Beyond the Multiplex

Steve Buscemi and Sienna Miller team up for a trashy take on celebrity culture. Plus: Mind-blowing apocalyptic anime and Kim Ki-duk's fun with monsters.

By Andrew O'Hehir

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Pierre Peders (Steve Buscemi ) and Katya (Sienna Miller) in "Interview"

July 12, 2007 | When you talk to people in the indie-film world these days, people who've been around the business their whole professional lives and have forgotten more about it than I'll ever know, you hear the same thing over and over again: Nobody knows what the hell is going on. When I spoke with Eamonn Bowles, the president of Magnolia Pictures, a few days ago, he described the current market for independent film as "a bit like the Wild West." Meyer Gottlieb, the president of Samuel Goldwyn Films, was more direct: "A lot of things are happening that no one has answers to."

If there's a specter that's haunting Indiewood and Hollywood alike, it's the shambling figure of some semi-shaved, post-collegiate 22-year-old watching movies on his cellphone. Now, I don't know anybody who has actually watched a feature film on a telephone, and I'm not even sure it's feasible. (The iPhone's ads show people watching film trailers and YouTube videos, not entire movies.) But three different people in the film industry have mentioned the idea to me within the last week, and the question of its present-tense plausibility is clearly not relevant. What people are really saying is that a big, weird change is coming. They don't quite understand it and they can't do anything to stop it, but they're worried that the whole business of selling $10 tickets to go sit in a dark room with some strangers and a movie projector is suddenly going to seem like Thomas Edison's windup gramophone and its wax cylinders.

But you know what? While the undammed weekly deluge of new movies isn't good either for art or business -- I can't even guess how many good pictures get swept away unnoticed in the flood -- the demise of theatrical moviegoing is much exaggerated. Michael Moore's "Sicko" is a huge hit, bigger than "An Inconvenient Truth" if not yet to "Fahrenheit 9/11" dimensions. "Waitress" has already claimed the summer's feel-good prize (along with $17.4 million at the box office). "Once" and "La Vie en Rose" have piled up startlingly strong numbers, by indie standards, and "You Kill Me" is quietly building up to sleeper-hit status. Zoe Cassavetes' "Broken English" and Werner Herzog's "Rescue Dawn" have both opened strongly.

Even more encouraging to a cranky cinephile like me are numbers that sound less impressive, like the $600,000 accumulated by Emanuele Crialese's "Golden Door" (terrific returns for an Italian art film), or the astonishing $735,000 for the three-hour documentary "Into Great Silence," or even the $30,000 collected so far for the re-release of Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Doulos," in one week on one screen at New York's Film Forum. As outmoded as it may be, human beings are still going to the movies this summer.

Most of the films I just mentioned would be pointless on a 3-inch screen, with their cinematic qualities made microscopic. But that's not true of all movies, and I feel confident that the teeny personal screen is going to command its own forms of content, just like TV and the Internet did. At least two of the five movies I'm covering this week might be perfectly OK on your iPod or your wristwatch or your holographic postage stamp or whatever. (I'll leave you to guess which movies.) Is that meant as a profound dis? Not really. It's just a sign hammered to a pole on the unmarked roads of the Wild West.

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