Beyond the Multiplex

Nov. 8, 2007 | Aren't you psyched about the yearlong presidential campaign, which cannot, God help us, be ignored even through heroic absorption in the minutiae of the independent-film world? Boy, I sure am. In the same spirit of sincerity that infuses national politics, I hereby offer my solemn campaign pledges to readers. While I offer no clear distinction between waterboarding and torture (or between waterboarding and water-skiing, for that matter), and I intend to obscure any thoughts I may have on the Iraq war beneath a thicket of non-navigable rhetoric, let me make one thing clear: I will no longer tolerate or accept gratuitous references to "Little Miss Sunshine" or "Pan's Labyrinth"!

Unless, that is, circumstances should arise that cannot be predicted and over which neither I nor anyone else can exercise control. Such as when some new movie vaguely reminds me of one of them and I have nothing else to say. Furthermore, I declare unambiguously that I today reject the first use of $5 adjectives, or FDAs, as a way of avoiding actual description or discussion of motion pictures. I say this, my fellow Americans, in full cognizance of the fact that we live in a complex and multivalent cinema universe, overloaded with works whose ontological status and epistemological significance is often paradoxical, elegant, eloquent, sophisticated, absorbing, contradictory, troubling, schizophrenic, graceful, ill-tempered, puckish, vainglorious, fanciful, phantasmagorical, acidic, acerbic, profoundly ironical, dark-hearted and sure-to-be-controversial.

Speaking of meaningless promises, people in the film business keep assuring us that the post-Michael Moore tidal wave of documentaries is sure to ebb, any day now. Since very few of the non-Moore docs are making any money whatever, the thinking goes, basic laws of supply and demand are sure to kick in. Most of the real Indiewood success stories in the last couple of years have been narrative films, like "Waitress" and "Once" and "La Vie en Rose" and, you know, some others I could name. But won't! Well, to Adam Smith and to supposed economic logic I say whatever. I count 11 noteworthy new documentaries opening between now and the end of November, on top of several terrific ones already in release. (And no doubt I'm missing something.)

I'm not complaining about quality -- there are some wonderful films in the bunch -- but this is just nuts. How are terrific movies like "Jimmy Carter Man From Plains" or "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten," which have both opened strongly, going to find the slow, steady national build that documentaries require? How are intimate little niche-market pictures about love in the concentration camps, or Indian immigration to Britain, or how Steinway pianos are made (all covered below), going to find any audience at all? Film execs talk cheerfully about "the ancillaries" -- in English, that's the DVD release -- but too many damn documentaries, in my view, means not enough ancillaries to go around. After the coming docu-crash, I'm afraid we may go from a market where everybody's documentary gets released to a market where nobody's does.

With such an embarrassment of docu-riches this week, I'm ditching the usual column format for a user's guide to this week's releases, which also include a lo-fi film about the still-obscure jazz legend Albert Ayler and "War/Dance," a good-news-from-bad-places saga that looks like one of the season's potential hits. Wonderful to tell, we've even got a couple of narrative films! One of them, mind you, is more than 40 years old and in Italian, while the other -- Steve Barron's likable New York indie "Choking Man" -- has been shuffling homelessly through the film-festival circuit for two years.

This week also brings us Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men," by all accounts one of the year's leading award contenders. (My colleague Stephanie Zacharek has already reviewed it.) I was underwhelmed when I saw the film at Cannes; it struck me as handsome, well-crafted and self-consciously grim, without much of the verve or entertainment quotient I associate with the Coens. Still, I'm definitely planning to catch it again, and the same goes for Richard Kelly's long, long, long-awaited "Southland Tales," which finally reaches theaters next week, a year and a half after the debacle of its 2006 Cannes premiere. In other notes, New York moviegoers can catch a brief rerelease of Ingmar Bergman's formerly scandalous 1953 "Monika," featuring a 21-year-old skinny-dipping Harriet Andersson, and the American premiere of "Glass Lips," a new experimental feature from Polish artist, author, composer, director and all-around avant-garde Renaissance man Lech Majewski.

Next page: Romping, stomping, blow-the-doors-off music and dance numbers -- in a war zone