The Monday Brief is back and just in time - as a month full of European mega-fests comes to a close (and VIDEOCRACY takes Sheffield, TRASH HUMPERS shocks Copenhagen and LAST TRAIN HOME conquers Amsterdam) and what may just be the biggest week of the year...
The Gothams kick off the award season in New York tonight as high profile docs FOOD, INC., GOOD HAIR and TYSON take on underdogs MY NEIGHBOR, MY KILLER and PARADISE. In addition to those, festival favorite OCTOBER COUNTRY is up as the sole nonfiction title in the Films Not Yet Playing at a Theater Near You category.
Here's a piece of trivia - in the five years that the Gothams have awarded a Best Documentary prize, the winning film has never gone on to win the Oscar, which is pretty good news if you're betting on THE COVE in March.
For the first time, the Gothams will be streaming live here, starting at 8 PM eastern tonight.
Then early tomorrow - probably before some Gotham revelers have gone to bed - Film Independent will announced nominations for its Spirit Awards. Worth watching - will FOOD, INC. sweep the major doc award nominations prior to the Oscars? Will the Spirits act (consciously or no) as a corrective on some of Oscar's snubs (I'm looking at you ANVIL, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC and SEPTEMBER ISSUE)?
Also worth watching are the nominations in the Truer Than Fiction category, which recognize films and filmmakers who have not yet received the attention they deserve.
Then, on Wednesday, the dam will fully break as the Sundance Film Festival announces its competition films for 2010. Here's what we know already - after what many agreed was a lackluster 2009 festival, next year's Sundance is shaping up (on paper at least) to be a barn-burner for docs. At least three films from Oscar nominated filmmakers are on tap, along with 2 new films from folks who took Sundance by storm with their previous features, plus a veteran Sundance filmmaker is back as producer on a debut feature.
And that's not even including LAST TRAIN HOME, the IDFA-champ that everyone and their mother expects to show in Park City (along with 2 or 3 or more titles from the just-wrapped European doc circuit).
By the way, if you haven't checked it out yet, gander at the newly re-designed Sundance fest website, which leads off with a retro graphic manifesto:
"REBEL. This is the renewed rebellion. This is the re-charged fight against the establishment of the expected. This is the rebirth of the battle for brave new ideas. This is Sundance, reminded. And this is your call to join us."
That's a whole lot of "re" words.
And what does it say, exactly, that John Cooper's first year at the helm begins with the declaration that Sundance needed a rebirth and a re-charge? (Although, again, after last year, you won't get much argument from these's parts.) Slogans aside, the week's first peak at this year's line-up will give our first clues as to whether there's a true revolution (a "re" word they didn't use) afoot.
Then, the week closes of Friday with the IDA Documentary Awards in Los Angeles, hosted by Ira Glass and featuring a career award tribute to Errol Morris. Worth watching - will love for ANVIL (and knowledge of its Oscar snub - if the jury knew about it during deliberations) push that film into wins for Music Documentary and Feature Documentary?
(More on the Gothams, Spirits, IDAs and the Oscar horse-race in another post this afternoon.)
So, as Friday becomes Saturday we will have our first look at 2010 just as we're beginning to make some sense of what happened to us in 2009.
If that's not enough for the week, I don't know what is.
While we've been traveling around this past month, this amazing year for documentary at the theatrical box office has continued unabated. MICHAEL JACKSON'S THIS IS IT had a $1M+ 5-day take, bringing its total to an estimated $71,800,000. With Sony having previously announced that it would pull the film after Thanksgiving, it seems unlikely now that the film will surpass MARCH OF THE PENGUINS' $77.5M take from four years ago. Still, it should end up as the number 3 nonfiction of all time.
On a less grand scale, but in many ways no less exciting, Frederick Wiseman's LA DANSE: THE PARIS OPERA BALLET has had a stellar launch at New York's Film Forum, taking in more than $80K in two weeks at that theater alone. It's now expanded to 13 theaters for a still strong $4K+ average, no small matter for a film that runs more than two and a half hours. Total gross to date is an estimated $184,000.
For more on Wiseman, check out Eugene Hernandez' ode at indieWIRE in which he labels Wiseman "the greatest documentary filmmaker working today".
Meanwhile, GOOD HAIR has now passed the $4M plateau and is creeping up on FOOD, INC.'s $4,417,124, and MORE THAN A GAME is closing in on $1M (just $50K shy as of last weekend) but its unclear whether the film will be able to stay in theaters long enough to hit that mark.
Stuff we've missed while we've been on the road... Hell, what haven't we missed? Well, the "best of the year" and "best of the decade" lists are starting to roll in. Paste Magazine, which, for a culture mag, usually does a pretty good job of covering documentary, posted its best 25 films of the decade list a couple weeks back. It had a pretty strong 1-2 punch at the top with MAN ON WIRE and IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS, but otherwise it's a pretty straightforward, Sundance-heavy list. And INCONVENIENT TRUTH at #14? For realz?
Also this month there's been a bit of jibber-jabber over moves by two of our country's major film critics - David Ansen and Scott Foundas - to programming positions. Ansen was named as Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, succeeding Rachel Rosen (who returned to San Francisco), and Foundas left the LA Weekly/Village Voice to become Associate Program Director for the Film Society at Lincoln Center in NYC. Ansen, who left a full-time gig at Newsweek a year or so ago, will continue to write for that magazine even in his new role. Doug Jones was upped to Associate Director of Programming at LAFF.
Add this to Variety's Robert Koehler taking over the reins at AFI Fest and as Karina Longworth might say, three stories make a trend and thus indieWIRE wondered if this "migration" signaled "the rise of the critic-turned-programmer"?
Anne Thompson had previously pondered - prior to the announcement that Foundas got the Lincoln Center gig - "as journalism becomes more and more inhospitable to film critics, film festivals become a viable alternative". This led to a must-read, full-voiced rebuttle from Sarasota/Newport programmer (and blogger) Tom Hall:
"Which, you know, makes the idea of film programming sound a little bit, well, like a bomb shelter; a place to hide out while the world collapses around you and hopefully you can get back to normal once all of the madness dies away. What it doesn’t do, really, is advocate for the reality of film programming, the meaning and importance of the job to a festival, an audience, a community and, probably most importantly, festival colleagues who will be called upon to execute the million details involved in putting on a large event...
For most of us in the world of film programming, life is a series of qualifiers; we like to think that by assembling a program from the available, relevant films in our festival window that will agree to play the festival, we’ve worked hard to bring the very best that we can to our audiences, given the unique circumstances of each event...
But, in welcoming my critic friends into the community of programmers, I offer a little bit of hard-won wisdom; film programming is a harbor for constant disappointment. We’re told “no” constantly, we have to tell other people “no” all the time, we do our best in negotiating all sorts of tricky problems between a multitude of interests. Now, obviously, people as gifted as David Ansen and Robert Koehler are amazing film scholars and have proven through their criticism and programming work, time and again, that they are excellent at what they do. I have no doubts that their work will be superior to my own in every way. But I do find it curious that so many festival directors seem to be looking to the world of criticism to find their programmers, and more importantly, that an honest discussion about what that means for programmers and critics alike hasn’t really started."
And finally, a mea culpa. One of the reasons that I started the Monday Brief this summer was because I knew what kind of fall awaited me. I hoped that having a targeted summary blog post once a week would let me off the hook for the rest of the week. But, planning on not writing Tuesday to Sunday is a pretty good way to take Monday off as well, so it's probably not the cure for what ails.
Truth is, over the past three months I've barely been home in Los Angeles. I've either been shooting my new film or attending festivals with my last one or working on various projects. And even when I've been smack in what feels like the center of our documentary universe (at Sheffield earlier this month, for example), it can be hard to jump back into blogging when the other options (seeing films, talking to filmmakers, resting) seem so very appealing.
We're gonna try to get things back on course in the next couple months, starting with this mammoth week. In any case, we're grateful, as always for your kind indulgence.
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