This was my fourth time at Park City, and the first where in between movies certain toothsome wheels clicked into place and various machinations began to turn in what felt like a fairly significant way. I saw fewer films than ever (only 11) and was busier than ever, except for the last day where I spent a necessarily long time doing laundry.

The whole thing was just wonderful and exhausting and beautiful and snowy, and that's not even counting the Screenwriting Labs because I can't really talk about those right now. At the moment I'm sitting at the gate, waiting for this flight to board and considering all the work we have to do to finish this music video before leaving for LA in four days to continue the chain of events set in motion last week. I'm too tired to put together the words necessary to imply how gracious I am that I'm this tired. Trust me, I've got some ebullience stored deep down - I'm just keeping it safe.

Photo by James M. Johnston.

I leave for the airport and Sundance in about four hours, and I'm still up trying to squeeze in as much work on this thing we shot last week as I can. It's a new music video for School Of Seven Bells, and I think we might have pushed our meager budget and inferior brains too far on this one, resulting in irreparable damage and unchecked carnage. Motion control, mathematical equations - these are things best left to experts! Of course, as soon as it turns out (if it turns out, which it will), I'll forget what a headache it's been and talk about how wonderful technology is.

I finished two FX shots just now, and I'll be checking the progress on everything else that's going to fill up that green from up in the mountains next week. Hopefully it'll be done and online in a week or two.

January 1, 2009

I didn't want to leave. The path from Texas to the Windy City is straight line; so why when I travel there do I always wind up in Atlanta? Some ancient ley line pulling me East when I need to go North; making straight a curve, as natural as an arm bent at the elbow. I trace its length with my fingertip; finding the radial artery that runs the entire course, following it to the elbow where I pause, and then turn on towards the wrist. Along the way that vein opens of its own accord; the sun is low in the sky and spins gold out of the pools and rivulets that well up from its riven surface; a spatter of mercury stretching to the horizon. Little lakes and ponds shimmering like mirages that do indeed disappear as the sun sinks lower and the faded green and brown quilt below turns monochrome with frost. Winter spreading in the afternoon. I flatten the image in my head, as I imagine Vermeer must have done, so as to see it as patchwork of color and shade; to detect the blues and purples in what looks so uniformly gray.

We hit a bank of clouds, and all color vanishes. Something deep and guttural shifts within the plane as it beginning to drop. Nearly there, after six hours. The radial artery wraps around the wrist. Its shoots spread into the fingers. It is almost as far from the heart as I can get. To get to where I really want to be, I'd have to retrace my steps, take the same path further back, back to the brachial artery, where I'd slip through a a wall of muscle below the shoulder and try to make longitudes out of the axillary artery, which itself would give way to the subclavian artery. I'd stay its course and then duck under the arch of the aorta and slip down through its descending branches, into those depths below, where East and West and up and down no longer matter and everything is a deep shade of red. Finally I'd find myself in the coronaries, and I could curl up warm and rest.

Vapor on the window; a thick imposing rolling wall of gray, thousands of feet high, reaching from the ground to somewhere above us. I settle back, and it's then that I see in my periphery: a ribbon of pink, unfurling across the sky in less than half a second and then vanishing. An optical trick, I think, but then there it is again. Brilliant, shimmering, heraldic, rippling long across the distance. Seemingly free from physics and all the natural laws, like the sailor's green flash, and like that gone in an instant. It makes no sense. I see it a third time. It's something to hold onto. And so I do. I hold on tight and let it be what I need it to be.

The cloud bank dissipates. The patchwork below is deep dark blue, and off in the distance is that same splash of pink, but sustained. A valiant sunset, making itself known while it sinks into the West. Hanging over the source. Waiting for me to see it. I know. We land.

Perfectly paced, bite-sized but never too brief, these episodes will be a treat to anyone who loved 45365, and with a combined running time of over two hours already, this is in effect an amazing feature film in and of itself. It is gorgeous nonfiction filmmaking, although there are some moments that stray from strict documentary form in strange and funny and wondrous ways. There's also a scene with some impersonations and a random tree limb in the most recent episode that delighted me to no end.

Here is the first episode.

The Brothers Ross will be returning to the big screen in 2012 with Tchoupitoulas, their portrait of one night in New Orleans. Let's all join hands and look forward to it together.

1. The Tree Of Life (Terrence Malick)

2. Margaret (Kenneth Lonnergan)

3. Open Five 2 (Kentucker Audley)

Three movies in my top ten - that's one more than last year. Things are looking up! In truth I could easily list ten more, which could beget an additional ten or twelve, but I'll quit while I'm ahead.

That last one has yet to officially screen anywhere, but the night I sat up in bed watching it until the wee hours remains one of the very most affirmative cinematic experiences I've had this year. Hopefully you'll have a chance to see it in 2012, and until then use it as a proxy for all the low-to-no-budget films that were released in 2011, of which I loved a great many. But during Open Five 2, I actually pumped my fist, which says a lot.

P.S. Honorable mentions to the skyscraper sequence in Mission: Impossible 4 and to my wife for making sure I got to the first screening of Melancholia on time the day that it opened.

Now, 12 years later, as this next movie I'm making rolls towards an uncertain but inevitable start date, the script has been invited to the same Screenwriting Labs this coming January. It's an honor and a bi thrill, and implicit in all that is the comfort of knowing that this film is already moving forward, and that the legs up it took to get it there were our own. I don't need the stamp of validation that I thought I did back then (although I'm very happy to have it). What I need is to weather some more creative feedback, now, before we shoot, from every angle, just so that I can walk onto set confident that the material is where I need it to be.

When I'll actually walk onto that set, I cannot at this point say. Six months ago, I'd hoped that we'd be shooting the movie right now. Three months ago, I had my heart set on February. Last week, after meeting with our line producer and going over our budget, we decided to push it. I look forward to sharing the reasons why, and also the wonderful people with whom I'm making these decisions. What's happened is that a particular avenue has opened up, and we've decided it would be a shame not to explore it, even if it takes us right back to where we started a six months ago, which itself was fine place to arrive at the first time.

It's funny to think back to that phone call twelve years ago, which actually wasn't from Sundance at all, nor was it even a phone call. It was a message from my mom, recorded to the voicemail on my pager, telling me that Sundance had called. I was at work in the projection booth, probably tending to The Phantom Menace or something. When I got home, I saw that my mom had jotted down the pertinent info on a piece of paper and tacked it the board above the home phone. Some months later, when I was ultimately turned down, the rejection came by post, on heavy stationary, and was signed by hand. I still have that letter; it's most recently served as a bookmark in my copy of Down And Dirty Pictures, where it still resides.

I stayed true to my word, and did make that movie. You'll never see it.

I was invited not too long ago to contribute to the new issue of Fortnight Journal, a quarterly online compendium of millennial talent. There are all sorts of fascinating people featured here - beekeepers, cartographers, morticians - and I'm honored to be included amongst them.

I'll be contributing six pieces over the next few months, one every two weeks. The first is online now. It's a short film I drew about my daily routine, inspired by this old website.

You can view the film here.

I wrote an introduction to it that included the following sentence: " If one considers the interpretation of quantum mechanics formulated by Hugh Everett in 1957 which suggests that every outcome of every possible situation results in the creation of an alternate universe as grounds for the decentralization of the ego, then one can likewise ascertain that the rigor of daily routine constitutes a profound defense of the same. " It's better off without it.

The above split-screen is probably my favorite frame from Bertrand Bonello's House Of Pleasures, formerly and more appropriately titled House Of Tolerance. It's an easy one to pick, although hard to call the best when a film is as overflowing with lush and stately chiaroscuros as this one. Misguided by critical reception from Cannes, I sat down expecting a predictably romantic, predictably male portrait of prostitution. What I received instead, right out the gate, was one the most invigorating uses of time I've seen in a film in quite some time. The sequence in which the Jewish whore named Madeline goes to her fateful rendezvous darts in and out of a dream, forward and back through time, skipping freely but never lightly as it all circles back towards a single inevitable outcome, just as the film on the whole does, as per its actual subject, the advent of history.

If only because of the proximity of their premieres and subsequent releases, it's difficult not to compare the Bonello's film to Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty, another elegant film about, at least on a superficial level, the oldest profession. I prefer this one, not because I sympathize with my own sex but simply because Bonello's intentions have a greater degree of exactitude, and he executes them likewise. There's plenty of room for symbolism, but not much for ambiguity, and I've reached a point when I see a woman weeping tears made up of a particular bodily fluid, I'm happy to know what it really is I'm looking at.

The film was much talked about at Cannes because of that image, and also because of its use of anachronistic diagetic music. In one key scene, the women slow dance to the Moody Blues' Nights In White Satin. This was once to me one of the greatest of all songs. I was seventeen or eighteen, and its grandiosity rocked my world. It wasn't the first Moody Blues song to do so; one night, I was driving home from work and heard the last half of Question on the radio and pulled into a parking lot to jot down the lyrics before they escape me. "It's not the way that you say it when you say the things you do" - this was a great song! Google was a year or two away then, and I couldn't look up a snippet of lyrics the way I would now; I didn't even find out that the song was by the Moody Blues for quite some time. Eventually I did, and eventually I bought some of their records, and eventually I became less enamored with their bombast, and then one day came to the conclusion that this amazing band was in truth quite silly. I was talking about this to a friend earlier in the summer - how music that can mean so much to you at some point can suddenly become terrible.

So in addition to its other wonderful qualities, Bertrand Bonello's House Of Pleasures managed to make the Moody Blues un-terrible to me once more. Which, when you see the film, which you should, you'll understand to be an incredibly appropriate and telling propensity.

One of the few later goals for which I've ever had an age-related time limit was to run a marathon before I turned 30. Given that I've had that same number of years to come to terms with my chronic procrastination, the fact that I was 11 months late in achieving this watermark isn't too big a deal. I crossed the finish line of the White Rock Marathon yesterday in four hours, thirteen minutes and eight seconds. I'd never made it past a nightmarish 16 miles in my training, but I crossed that same point yesterday and then found most of the miles after melting away with relative ease. No walls in sight. It was freezing (almost literally) and raining the entire time. I ran it with my partner in crime, Toby Halbrooks, and Augustine was there to cheer me on, and it was one of the best days of my life. I try not to expound too often on personal achievements, but in this case I'm allowing myself a few sentences.

Now it's over, there'll never be another first one and it's on to making this movie.

We Need To Talk About Kevin confounded my expectations from the very first shot. This is appropriate, as the first shot is a useful vantage point from which to consider Lynn Ramsay's intentions: a vast overhead tableau of a sea of bodies writhing in dionysian ecstacy (soon revealed, vividly if still vaguely, to be a European art festival), the image has an otherworldly aspect to it. A divine perspective is how one traditionally might describe this sort of image, a God's-Eye view, but in this film it is more accurately extraterrestrial. In other words, this film feels like it's been made by an alien. It is curiously out of touch with the physical minutiae of life in suburban America, from the house the characters live in to the aggressiveness of the trick-or-treaters that roam the neighborhood on Halloween night, all the way down to Kevin himself, who is not a nuanced character but a representation of one. Every physical element in the film is an exaggeration, occasionally symbolic, never tethered to verisimilitude. When Tilda Swinton hides from a neighbor in the grocery store, the wall of soup cans she hides behind are not soup cans but Soup Cans (and I may be mistaken, but I believe the labels read Mrs. Ramsay's Tomato Soup).

This is not a criticism, per se, for none of this is unintentional. Ramsay's first two films did not set any sort of precedent for this, but she establishes from that first shot the manner in which she intends to tell this story, and she honors that concept and executes it flawlessly. It is entirely unique. I went into the film with its basic plot in mind, expecting something along the lines of Van Sant's Elephant, and received instead an experience which I'd never had before, one which ran contrary to my own instincts for the material but which nevertheless provided the emotional exactitude necessary to bring this curious beast down to earth. Credit Tilda Swinton as much as Ramsay; her performance pierces straight to the core of a mother who fears her child has been born wrong - an alien concept to me, and one which I've now got an inkling of an understanding of, which means that whatever Ramsay was doing up there on the screen works, and works well. It's a sympathy I've yet to shake.

I haven't yet read Lionel Shriver's novel upon which the film was based, but it's not too far from the top of my stack. First, though: to finish Infinite Jest. I started it in August, and sometime in September realized that, entrenched at the time in one of the longer, less lively sequences, I was increasingly reticent to spend time with the book. So I decided to start reading other things at the same time, which has worked out quite well so far. I've read with great pleasure Philip Roth's Deception, Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Herzog's Conquest Of The Useless and Rober Ebert's Life Itself alongside the first half of David Foster Wallace's magnum opus. But now it's December. Time to focus on one thing and finish the last 500 pages before the year is out.

I've decided that the condition of one's copy of Infinite Jest when one finishes reading it is a good indication of their personality (or some aspect of it, at least). I base this hypothesis on my own copy, which at this point is tattered, dog-eared, warped and stained intermittently with coffee, tea and seawater; and that of one of my friends, which I noticed last month sitting on his shelf alongside Wallace's other works in what appeared to be near-mint condition. I'd never for a second think he hadn't read it - I watched him read it. I simply marvel that the massive volume itself survived.

I was talking to a friend the other day about Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene and discussing whether its very methodical structure and faux-subjectivity was the correct approach to the particular story. The crux of our conversation pivoted upon the same umbrage Richard Brody had with the film in The New Yorker:

It’s exactly this canny dosing of information that makes it seem as if Durkin is pushing buttons—not ineffectively, but un-affectingly ... By holding back on what Martha knows and playing it out as what he’s willing to divulge, Durkin trades the potential depth of her dark and strange experiences for cheap, if clever, thrills.

This assessment is basically correct, except that the trade-off Brody suggests Durkin made is not for a better film, but a different film altogether. What he did make is indeed a thriller, an expertly crafted one which, in that it even suggests the depths which Brody wishes it fully plumbed, has the bonus of being more than the sum of its well-calibrated parts. That its structure doesn't completely mirror the psyche of its subject doesn't bother me. I'll wait for another film to do that, and enjoy what this one does so well.

A day or two later, I watched Julia Leigh's lush debut feature Sleeping Beauty, also the story of a young woman with personality troubles and one which takes precisely the opposite approach to its subject as Martha. Just as Durkin carefully regulates information in order to wring out the suspense and mystery, Leigh openly defuses her scenario's inherent tension. Within the story of a girl who willingly allows herself to be drugged and prostituted, and who is gradually overcome by her curiosity about what transpires while she's unconscious, there is an exquisite opportunity for a mystery: a protagonist who must fill in the blanks. This is not what Leigh is after, however, just as she is not out to titillate us with explicit nudity or mortify us with unpleasant sex. From the very first time her heroine, Lucy, goes under, we are made privy to precisely what information her circumstances deny her. These circumstances are presented in a highly formal and emblematic manner (three encounters, each representing a different phylum not just of masculinity but castrated masculinity), and from this structure we can infer Leigh's intentions. Take it or leave it.

The risk of this model is that, if the viewer is not on board with the director's thesis, or if that thesis is not completely thorough, or if it is presented in a manner that is too obscure, the film potentially fails. The viewer leaves it. In so much as that this is a riskier route, perhaps Durkin was hedging his bets by not taking it, but I doubt it. I don't believe he overestimates his work. He chose the type of film he wanted to make, and hit that very particular nail on the head.

Postscript: I watched Almodovar's The Skin I Live In this evening and during the first hour or so considered working its structure into this discussion, before realizing shortly thereafter that I would be biting off more than I could chew in a few paragraphs. Here's a movie which confounds expectations concerning not simply what information to reveal, but when, and how, and through whom. It makes the famous expository sequence in Vertigo seem like an offhand line of dialogue, thrown out midsentence to keep us on track; Almodovar, conversely, takes great delight in not even letting us know we're on a train, much less that it's about to crash.

When it comes to short film distribution in the US, it doesn't get much better than the quarterly Wholphin anthology, and so we're thrilled to be featured front and center in the latest edition. Personally, I'm especially pleased that we're in issue 14, as that number is immediately divisible by seven, which is my favorite digit. As of now, that issue is available online either individually or in a subscription, and it'll be available at fine brick & mortar locales beginning next week. Or on Amazon, if that's your poison.

It's also quite wonderful to be showcased in the company of some of the truly outstanding short films we've had the pleasure of seeing on the festival circuit this past year. The Eagleman Stag by Mikey Please deservedly won the award for Best Animated Short alongside us at SXSW last March, and most recently played in the same block as us at the Hamptons Film Festival. I Am A Girl! is a beautiful and charming documentary about a trangender girl in the Netherlands, which was one of the highlights of our program at the LA Film Festival last summer. Amy Grappell's Quadrangle was one we saw back in 2010, and that it didn't get an Oscar nomination this year (much less a win) is shocking to me. And last but not least, the immortal Zellner Brothers are present on the disc with Sasquatch Birth Journal 2, about which not much more needs to be said.

This isn't the only vehicle through which Pioneer will be available for home viewing, but it's the first, and for the time being the very best. Thanks to everyone at Wholphin for making our best-of scenario come true.