[Leonard Proxauf in Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band)]

This episode of the Plastic Podcast concludes our conversation about the Academy Award nominations. Rob and J. Robert talk about the nominees in the other major categories and mention a few overlooked favorites of 2009. Here's part one.

0:00 Intro: The Conversation Continues
0:18 Best Acting Categories
6:46 Best Animated Feature Film
10:31 Best Original Screenplay
13:10 Best Adapted Screenplay
15:14 Best Documentary Feature
25:50 Best Foreign Language Film
35:18 Other Faves of 2009: Pontypool, Two Lovers
38:07 Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey, 1937), Text of Light (Brakhage, 1974)
40:25 Done

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Duration: 40:47

Notes

• Films not named above that are nevertheless discussed at some length in this podcast, given the time constraints: The Messenger, Food, Inc., The White Ribbon, Coraline, The Princess and the Frog, Burma VJ, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, Forbidden Lie$.
• Actor whose name is mis-pronounced by Rob in both halves of this conversation: Christoph Waltz, who — guess what — is Austrian. Rob will say valts from now on.
• Rob on Pontypool, the 3D of Coraline, Food, Inc., Burma VJ, and his list of 2009 faves
• List of Oscar nominees
• Part one of our conversation

[Avatar]

This episode of the Plastic Podcast is the first half of a conversation about the Academy Award nominations. Rob and J. Robert talk about the Best Picture and Best Director categories.

0:00 Intro
1:16 Avatar
7:21 Expansion of the Best Picture Category
10:17 Our Favorite and Least Favorite Nominees
12:03 An Education
14:01 Up in the Air
18:20 The Hurt Locker
20:51 Precious
22:30 2009 as a Whole/Hole
27:31 District 9
29:15 The Blind Side Blind
30:30 Inglourious Basterds
35:18 Outro

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Duration: 35:24

Further Reading

• Our previous chat about the Coens' A Serious Man
• Rob's review of Inglourious Basterds
• List of Oscar nominees

[Michael Stuhlbarg in the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man]

On this episode of the Plastic Podcast, Rob and J. Robert talk about the new film by the Coen brothers, A Serious Man, and the work of Chantal Akerman, especially her 1993 film D'Est (From the East).

0:00 Intro
2:01 The Coen Brothers and A Serious Man
26:03 Overlap
28:34 Chantal Akerman and D'Est
59:21 Outro

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Duration: 59:32

Further Reading

• Rob's blog post about A Serious Man
• Forgot to mention: Ben Russell, whose intriguing new film Let Each One Go Where He May has been receiving accolades at film festivals this fall, cites Akerman's D'Est as a major influence, along with the work of Jean Rouch.

Malcolm Gladwell's critique of Free that appears in the latest New Yorker is a sharply and persuasively argued counterpoint to Wired editor Chris Anderson, whose new book (which I haven't read) expands on the adage that says "information wants to be free." If it does, Anderson seems to ask, what does that mean for our economy? Well, it likely means that anyone who has been making money on the scarcity of information needs to find another source. Newspapers, for example.

Gladwell's comments about the cost of running YouTube are witty, although they may not apply to journalists who work on a much smaller scale. But his overall argument concludes with this somewhat saggier bit of logic about the drug industry:

The expensive part of making drugs has never been what happens in the laboratory. It’s what happens after the laboratory, like the clinical testing, which can take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. In the pharmaceutical world, what’s more, companies have chosen to use the potential of new technology to do something very different from their counterparts in Silicon Valley. They’ve been trying to find a way to serve smaller and smaller markets — to create medicines tailored to very specific subpopulations and strains of diseases — and smaller markets often mean higher prices. The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide. That’s the quintessential modern drug: a high-tech, targeted remedy that took a very long and costly path to market. Myozyme is priced at three hundred thousand dollars a year. Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property—information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.

The adage "information wants to be free" doesn't imply that the owners of the information want it to be free. The history of the information age is littered with companies who fought tooth and nail against such an idea, and that history is still being written, with new examples every day. I'll smile at his poke at the metaphor's anthropomorphism ("But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money.") But it's just a descriptive phrase, like saying the molecules of a gas want to be far apart, which doesn't mean we should give them them vote.

His coup de grâce about the drug companies who make expensive products for a niche market contains a joke that misreads the word "free." Information wants to be free from constraint, which probably, eventually means free of cost, too, but that's a side effect. Gladwell ignores the fact that the drug companies can make expensive drugs only because they've been able to control the information for a brief window.

Amazon wants their raw material for the Kindle (information) to be free (to them), and drug companies want their products (information, essentially) to be expensive (to their customers). There's nothing confusing about that, but what the adage implies is that when the raw material is information, keeping this status quo will be difficult. Selling information for a price will eventually be hard. If information wanted to be expensive, there'd be no need for the patent battles that drug companies are waging to keep it bottled up and no waiting period for a generic drug. Unconstrained, those molecules eventually leak out, and how long can artificial constraints remain effective?

I'm not sure what I think of Anderson's thesis, but Gladwell's example, taken a bit further, makes the case that he's trying to debunk.

[Steve Earle as Walon in The Wire, Season 1, Episode 7: One Arrest]

Singer-songwriter Steve Earle pops up here and there in all five seasons of The Wire. Half way through the first season, he makes the first of several appearances as Walon, a recovering addict and a Narcotics Anonymous mentor and sponsor to one of the series' major characters. At the end of the second season, Earle's song "Feel Alright" is the prominent backdrop for the season-capping montage. (Every season ends with one; the one that closes the season about blue-collar dock workers belongs to Earle.) And in the fifth season, Earle opens every show with a cover of the Tom Waits song "Way Down in the Hole."

But the appearance that makes me smile the most is the one in which Earle's face and voice are nowhere to be seen or heard. It's buried in the tenth episode of the first season, in a familiar bit of dialogue:

Jimmy McNulty: Why New York?
Omar Little: Must be something happening out there, man. Too big a town, know what I mean?

By the way, in case you missed this tweet from Darren Hughes: Alan Sepinwall is writing detailed synopses and analyses of The Wire, episode by episode. They're a great way to revisit the show. Sepinwall is churning up lots of new ideas.

[The Lost World (Hoyt, 1925)]

[UP Concept Art]

[Rendered Still from UP]

[Erika Bók in Béla Tarr's Sátántangó]

Look at this image from Béla Tarr's film Sátántangó. In one long tracking shot, a girl named Estike played by Erica Bók walks down a dirt road, and the camera tracks backward in front of her. Often we can see what must be — barring an unlikely digital effect or an overly elaborate crane — the freshly made tracks of the camera dolly, clearly visible on the ground behind her. We accept them without question because they make sense within the story: maybe they were made by a cart or by a vehicle that recently travelled down the same road.

In other words, a mark made by the machinery of cinema has an internal explanation within the narrative, and it's only when we stop to think about how the film works, technically, that we even notice it. But that's exactly what Béla Tarr's films ask us to do, especially the 7.5-hour Sátántangó. They ask us to stop and think, to meditate on what we're seeing, and he gives us plenty of time to do that with shots of people walking for minutes at a time.

Lately I've been interested in films that, intentionally or not, allow the evidence of their production to harmonize with their themes. Such evidence isn't an error but an amplification, a subtle echo, a brush stroke.

The first issue of Unspoken Journal appeared today, and it's dedicated to Tarr. I've contributed a rumination on Sátántangó.

While Sátántangó is often described as a detailed self-contained world, like all films it shows evidence of the filmmaking process, sometimes unintentionally as in the photographer’s reflection, sometimes playfully like the visible brush strokes of the Impressionists, and sometimes individually in an active viewer’s mind. What is most unusual about Sátántangó is that the film itself seems to mingle with its own themes of external, quasi-spiritual forces. As the characters react to foreign elements, the cinematic machinery breaches the narrative hull, hinting at something outside the film: the filmmaker, viewer, and apparatus of its art.

Read more at Unspoken Journal, edited and assembled by Yvette Biró, Edwin Mak and HarryTuttle. The issue is full good stuff.

[Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody in The Brothers Bloom]

On the triumphant return of the Plastic Podcast after a months-long hiatus, Rob talks with filmmaker Rian Johnson about his second film, The Brothers Bloom, starring Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, and Rinko Kikuchi.

0:00 Intro: Where Have You Been?
4:10 Interview: Rian Johnson on The Brothers Bloom
21:17 Outro

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Duration: 23:04

Further Reading

• An excerpt from this interview at Paste
• Rian's Bloom Blog

[Alex Descas and Claire Denis on the set of 35 Shots of Rum]

After jotting down some initial impressions of Claire Denis' wonderful, warm-hearted new film, I sat down for a conversation with Denis in Toronto. As Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times recently, 35 Shots of Rum is "a movie of few words and little psychology that relies mostly on the physical vocabulary of faces and bodies to convey feelings too complex to be verbalized."

That's often true of Denis' films, and when I talked with her I found that this one has a very personal connection, as well. She spoke about the great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, about her grandfather, and about the interplay of work and family that appears in Ozu's films, in her own film, and even in her band of regular collaborators.

35 Shots of Rum plays March 13 and 15 at the Walter Reade Theatre in New York as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series.

* * *

Robert Davis: I saw your film yesterday for the first time, and I'm going to try to see it once more before I leave Toronto, just because I always feel like your films take a little bit of time. I like to figure out how to watch them. It's such a beautiful movie.

And what I discovered as I was watching is that it's an homage to Late Spring and Ozu!

Claire Denis: Yes. [smiles] I think I would not have been pushed or—

I've been dreaming for many years of making an homage to Ozu, and this particular film was possible for me to use as an homage to Ozu, because actually it's the story of my grandfather and my mother. She was raised by her father. And once I took her to see a retrospective of Ozu, and she really had a sort of shock to see that film [Late Spring]. That was like maybe ten, fifteen years ago, and I told her, "Maybe, once, I will try to make a film like that for you."

On the other hand I was a little bit afraid, and when I saw Hou Hsiao-hsien's film, the film he made in Japan—

RD: Café Lumière?

CD: Café Lumière, the homage, I thought maybe it's simpler to make an homage to Ozu. Maybe my shyness should be reconsidered. Maybe it's possible.

RD: What was the fear, do you think? Just that he's a master, that he—?

CD: No, my fear was that I'd be fulfilled with my love for his film and therefore not create a real relationship with my film. I realized this was a little bit stupid, because the minute I was in the film and with my characters and actors, I can't say I forgot Ozu, but on the other hand I was concerned by that story, those characters.

Continue Reading

• Neat: David Bordwell observes that the Coraline animators took an unusual approach to perspective and depth cues. (via Where the Stress Falls)
• Troubling: New Yorker Films is closing. The loss of this major DVD and theatrical distributor, whose roster is heavy with the work of international master filmmakers, could have a significant impact on what we can see in the States. Related: the history of New Yorker Films was discussed on The Leonard Lopate Show two years ago. (via Long Pauses)
• Uncertain: Paul Starr gives the difficult problem of newspaper viability a thorough, rigorous examination in The New Republic. Remember that Roger Ebert called the newspaper film critic a canary in this coal mine. But here's another point of view, about magazines, from Cathie Black.