Out of Focus

So tonight is the beginning of the 43rd New York Film Festival, an annual event that I usually spend hundreds of dollars on, probably needlessly. Thankfully, this year, I don’t really have to because, say it with me, Yay for press screenings. So far I’ve seen eight of the 11 films screened, and I have to say that I’ve at least liked most of them. Two of them — George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck and Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale both have a great shot at making my 2005 Top 10. Unfortunately, scheduling issues caused me to miss the Polish film I Am (which Filmbrain told me was great, the drug addiction documentary Methadonia, and, most upsettingly, Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers, of which I’ve also heard great things. Unfortunately, I had a pretty major job interview today at 4 PM for a position I’m kind of dying to get, and the screening wasn’t going to be over until 4:30. I may try to go tomorrow morning to the public screening, but I have a ton of apartment hunting to still do, so maybe now.

I hope to not miss anymore press screenings, though, and don’t plan to unless a job comes through which would obviously preclude me from attending anything during the day. I’m trying to provide thorough and complete coverage of this year’s NYFF for Gothamist, and that started today with this post in which you’ll find reviews of Good Night, and Good Luck, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, L’Enfant and Avenge But One of My Two Eyes, all which screen this weekend. I’ve actually also already seen Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble as well, but I simply didn’t have time to write about it yet. Other films screening this weekend include Regular Lovers and Methadonia, along with the fantastic Shochiku Company sidebar series. On Monday, I’ll have more reviews at Gothamist including for The Squid and the Whale and Capote.

I haven’t been too enamored with most of the short films I’ve seen so far, although Stop! screening tonight with Good Night, and Good Luck is a very fun and clever six minute piece from The Netherlands, and I was on the fence about Columbia MFA student Talal Hadid’s Your Dark Hair Ihsan which screens with Avenge But One of My Two Eyes. However, Joan Stein’s Solidarity (which screens with Paradise Now) was a big bore and relatively awful.

Today’s Gothamist Interview is with Warren Leight who just might be my new writer hero. If you don’t know Leight by name, chances are you’ve seen or at least heard of his work. He won a Tony Award for the play Side Man. He has a new play officially opening this weekend called No Foreigners Beyond This Point, and Sunday night is the season premiere of Law & Order: Criminal Intent on which he’s a writer and co-executive producer. In 1993 he wrote and directed the wonderfully clever romantic comedy The Night We Never Met which I vividly remember seeing and loving at an early press screening. In the interview, he mentions that people occasionally say to him that it’s one of the most underrated romantic comedies of the 1990s, and I would most certainly agree.

But why is he my new hero, you ask? Because while talking to him on the phone last week, for the first time in my life I heard a writer talk about his working habits in a way to which I could completely relate. I guess the most specific passage that I printed over at Gothamist would be this one:

You know, I guess there’s two kinds of alcoholics; there’s also two kinds of writers. I’m a binge writer. I’ve always been a binge writer. Again, that’s why TV is fine for me. You know, I’ll have three days to write a whole script, and I’ll go 20 hours a day for two days or something like that. There’s something about just disappearing into the world and coming out with a first draft that’s a bit of a narcotic for me I suppose. Something happens when I get into that world, that I don’t have any sense of time. I’ll look up, and 14 hours will have gone by, and I’ll stand, and my legs are all cramped up. I have writer friends who set the alarm every morning, wake up, make a cup of coffee, and sit down at the typewriter. I don’t understand what they’re doing.

Halleluljah! Tell me about it. I’ve tried to force myself into that make-it-a-habit mode, and it just never works. It makes everything harder. He also talks about how he needs deadlines; that he’ll always do what it takes to get it done; that sometimes he’ll agree to a deadline (for a script reading, for example) before he even knows what he’s going to write about. I relate.

Two years ago, I was determined to finally write a complete draft of a screenplay idea I had had for a few years. So what did I do? I actually paid to take a screenwriting class, not because I wanted someone to teach me how to write a screenplay — I’ve had plenty of classes and read books and read hundreds if not thousands of screenplays — but just to give myself a deadline. I’m terrible at setting deadlines for myself because if I don’t make it, who do I disappoint or fail? Just me, and in my own head (here comes the dysfunction), I’m not always important enough. But if I spend several hundred dollars paying someone else, you better believe I’m going to complete that draft. And I did. And now, two years later, “Dwight and the Lady in White” (that’s just a working title!) remains in that complete first draft state. I really need to get back to it, but how without a hard deadline?

In fact, the best part of my conversation with Warren was a bit that I didn’t print on Gothamist, just because of length — as it was, I cut well over 2000 words from the final interview and it’s still rather long. But I’ll tell you what he said here.

Honestly, the self-loathing … the worst thing in the world is how you end up hating yourself because you’re NOT one of those other kinds of writers. I guess … here’s my tip, Aaron: just accept it. Give yourself … It took me 20 years to figure this out. Impose a deadline on yourself, but the only way it works for me is to have eight people waiting, or something like that. Tell somebody, Oh, I’m going to get you a screenplay in a month. But otherwise, I don’t know. How would you finish?

Yup. I hear ya. I may not always be the best writer, but the “self-loathing”? I got that shit nailed, yo!

One more interview will run next week, but I have to say, as busy as I’ve been and as difficult and time-consuming the past two weeks have been — and no, as of this moment, I still do not have a new apartment or job, although I have a big job interview in under three hours that I’m really hoping for — the interviews I’ve done this go around — with Warren, Christine Vachon and Liev Schreiber are easily among my favorites. Maybe because I actually got something personal out of conducting and editing each of them. I don’t know … but I guess it’s why I keep doing this.

You see, I’m trying to see every New York Film Festival press screening, but having to edit that Christine Vachon interview and then also write this week’s Gothamist Movie Guide, I didn’t get to bed until nearly 4 AM which made the 9 AM screening at the Walter Reade just about impossible. Now sure, I was up in time for the 11:30 AM screening, but I realized that if I wanted to make Capote today at 2 PM and The Notorious Bettie Page tonight at MoMA, then I had to get to work on the really good but time consuming interview that I’m running tomorrow.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that I still don’t have a new place to live? T-Minus eight days and counting! I actually found a place — a share in Ft. Greene — that I really like; I just don’t know if I’m going to get it. Those who know me will not only stop and say, “Wait, Aaron, isn’t Ft. Greene in Brooklyn? You couldn’t be moving to Brooklyn!” would be even more surprised to hear about some other characteristics of exactly where this apartment is. But I’ll save those surprising elements, and some of the less surprising ones, to another time if and hopefully when I get it and can relax slightly on the home front. Literally.

Anyway, I’m seeing tons of movies, but they’re all NYFF press screenings for the most part. I don’t think I get to slow down until this move is finished, and I definitely need to be working a little less on things that aren’t paying me money, which is most of the writing right now. But I actually enjoy doing the movie guide and am still open to any and all suggestions. It is most definitely a work in progress.

Simply put, Christine Vachon is one of the most important producers to have come upon the New York independent film scene, and since at least the early ’90s, she and her company Killer Films have consistently put out daring and provocative films. Everybody might now always like all the films to come out of the Killer stable, but possibly more than any other production company, and certainly more than any other company that regularly produces as many films has Killer does every year, Vachon and her partners Pam Koeffler and Katie Roumel have never been afraid to help filmmakers tackle any subject or story no matter how seemingly unfilmable or taboo it may be.

Tonight MoMA begins a two-plus week retrospective honoring the past 10 years (really more like 15) of Vachon and Killer Films: “Swoon: Ten Years of Killer Films”. It’s really a great series, showcasing the best of what has come from the company, and it provided a great opportunity for me to talk to Christine. That conversation is now, more or less, today’s Gothamist Interview. It really is a wonder that with all the other indie film companies that have come and gone over my nine years in New York, Killer is really the only one that survives, intact, as it was, at least of its size, importance and prominence. Good Machine? Split into Focus Features and This Is That. The Shooting Gallery? Shot down. Even a much bigger organization — Miramax — you could say is, for all intents and purposes — dead. Regardless of whether the new Miramax attains any large degree of importance and stature, the company that was often at the hub of the New York film industry will basically cease to exist in just over a week.

But Killer is still going strong, and so is Christine. I’ll be at MoMA tonight for the screening of The Notorious Bettie Page, and I can’t wait.

So you may have noticed that I didn’t write anything about the Emmys. As cinetrix mentioned yesterday, it’s a total cliche to write posts about why one isn’t writing posts, yet I find myself spiraling further and further into a deep dark pit of cliche everyday, so why not continue the trend. As I mentioned in the last post, I simply didn’t have time to properly write a pre- or post-Emmy, uhm, post. So instead, I just IMed during the (amazingly horrible, worst Emmy ever?) broadcast with Gothamist’s Jen Chung, and she included a comment from me here and there.

But after last night’s season premiere of Arrested Development, I’m more annoyed than ever. You know, I didn’t have a problem with the Emmy’s making bad choices for their awards: it was just a horribly designed and produced show. Somehow, even in bringing the show in on time — three hours on the dot, I believe — it still felt longer than any Emmy broadcast in recent memory. I knew we were in for a bad night when the opening number featured Earth, Wind and Fire singing “September,” with rewritten lyrics to make it all about the TV season, only to have them joined by the Black Eyed Peas, who have now officially not just jumped the shark but are slaloming back-and-forth over the damn thing. I throw that show-opening number right up there with Rob Lowe and Snow White at the Oscars as among the worst openings ever.

But what really got me was the sympathy Best Comedy Series award for the now defunct Everybody Loves Raymond. Last night’s season premiere of Arrested Development reminded me why it’s the best show on television anywhere — yes, including HBO and FX. There is not another series that top to bottom — writing, casting, production value — is as near perfection as Arrested, and if the third season premiere was any indication, it’s just going to keep getting better-and-better. Last night’s episode was, to my eyes at least, one of the best I’ve ever seen in the series. They pack so much story and so many laughs into 22 minutes, it would take almost that long just to summarize everything that happens.

Arrested Development is on Mondays at 8 PM this season. It also is probably getting its last chance from Fox which has, to its credit, valiantly stood by the show (most likely because there would be an enormous critical uproar if it was cancelled), although they haven’t left it in one time slot to let people find it. Really, Mondays at 8 is a pretty empty slot on TV this year, so please, if you’re not watching Arrested, give it a shot, and more than once because it takes a couple episodes to really get into the rhythm of it all. It’s well-worth it though, and if you’re someone who’s always complaining about nothing good being on television but you’ve never seen it? Stop complaining. You’re part of the reason the good shows get cancelled while perennial no-laugh-crap like Will & Grace manages to continue getting Emmy noms.

OK, not sure what happened, but this post was supposed to go up YESTERDAY. I had it ready to go, and Typepad should have automatically published it around 11 AM, but for some reason it didn’t. Not that it really matters. I’m guessing most people who read this blog also read Gothamist. Anyway, whatever. The following has gone unchanged.

NO TIME. That’s my life right now, particularly because of this apartment hunt. It’s exhausting, and now I have only 10 days left. Meanwhile, this week the press screenings start for the New York Film Festival and I’m planning on going to everything and covering for Gothamist. Plus, there’s still that nasty little thing about needing an actual PAYING job.

Anyway, in the midst of all that, today’s Gothamist Interview is with the head of programming for the Food Network, Bob Tuschman. Whether you watch Food Network or not, this is actually a really interesting interview (and credit has to go primarily to Lily who took the lead on this one — I just added a question or two and edited a bit). Plus, if you want to know where people at Food Network eat (or at least Bob), he’ll tell ya.

Lily and I have a break from the interviews tomorrow and Wednesday, but we’ll be back with two more (big ones!) on Thursday and Friday and one more next week. Until then …

Another month, another series of Gothamist Interviews, and the ones we’re doing for September are a great group starting today with a chat I had (just yesterday, in fact) with Liev Schreiber. target=”_blank”>Schreiber is one of today’s most talented actors working in both film and theater. His recent performance on Broadway as Ricky Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross, for which he won a Tony, was simply amazing, especially considering that throughout the run of the show, he was in post-production on his first effort as a feature film writer-director with the adaptation of Everything Is Illuminated.

The first thing one notices when speaking to Schreiber is how damned articulate he is. Sure, he’s an actor, and speaking is how he makes his living, but not all actors can present their ideas verbally as well as he does, at least in my brief experience with him. As I transcribed and edited the interview last night, I kept kicking myself for not asking this or that follow-up. For example, in response to one of our generic questions, Schreiber mentions how terrible his memory is. Well, duh! Might it not have been a good and obvious idea to ask, “Hmmm, how does that affect you as an actor?” And each time I read through it, I see at least two or three other moments like that.

But whatever — when one has only 30 minutes on the phone with somebody, it’s hard enough to keep everything organized and cover the topics you want while still retaining the freedom to take the conversation wherever it may go.

And what of the movie, which opens today? Well, as I mentioned in Gothamist’s Weekly Movie Guide yesterday, Everything Is Illuminated is a solid even accomplished first-time effort that will taste better, if you’ve read the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, if you do your best to forget the novel upon which it’s based. In fact, I didn’t know — and I’d assume a majority of people who read Foer’s book don’t know — that Schreiber started work on the script before there even was a published novel. Instead, his script was adaptated from a short story called “The Very Rigid Search” published in the New Yorker which Foer later expanded into the novel. I was particularly impressed, in fact, with Schreiber’s seeming recognition of his own limitations in adapting Foer’s story both as a writer and director, and his intelligent thoughts on the very idea of interrupting the relationship between reader and book by creating a filmed adaptation. Although people don’t watch movies with director’s notes nor should they have to, his comments do, in fact, clarify some things that aren’t so much questions the movie itself presents as much as concerns a viewer might have in trying to connect the film to the novel.

I was also struck by the fact that, while not ruling it out, Schreiber doesn’t seem to have a burning desire to direct again. He quite bluntly states that unless a particularly personal piece of material comes his way, he’s content exploring his creative and artistic tendencies through acting. That’s certainly refreshing to hear from an actor, and helps illuminate (yes, I know) one reason why he may have in fact been successful in this first effort: it wasn’t a vanity project for him. It was something that came his way about which he felt connected and passionate. It’s certainly refreshing to hear an actor speak in this way, and it’s also probably why this conversation joins a small group of my favorite interviews. Go check it out.

These weeks are flying by, and I’m not actually getting to anything. I did have a bit of a DiVo’d-from-TCM day last Sunday where I watched, among other things, the absolutely brilliant Preston Sturges comedy The Palm Beach Story. Does anybody anywhere ever write lines like as smart, witty and biting as Sturges once did? My favorite: “That’s one of the tragedies of this life — that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous.”

Of course, that has nothing to do with the absolutely ridiculous number of new releases (many of them quite intriguing) and, as usual, great repertory programming happening around town over the next seven days. Everything Is Illuminated is worth seeing, but set your feelings about the book at the door. Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, on the other hand, while certainly not bad was a bit of a disappointment, and I’m not even such a huge Burton fan.

But whatever. We’ve got RESFEST in town and CMJ Filmfest and a slew of other interesting new releases like Thumbsucker and Lord of War. And I retain hope that Proof isn’t too much of a mess because the play was so good. Plus Notorious at BAM and The Lost Weekend at MMI, and … oy.

Why am I babbling about this here, though? It (and more) is all over in this week’s Gothamist Weekly Movie Guide.

Could we please just slow the hell down. Seriously. August flew by. September is nearly half over. And I really can’t tolerate this anymore, so someone just put a little bit of freeze on the timeline if you could. I’d appreciate it.

Danke.

No, the “Gothamist Movie Guide” does not take me an entire week to write — just several late night hours. Instead, I was helping out with this which finally happened and ended on Saturday. And it took up the majority of my life last week. I also have a Gothamist Interview week forthcoming (and I’m chatting this week with three huge names, to my mind, covering the worlds of New York theater, film and TV), and the New York Film Festival popping-up with the press screenings (yay press accreditation!) starting tomorrow. And of course, the continuous job hunt.

Add to all of that, I now find myself in a position which every New Yorker dreads, probably more than anything else other than actual catastrophic tragedy that might involve death, injury, etc. Namely, while I am still unemployed, I now also need to find a new place to live … within the next 17 days (and counting).

I’ve been in my current apartment in MILFland (a/k/a the Upper West Side) for five years. That is the second-longest I’ve lived anywhere, EVER! I don’t mean in the 17 years (oy!) since I moved away from home; I mean in my one-week-shy of 34 years (double oy!) of life. My mom and I lived in one apartment for nine years from the time I was four until 13, but otherwise, neither of my parents stayed in an apartment for more than 3-4 years while I lived with them, and until now, the longest I had spent in any one place was my first studio apartment in Westwood while at UCLA. I moved in during my third year and was there for three years. (And WOW would I kill for that studio now. Other than facing the cement foundation of the next building and becoming pitch black by 3:30 PM during the summer, it was enormous by NYC standards, with a large separate eat-in-kitchen and a sleep-in (way bigger than walk-in) closet with a built in dresser/armoire.) Ever since then it’s been two years tops — until W. 83rd Street.

I’m out of practice, and, of course, I’ve accumulated more stuff (primarily of the books/CDs/DVDs varieties) than ever. Other than my ex-girlfriend who lived here with me for 2-1/2 of the past five years (until May), I haven’t shared an apartment with anyone in nearly a decade — I’m pretty sure my last roommate and I moved out of our gorgeous yet dangerous LA apartment (it was smack-dab in between the Korean gang- and Latino gang-turfs — I got mugged a block from it at knife point while in my car … but that’s a story for another time, or hell, maybe I’ve already told it) in early 1996.

Anyway, I digress … or at least slightly. I sent out a mass email last night to just about everyone I know in NYC (although it was late, I was tired, and I may have missed a few), and now I’m going to do something from which I usually refrain on this blog: not rant about movies and TV and instead just throw out my little request for help to the blogosphere. I will certainly be returning to far more interesting items (the new TV season is here! the new TV season is here!) very soon — or at least a return to the stuff I do usually write about on this blog. Labelling it “interesting” might be too much, of course.

With that said, the email I sent out last night (mentioning essentially the whats and wheres of what I’m looking for) said this:

Continue reading “AARON GETS PERSONAL – WHERE HAVE I BEEN?”