the wrong thing drives this movie." But not only. Gordon balances his caution with the compassionate generosity of a homeless stranger and a small child offering his hand at film's end. This is a horrific film to watch; but, not necessarily a bleak one and that's the film's redeeming strength. As much as it details man's inhumanity to man, it reminds of the capacity to do the right thing.

If you missed its scheduled screenings, IndieFest has added one more at the Roxie Film Center on Thursday, February 21, 9:30PM and you would be woefully remiss to not catch it.

Cross-published at Twitch.

SXSW08—Medicine for Melancholy

The first thing you notice right off in Barry Jenkins' debut feature Medicine for Melancholy is its color palette, skillfully enunciated by cinematographer James Laxton. The film—part of the Emerging Visions lineup at this year's SXSW—looks like it was shot in black and white and tinted by hand. Whether or not Jenkins and Laxton intended this to parallel how the color can be taken out of a person of color through the compromise of assimilation and the coercion of gentrification is anyone's guess; but, that's how I read it. Once you've adjusted your eyes to the bright, leaching light, you're introduced to two Black characters—Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo (Tracey Heggins)—who straightaway thwart preconceptions of how young urban African-Americans are supposed to both look and act. "Supposed to" is the qualifying determinant here in this desultory study of the desire for and the desire through identity.

The film borrows its title from Ray Bradbury's novel and its modus operandi from a Bradbury quote: "Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning—just follow him or her all day." Monitoring what two young Black people do on a Sunday afternoon/evening in San Francisco, California after a drunken one-night stand the night before is exactly the film's narrative trajectory. What you find is what Micah and Jo do on a Sunday afternoon as they warily approach a melancholy malaise within themselves not fully recognized nor articulated.

What remains to be understood is precisely the selfsame challenge posed to the film's audience. Whether the film's meandering mode will engage audiences enough to pay attention to the subtle thematic traction underscoring its casual demeanor is the crucial pivot; but, whether it succeeds or fails, I must commend those themes and hope audiences will take the time to feel them out and to think them through.

What is a "Black" person? What do they look like? What do they act like? What kind of music do you associate with them? What part of the city do they live in? What are your presumptions about them? What are your expectations? And why—if you are not Black—should it matter to you? Is it perhaps as Robert F. Reid-Pharr has written in his assessment of Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman that a predetermined conception of Blacks "has come to lend a certain type of ontological stability to all American identities"? And if two African-American characters are introduced who do not match stereotypes does it induce a kind of vertigo? If say, both are civilized young people compromised by a sense of social displacement, do the forces that create that social displacement appear less than civilized?

It's a good question, especially situated in San Francisco, where Jenkins has thoughtfully overlaid demographic pie charts on the spokes of bicycle wheels. He informs that urban African American populations in Atlanta total 59%; in Chicago 37%; in New York 28%; and in San Francisco a shrinking 7%. What is a young urban African American to do when they find themselves in a sea of white identities purposely forcing them out of a beautiful city like San Francisco? With the memory of what the Redevelopment Agency recently did to the Fillmore District barely mollified, current events in South Beach reveal the same forces at work, even as an initiative to make rent control illegal in California is being crafted for the next election. If rent control is repealed, what will happen to San Francisco's ethnic (and—by extension—creative) diversity? Good questions indeed. Rendered through the scale of a human interaction, Medicine for Melancholy reveals the potential collateral damage. Is there really an appropriate medicine for such melancholy?

Cross-published on Twitch.

03/10/08 UPDATE: The San Francisco Film Society recently announced that Medicine for Melancholy will be one of four films screened at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival as part of their Spotlight: Cinema By the Bay program. Congratulations, Barry!

CHINESE CINEMA: Fujian Blue (Jin Bi Hui Huang)

This review was initially written for the catalog for the upcoming San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Due to censorship issues in China, the film was pulled from the festival line-up. Never one to waste a written word, however, I offer it here at The Evening Class.

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First-time director Robin Weng's Fujian Blue is an unflinching depiction of the effect of globalization on China's southeastern Fujian province, a departure point for Chinese seeking their fortune overseas, and consequently a notorious hub of illegal emigration and human trafficking. The film delivers an absorbing indictment of the lure of Western materialism on the current generation of Chinese youth and its corrosive impact on family cohesion.

Turning his lens on three cities in particular—Fuqing, Changle and Pintang—and casting non-actors, Weng achieves a naturalism in detail that borders on investigative documentary. The well-publicized deaths of illegal Fujianese workers in Morecambe adds haunting gravity to Weng's bifurcated but interwoven tales of young people from the embattled Fujian province pressured to come to terms with New World economics.

The first story "Neon Knights" details how fankepo—"remittance widows"—are preyed upon by a gang of kalu, local lovers who maneuver wealthy lonely women into cheating on their husbands working overseas. Once compromised, the women are blackmailed and extorted. The gang's pseudo-leader, aptly-named Amerika, turns his gang on his own philandering mother without realizing her connections to the Fujianese underworld. The second story "At home, At sea" follows the ill-gotten money to Pintang where Amerika's friend Dragon chooses to use it to save his family from debt incurred sending an older brother to England. The cycles of sacrifice become compounded, however, when Dragon's plans go awry.

Fujian Blue, a co-winner of the Vancouver International Film Festival's "Dragons and Tigers Award" for independent Asian cinema, marks a notable debut from one of China's new wave.

Can Paranormal Activity Be Seen?

The question entitling this entry is purposely loaded. Sure it could be approached ontologically; but, for my immediate purposes, it's simply pragmatic, if not litigious. Apparently, one of the first conditions of the deal director Oren Peli struck with DreamWorks—who purchased domestic and remake rights of Paranormal Activity at Slamdance—is that Peli's original is to have no further exhibition, including the two Bay Area festivals where it was scheduled to play: San Francisco's IndieFest and San Jose's Cinequest.

Jens Michael Hussey, Director of Public Relations for Cinequest comments: "It's always disappointing when a film gets pulled from the lineup for whatever reason, but that's part of being a festival and part of the process for films to come out of the gate and get noticed and purchased. Our mission is to get these films to their audience and sometimes that entails a scenario that's not a first choice for us but is good for the filmmaker. If the filmmakers felt this was the deal they wanted to sign then ultimately we understand that and we certainly abide by the legal restrictions that ensue. It's our policy to ONLY show films we have a legal right to exhibit."

Jeff Ross, Director of San Francisco's IndieFest, declined to comment.

DreamWorks representative Chip Sullivan offered: "It's not that we don't want anybody to see Paranormal Activity; but, the reason filmmakers go to film festivals is to sell their films. Once we bought it and now that we own it, we have to think of a strategy of what exactly we're doing about the remake and all that. We could keep showing it but we have no vested interest in having it be shown until we determine internally what we're doing with the movie. That's sort of typical of all films that go to film festivals; once it's sold, it's off. These films that don't have a distributor; once the distributor picks it up, the game's over." Though Sullivan couldn't confirm whether Peli would or would not be tapped to direct the remake or whether the original version would find its way to DVD, he stressed how excited Dreamworks is to have the property and that only time will tell the particulars of the distribution.

The Bay Area festival cancellations are only the most recent events of interest surrounding Israeli émigré Oren Peli's effectively creepy lo-fi supernatural thriller. Paranormal Activity screened at last October's Screamfest, where it won an award and received a rave review from Dread Central's Debi Moore who was impressed with the film's palpable sense of dread. "I'd bet cash money," Moore wrote, "nobody can watch the entire thing without saying at least three or four times, 'That's some fucked up shit.' Or, more accurately, 'That's some seriously fucked up shit.' " Though originally she was just about to write Paranormal Activity off as "another entry in the long line of pseudo cinéma vérité rubbish we've been subjected to during these last several post-Blair Witch years", Moore found herself drawn into the film's microbudgeted scare tactics.

It's true that since The Blair Witch Project, the "found footage" trope has been used almost to death. Though not quite a "fake documentary" and not humorous enough to be a "mockumentary", Paranormal Activity sifts what is frightening from ordinary events and effectively does so through documentary direct cinema strategies. The film starts out claiming that the footage has been obtained through surviving family members. Interestingly enough, in his interview with Dread Central, director Peli posed as if the footage—allegedly shot over the course of three weeks in September and October of 2006—was truly "found" and authentic and that the "record" of the paranormal activity was edited into his feature length presentation. Clearly this is a promotional ruse that Dreamworks will not be able to employ.

Where Paranormal Activity breaks out ahead of Sci Fi Channel's ubiquitously programmed Ghost Hunters and International Ghost Hunters is that it's paced naturalistically, the dread is timelapsed incrementally, and most of what happens occurs while the protagonists Kate and Micah are asleep. Whereas the handheld camera was used to question the ethics of media reportage and redaction in Brian dePalma's eponymous Redacted—as it was in George Romero's Diary of the Dead—and whereas along with those two films Cloverfield sought a sense of immediacy and presence through vérité effects (while sacrificing reality to its special effects), Paranormal Activity emphasizes naturalism, capturing when the natural shifts into the supernatural, and the ordinary into the extraordinary, cognizant that the anticipation of that moment is the gist of dread. All it takes is for a door to move or a blanket to shift or a shadow to cross a threshhold to make the hairs raise on your arms and neck.

Paranormal Activity approached Slamdance poised for purchase, having been trimmed and tightened by Paramount-based producers Jason Blum and Steven Jay Schneider, who caught Paranormal Activity on a screener and—as Variety's Anne Thompson details—responded to its "intimate fear." It's their success story that Paranormal Activity was seen and picked up by Dreamworks.

So where does that leave San Francisco's festival audiences? Disappointingly—other than for the trailer up (momentarily?) at the film's website—they won't be (legally) seeing Paranormal Activity anytime soon.

Cross-published on Twitch.

INDIEFEST08: POP SKULL—The Evening Class Interview With Producers Peter and E.L. Katz

I'm not sure which was more disturbing: catching Adam Wingard's Pop Skull at SF IndieFest or hooking up with the film's producers for a luncheon interview in San Francisco's notorious Tenderloin. I braced myself and hooked up with brothers Peter and Evan Katz at AR Roi Noodles where duck noodle soup calmed my fears. Peter produced, and Evan produced, co-wrote, and starred as one of the bloody ghosts in the film.

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Michael Guillén: My Twitch colleague Todd Brown caught Pop Skull at the 2007 AFI Fest and cited it as "a textbook example of what you can do on a budget if you're smart enough"; that "budget" being $2,000, which Todd likewise noted "wouldn't buy the coffee on a typical Hollywood movie." Did you tell yourselves, "Okay, we have $2,000. Let's make a movie!" Was that a budget you graphed out at the outset?

Evan L. Katz: We got our equipment rentals for free. We didn't expect to have anything. We weren't paying anybody. The $2,000 was just gas. We didn't break down, "This is how much we're going to spend." We were naïve. We thought, "We won't spend anything. We're just going to make this movie basically throwing a couple of bucks here and there." We wanted to make a go at that. $2,000—even that—was more than we thought we were going to spend.

Guillén: So you had free equipment, free labor….

Peter Katz: And our director's amazing. Adam Wingard knows how to do almost all the technical aspects of the shooting, the editing, the lighting; he's really talented. He's like a tech guy but he also directs it.

Guillén: So you saved costs because you had a director who knew what he was doing; you had unknown actors who delivered nuanced performances; and yet the movie looks like you've poured a lot more than $2,000 into it. The stroboscopic special effects alone are accomplished.

Evan L. Katz: All that stuff Adam did sitting at his laptop for months on end, piecing it together frame by frame. If we had hired an editor to do that in post and said, "This is what we want and this is what we're envisioning", to get that right we would have probably had to pay that guy a fortune. But Adam's a perfectionist and he would sit there and go through it. He labored through all this footage. We shot so many hours of footage, we could have made four movies. He really had to fashion it with some kind of cohesive narrative. There were a lot of options.

Peter Katz: Adam explores it. He keeps the camera rolling. He explores the scene from all the different possibilities. He says as a director shooting on video it's silly to cut cut cut; it's not like it's film that costs tons of money per minute. He shoots on video and he keeps it going and then—when he goes through the video tapes in the editing room—he has a million choices.

Guillén: In your role as producers, what was your strategic involvement? You got the film into AFI, which was a great move, and then you went to Rome with it?

Peter Katz: Yes, we went to Rome with it. It's in Berlin right now being marketed in their film market by Wild Bunch who is selling our movie.

Evan L. Katz: The strategy from the beginning was that we realized with a movie this small we needed to align ourselves with the right people. We knew we needed to get into the horror websites, even though this movie has a lot more crossover appeal to indie offbeat non-genre. We knew we needed to get the buzz out starting from the horror side of it and that other people would take notice of it if they wanted. We got it into Bloody Disgusting; Brad Miska there was the first person championing it. That was really cool. That really helped. Then other people started to take notice.

Peter Katz: Variety.

Guillén: Robert Koehler gave you a supportive review.

Evan L. Katz: Variety got involved after we actually played a festival.

Peter Katz: Through AFI.

Evan L. Katz: That was a really good review. We started off by having to get a couple of good reviews. Then we had to release a trailer online. Then we started having sales companies approaching us, like Wild Bunch, and we were like, "Okay, yeah." We got partnered up with them. Then we started getting more reviews.

Guillén: So Wild Bunch approached you based upon your festival screenings?

Evan L. Katz: Pre-festival screenings.

Peter Katz: Wild Bunch approached us about the trailer. Wild Bunch saw the really good review on Bloody Disgusting and then they saw the trailer. The trailer grabbed them. They had a positive response. From there they contacted us about possible representation in foreign territories.

Evan L. Katz: First we had to show them the screener.

Guillén: So if a young filmmaker with no budget reads this interview, would you recommend their placing the trailer as a first strategic move?

Evan L. Katz: Before we did the trailer, we waited to get a couple of reviews. We got Stephen Susco, the writer of The Grudge, to check it out so that we could have a quote for the trailer. You need to know who your audience is and which people they might respect and see if you can get them to align themselves with the movie. If you can get a good quote or a blurb, people will take extra notice. If you're going to pick up a horror paperback and if you see some of your other favorite authors at the top saying, "Check this out. It's the next Clive Barker or the next Stephen King!"—you'll give it a chance vs. the one that you don't know where it's coming from, there's no point of reference. Especially if you have something as weird as Pop Skull, you need to come at people with some things that people can recognize or else they'll just say, "What the hell is this?"

Peter Katz: It's about trust. People already trust Susco because he made The Grudge. They say, "I enjoyed that movie" and they have their trust in him; but, this is a new prize. You need to be able to latch this to some kind of foundation or else it's going to float in the abyss and no one's going to notice it.

Evan L. Katz: It's an experimental weird movie with no names and no car explosions….

Guillén: But with the possibility of an epileptic seizure at any moment! Susco wrote: "Unlike any horror film you've ever seen—and ever WILL see—Pop Skull is a must-see." That's a strong endorsement from the writer of The Grudge, which in itself is a story about a house, an environment, wherein something horrible happened in the past and a vengeful demonic spirit remains and gathers power at the site of the crime. Was the thematic similarity with Pop Skull why you approached Susco?

Evan L. Katz: There is definitely a certain J-horror style to the hauntings in Pop Skull—there's certainly that supernatural element—but we didn't really draw those comparisons; but, later we did. The movie even starts off with a mention of murder.

Guillén: Notwithstanding, it's a great feather in your cap to get Susco's endorsement. One of the disclaimers of the film is that Pop Skull is based on a true story. Is that so?

Evan L. Katz: It's loosely based on a true story.

Guillén: In what sense?

Peter Katz: The actor Lane Hughes, who is also one of the writers and producers on the project, originally met Adam when he was writing for his zine. The first film that we produced was Home Sick—a low budget slasher set in Alabama—and they were just talking about his zine and then Adam and Lane became friends. Lane had just gone through a terrible break-up with a girl he really liked and he was venting about it and was very passionate about it and Adam said, "Wow, this is a story right here. We've got to make this into some type of story. You've got a lot of demons here to exorcise." At that point Lane had a very loose story, a story for a book he wanted to create on it, and it just turned into a movie. Evan, who had collaborated with Adam in the past on the script for Home Sick, got involved and they started working on the script for Pop Skull.

Evan L. Katz: Lane was a kid who definitely had some problems with pills at some point in the past. He thought he lived in a haunted house. Some of the friends in Pop Skull were based on Lane's friends. But then the story shifted into this supernatural horror movie and we obviously fictionalized the ending.

Guillén: Neither of you have a Southern drawl. I assume you're not from Alabama?

Evan L. Katz: No. Me and my brother, we went to Alabama for about a year after I graduated from film school. And then I stayed there for about a year and a half producing the first movie Home Sick, which is a slasher we did with Adam. We went back home and then I [returned] to Alabama for another six months to work on Pop Skull. Adam and I went to film school together in Florida. He was pretty much the first person I worked with after graduating.

Guillén: The reason I ask is I have a college friend living in Louisiana who tells me he's having problems with his son and his son's friends because they're all hooked on pills. Whereas here in the Bay Area we're in the grip of a meth epidemic, in the South it's pharmaceuticals like OxyContin. Were you purposely commenting on that regional issue?

Evan L. Katz: I got interested in a website called MyDeathSpace.com. It's like MySpace but—let's say I get hit by a car—they'll link my MySpace profile on this website, have an obituary, and people will comment. I went on this website and I was looking at all the entries and a lot of the entries were weird. They were of kids dying of these pills. They were all like these Emo-looking 15-17-year-old kids, some are older, but they're all dying from pharmaceuticals. There were also a lot of [stories] of guys murdering their ex-girlfriends and then killing themselves. That influenced a lot of the horror elements of Pop Skull; these weird teen homicides.

Guillén: I hear that. I used to work for the State Judiciary where at least half of the cases that crossed my desk were methamphetamine-related crimes: strange public behavior, robberies, assaults, murders, suicides. So I'm always intrigued when the link is made between drug abuse and horrific events. In the last year or so there have been a few films, Pop Skull included, that have been exploring that link between drug abuse and horror: Simon Rumley's The Living and the Dead; William Friedkin's Bug; Sean Abley's Socket. These films try to visualize and capture the drug experience. Pop Skull also captures "a" drug experience but I'm not quite sure which drug experience or whether the film references more a process whereby—if you become an addict, if you become too drug-affected—you thin the membrane and become susceptible to dark forces.

Evan L. Katz: With regard to those forces of darkness, if you get into those dark places you are more open to weird shit.

Guillén: You become paranoid delusional and suffer a schizoid break. People are following you. You hear things you can't quite make out. Pop Skull captures that perfectly, especially through its sound design. As the reviewer for Splash wrote: "The soundtrack occasionally spikes as images jump out at you. But mostly, it is a drone-filled stream of pulsing tangled melodies intertwined with hard sound effects and haunting voices. Sometimes shredding, sometimes simmering, the sound design of this film was great." Can you speak about Pop Skull's sound design?

Evan L. Katz: It's a combination of things. We always use an awesome composer named Kyle McKinnon. He's worked with us for about five years basically. At the same time Adam is pretty good composing his own noisy soundscapes as well; he's a big fan of noise music. He's always been able to find a good drop needle that's appropriate for a threatening atmosphere but also to create his own. He obsesses about it. He's a music fanatic. That stuff to him is one of the most important parts of the movie. The music, sound design, atmosphere, all that stuff is integral, especially when you have a film like Pop Skull that's so much through the perspective of one character. You need to really build that.

Peter Katz: A lot of times I'll see a movie and I'll think, "Yeah, this is a great scene" and then they just randomly and haphazardly throw a song down on the track and you listen to the music while you're watching the movie and it doesn't match. You want the music to blend in. Adam is so into music. He plays the keyboard and listens to soundtracks, CDs and scores. It's almost second nature to him. Lane, the actor, is also actually a musician. So when they combine forces, they create a unique sound.

Guillén: It's completely visceral. Between the visuals and the sound, watching Pop Skull is a visceral experience and that's why the film works.

Evan L. Katz: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Guillén: What I'm hearing from the both of you—without Adam here to defend himself—is that Adam's a good guy, a great talent.

Evan L. Katz: Definitely.

Guillén: And what I've been reading is that folks have their eye on him. Bloody Disgusting calls Adam's work "the beginning of something special", even as Todd Brown at Twitch claims Pop Skull "clearly marks Wingard as a significant talent to watch." You both concur?

Peter Katz: [Enthusiastically] Yeah! I remember a while back I was working on a music video and—at that time—Spielberg was doing a call for On the Lot, this ridiculous show where directors compete against each other; but, it was done in an asinine way where directors would compete against each other while being interrupted and distracted, like American Idol where they're on a rocking stage while they're trying to sing. I told Adam, "Adam, you're an amazing director. You should try to get on the show." He sent them one short film and immediately gets called back that they want him on the show. He's on the show for about a minute—which is good because the show is ridiculous—and then he gets off the show. But it was just something to show people [who want] to see his work. After Evan, Lane and Adam did such a great job [with] Pop Skull, it got out there. Their work had such a great response that agencies were interested in Adam and he got signed to Endeavor.

Guillén: Another aspect that interested me in Pop Skull is its William Castle riff. The epilepsy warning….

Evan L. Katz: [Chuckles] Oh yeah, I know, prepare yourself! The Tingler is waiting!

Guillén: Nurses are on standby in the theater lobby! So, I'm curious, was that merely a marketing device? Or was that something you were legally advised to do?

Evan L. Katz: Adam actually had a short film play in the Sidewalk Film Festival a while back that had flashing and someone had an epileptic seizure. Adam was like, "Well, this has more so let's [provide a warning]!" At the same time Adam does have that same kind of [showmanship].

Guillén: Didn't you likewise pass out collectible Pop Skull pills at your Winnepeg Short Film Massacre screening?

Evan L. Katz: Yeah, that was Kier-la Janisse at the Winnepeg Cinematheque. She's really cool. She helps program for the SF IndieFest. She's programmed for the Fantastic Film Fest. She really championed Pop Skull. She made these free pills that she was passing out. That was her! That wasn't even the filmmakers.

Guillén: But they had the skull on them, like on the poster?

Evan L. Katz: Yeah.

Guillén: That's too cool.

Peter Katz: She's a really good promoter. She did this cool festival where people were locked into a theater for 24 hours and they had to pay to leave. They didn't have to pay to get in.

Guillén: Pop Skull had its North American premiere at AFI. Where has it gone since then?

Evan L. Katz: It played in Rome. It played at the Winnepeg Cinematheque. It's going to be playing at the Boston Underground. It's waiting on Telluride and Cinevegas and Seattle. And it's playing at the Over the Top Festival in Toronto, which is a music/film festival.

Guillén: And what is your hope? As producers are you hoping that at one of the film's festival screenings it will be picked up for distribution?

Evan L. Katz: Right now our sales reps are trying to get North American distribution separately. These festivals aren't markets. Right now we have Wild Bunch [in Europe] and Glenn Reynolds and Endeavor is our North American sales rep. Hopefully they'll get an art house small run. That's what they're working on separately. [The festival screenings are] just to get Pop Skull out there, to have some kids see it, and visit different places.

Guillén: Another intriguing aspect of Pop Skull is that it's a genre hybrid. As you indicated, Evan, it's more than a horror movie, even though I understand why you've pitched it as horror first. Robert Koehler at Variety grouped Pop Skull into a subgenre he calls "acid horror"—which, I don't find an accurate term; but, I understand what he's saying—how would you classify it?

Evan L. Katz: I come from more a straight genre background. I work primarily in horror genre. If you look back at some of the '70s ghost movies, they were sometimes more minimalist character studies, psychedelic even, and I loved those—films like Let's Scare Jessica to Death—they were kind of arty and kind of out there. I love an indie approach or an arthouse approach to horror because you get less and less of that nowadays. There's still room to mess around in the genre. I like Larry Fessenden a lot. He's a great talent. Watching Habit influenced me a lot when I was younger. He's doing more of this low-key indie Brooklyn movie about an alcoholic; but, it's also a vampire story. It's really cool.

Peter Katz: It feels like Pi. I like what Evan says about Habit because it has that toned down lo-fi quality, very realistic in a Larry Clark way where you get to know these characters, you're not pushing anything in your face, there's no gimmicks here. Then you have a little bit of that Pi element; that stirring quality of editing where things are unsettling and in-your-face soundscapes.

Guillén: Todd Brown at Twitch likewise drew that analogy, describing Adam's work as "equal parts Aronofsky and Tsukamoto." So what's next for you two?

Evan L. Katz: There's a bunch of stuff. The Writers Strike's probably going to end tonight—which is a great thing—but we have a million things we're doing. Right now me and Peter are producing Adam's next film, which is a gritty, dark, pulpy werewolf horror film. [Evan is grinning from ear to ear describing the film and his eyes are gleaming, which makes me laugh.] I like it because it's different than Pop Skull but it still takes place in more of a real world. You have this dark creature feature but it's based in a small town like Flint, Michigan.

At the same time, Adam's working on a script. He's obsessed with Herzog's Nosferatu. He wants to do a white trash version of that. He's working on a draft of that and he'll send it to me to do a rewrite. We're going to try to do a druggie lo-fi [version].

Guillén: Which leads me to admit that—rather than thinking of Pop Skull as "acid horror" and despite my reservations about mumblecore films—I think of Pop Skull as "mumblecore horror".

Evan L. Katz: You're not the first person to say that.

Guillén: Good! Then I'm not totally off mark.

Evan L. Katz: One other person has said that he's surprised that Pop Skull hasn't been lumped into [the mumblecore movement]. I guess we just don't know the people in that scene; it's an insular group. A lot of it seems to be comedy relationship dramas.

Guillén: More how I look at mumblecore is that the protagonists tend to be irredeemable losers, usually lower class or—as you mentioned—white trash, caught in miserable scenarios. Myself, I have some issue with that, just because I like happy endings and want to think people can rise above their circumstances; but, realistically, I completely understand why mumblecore films are finding an audience. Lots of people do feel like chumps and don't see a way out of their circumstances. They can't get the girl and—if they do get the girl—they lose her fast.

Peter Katz: Especially young people because they haven't established themselves. All these people and their potential is the X factor because they don't know what the future holds. Mumblecore is embraced by those kids.

Guillén: That being said, that's why I would classify Pop Skull as mumblecore horror, which is possibly the only thing about mumblecore I find intriguing: the notion that someone from a lower class or working class environment might be more prone to becoming addicted to alcohol or drugs, which then leads into this field—as I mentioned earlier—where the membrane is thinned and the darkness crosses over.

Evan L. Katz: The potential for bad shit just expands. One thing I think is cool about Pop Skull is that you get a break-up story and then you take it as far as you can go but you need to start off at least in a place where the guy is not like Norman Bates, he's not an over-the-top character actor chewing scenery running around. He seems like a regular kid. And then to take him to such a dark place in the end is like the worst this could go, the worst way this could end up.

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You have one last chance to have an epileptic seizure at this year's IndieFest when Pop Skull screens at the Roxie this evening at 9:30PM.

Cross-published on Twitch.

JUMPER—Anywhere Is Possible

I liked Jumper so much that I wish I could be the chump who could jump right into (what I assume will be) the sequel. Do I really have to wait?

David Rice (Hayden Christensen) discovers he has latent powers to teleport any place he visualizes. His initial reaction is to escape from a stifling home environment, school bullies, and poverty. In no time at all he beams himself in and out of bank vaults and scores big money, a penthouse suite, and global access. And just when he thinks he has it made, sitting on top of the world (or, at least, the Egyptian sphinx), along comes Roland (Samuel Jackson)—a "Paladin" committed to ridding the Earth of "jumpers"—as well as Griffin (Jamie Bell), a firebrand jumper equally committed to resisting and defeating the Paladins. Add luscious girlfriend Millie (Rachel Bilson) and an absent and enigmatic mother (Diane Lane, in a charismatic performance that bears no trace of Untraceable), plus locations in New York, Rome, Tokyo and Egypt, and kick-ass jumping effects and you have all the markings of an entertaining action sci-fi thriller.

But wait, there's more! This film is enrichened by believable character arcs that the sequel can only serve to deepen. Christensen plays his bruised soul to perfection. Yes, it's a superhero cliché that with great power comes great responsibility, something every young superhero needs to learn, but it's genuinely engaging watching Rice mature from a self-serving teenager to a young man giving thought to using his powers to help others. You truly sense that hiding his secret and living alone with so much power, even if it secures him material wealth, simply is not enough. The chemistry between Christensen and Bilson is sweet and sexy, which—linked to the film's opening on Valentines Day—reminds that Jumper is basically a love story about two people learning how much they can really reveal and share with each other. I imagine it will be the perfect date movie.

There are also solid veins of inquiry. As Rice learns that his gift has passed down through generations for millennia and that—like it or not—he is caught up in something of an ongoing holy war; Griffin guides him to make the historical connections between the Paladins and the Catholic Inquisition. The Magisterium's ageold dispute against divine immanence takes a pop cult turn in Roland's zeal to destroy anyone who possesses the power of God to move at will. Roland is not just a basic bad guy cut from dark broadcloth, however; Jackson exhibits genuine concern that the power bestowed upon jumpers inevitably drives them to madness and evil. One senses feral Griffin leaning that way. And one can only wonder if Rice's protestations that he's "different" will be borne out? I sure would like to know right now. Where's a worm hole when you need one?

Cross-published on Twitch.

MICHAEL CLAYTON—The Greencine Interview With Tony Gilroy

As Dave Hudson has prefaced at The Greencine Daily: "Tony Gilroy had been writing screenplays and watching directors turn them into movies for about a decade when he wrote Michael Clayton. For six years, the project simply would not get up off the ground. Then along came Jason Bourne. With the help of, among others, George Clooney, Sydney Pollack and Steven Soderbergh, he was finally able to get Michael Clayton made—and direct it himself.

"The film was well-received when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival and lauded in Toronto. But when it hit theaters . . . well, you may have missed it. Now's your chance. It's out on DVD this week, just in time for the Oscars. It's been nominated for seven of those, including Best Picture. And Gilroy's been nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay."

My interview with Tony Gilroy is up at Greencine's main site.

Cross-published on Twitch.