Out of Focus

THE WEEK(END) IN PREVIEW (HAPPY BIRTHDAY MICHAEL POWELL) & MORE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

I was supposed to be moving ... well ... today. That's not happening. I might be moving next week; I will definitely be moving by the end of October. But either way, all that optimisim (not that there was so much of it) I expressed in my otherwise depressing birthday post pretty much got shot to hell between Monday (when I didn't get an apartment I wanted) and today (when I found out I won't be getting a job that I really wanted and have been trying to get for about four months). Yay, life!

In the mean time, I missed a few New York Film Festival press screenings of films I really wanted to see -- especially Manderlay, Tale of Cinema and Three Times, but I did see the excellent third entry in Park Chan-wook's revenge trilogy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.

In fact, there's a new NYFF entry on Gothamist which discusses everything going on at Lincoln Center this weekend, and includes my thoughts on the aforementioned Sympathy for Lady Vengeance as well as Something Like Happiness and the latest film from Irish director Neil Jordan, Breakfast on Pluto.

Oh yeah, and if the NYFF isn't your style, a new Weekly Movie Guide went up yesterday. In it, I mention how Friday at 6 PM, I just know I'll be at MoMA to see Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmacher introduce a screening of one of my absolutely favorite films (definitely part of my top 5 list!) which I have mentioned here several times before, The Red Shoes. MoMA is presenting this screening in honor of what would have been British director Michael Powell's 100th birthday. But here it is, 5:30 PM, and there's no way I'm getting there. Oh well. Just another thing that must be sacrificed to my apartment hunt, move, job search and all around crappy September!

Hi October ... would you like to come out and play? Nicely, please?

"THE BLACK FAMILY" -- THEIR TITLE, NOT MINE

For a long time I have extolled the virtues of CBS's The Amazing Race, which had its new season premiere last night. Before anyone jumps on me to say how the show sucks, while I wouldn't go that far, I found last night's first episode of this new series which for the first time is a "family edition," remarkably boring. I think they fucked up the entire dynamic, not just between teams but within teams too. There's just something off: maybe it's too many people; maybe it's some teams being all adults, some have kids; maybe it's the fact that everyone thinks that every other team is going to underestimate them, but they know better and are actually much smarter than the others -- but I doubt that because that's a common quality. Anyway, hopefully the season will pick-up once more teams get eliminated.

(Spolier to follow. If you're intending on watching last night's episode and haven't yet, don't read further.) However, boring or not, there was one absolutely fascinating thing about last night's show. I haven't had much time to read TWoP or other blogs so I don't know -- maybe this has been covered all over the world wide internets already -- but one team in particular (and it so happened to be the team that was Philiminated kind of shocked me. That would be the Black Family.

Yeah, for those of you who didn't see the show, I don't just mean a family of African-Americans, nor do I just mean the family with the last name "Black." I mean an actual black family with the last name Black, repeatedly called "the Black family" and appearing in the opening credits with the onscreen title "Black Family." And by the way, out of 10 teams, they're the only one that actually is a family of African-Americans. For that matter, they're the only minority family participating.

Now look, obviously, that's their name, and CBS, to its credit, apparently paid no attention in the family's name when casting. But there's something about the appearance of this lovely smiling family appearing on screen with the title "Black Family" among the Gaghans, the Schroeders, the Aiellos, etc. that is a bit disconcerting, and I have a hard time believing that somebody either at CBS or Jerry Bruckheimer Productions didn't think that this was maybe not the best idea.

I mean, am I alone here? Making matters worse, the Blacks (see what I mean?), now having been eliminated, will remain in the opening credits, smiling as the "Black Family" but not appearing again until they have to stand and clap at the finish line some 2-1/2 to 3 months from now for whatever smiling, jubilant white family winds up running in first and claiming that big prize. And there they'll be, the Gaghans, the Schroeders, the Aiellos, the Blacks.... I'm just saying ...

THE GOTHAMIST INTERVIEW: SEPT. DAY 5 -- TERENCE GRAY

The week has not particularly gotten any better. The apartment search is now running my life because the place that I wanted and thought I had a good chance of getting fell through, so I'm back to square one. Which sucks. A lot. In fact, because of needing to concentrate on finding a home, I've even had to skip some NYFF press screenings, including two movies I really wanted to see -- Lars von Trier's latest Manderlay and the latest from Korean director Hong Sang-soo's Tale of Cinema.

But that's all neither here nor there. We had one more Gothamist Interview this month, and it's up today. Starting tonight is the very first New York Television Festival, running through Oct. 3. Today's interview is with Terence Gray, the founder and executive director of the festival.

That's the last interview for the month -- thank god! I'm going to be doing more NYFF stuff still, but right now I really need to concentrate on finding a place to live. Oh well ... back to Craigslist ....

MORE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: NO TIME FOR CHATTER

I came home between press screenings because I had to do a phoner for an interview I'm running on Gothamist this Wednesday. Now I have to run back out to the Walter Reade for the afternoon screening. I'm not packed, and in fact, I still don't have a new apartment. YAY!

But I do have a new set of reviews up at Gothamist for films screening at the NYFF this week. Among them is Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, which not only did I love but is also one of my favorite films of the year so far. (Reviews for Bubble and Capote are also up.)

Much of this year's program is living up to its promise. I particularly enjoyed this morning's press screening of the Japanese film Who's Camus Anyway? but I'll have to save the why's for another time.

SO FAR, SO GOOD: THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL IS HERE

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.

THE GOTHAMIST INTERVIEW: SEPT. DAY 4 -- WARREN LEIGHT

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.

THE WEEK(END) IN PREVIEW: I THINK I'VE OVERCOMMITTED MYSELF

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.

THE GOTHAMIST INTERVIEW: SEPT. DAY 3 -- CHRISTINE VACHON

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.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME: ENTERING MID-THIRTY

Yeah, you see, if I had made it make sense (mid-thirtIES), it wouldn't have rhymed, and some things are just more important you know.

I woke up this morning and re-read what I wrote on my birthday last year: all the people I share a birthday with, my theory of the perfect age (it's 27, in case you don't remember), stuff like that. Looking back, I don't have so much to add today. The past year has been one of the most turbulent of my life, full of change and upheaval that is really only starting to culminate now. At least I hope that's the case. I can't even say for sure. All I know is that at this time last year, I was in a then-3-1/2 year relationship with a woman I thought there was a good chance I would marry; I was looking forward to finally leaving my job at HBO in a couple months; I had just signed a lease for the fifth year in my apartment, anticipating my girlfriend and I probably moving at the end of this new term, but certainly not with anything definite, and I thought 2005 could even be fun.

Well, like the subway and the summer weather and this city I actually love so much (maybe it's an example of battered wives syndrome or something), 2005 has instead mostly decided to smack me down and say, "You want some more, bitch?!" It's been a rough year, or at least a rough summer, and as someone who never has been such a huge birthday-booster anyway, arriving at 34 doesn't do much for me. In fact, surprisingly, I've discovered that I've been calling myself 34 for the past week: succumbing to the inevitable, I suppose. But right now, I just don't have time to concern myself with having a happy birthday. Instead, I have to keep looking at apartments, and keep searching for a new job, and start to pack-up this apartment in which I've now lived longer than any other place in my entire life, save one apartment my mom and I had from the time I was four until 13.

I'll admit; I'm one of those people who places significance in specific dates. Not so much that the date controls events, but rather the date as a milestone to note and remember them. But these dates don't act alone -- they're always the start or end of a period. My summer started on May 3 when two days after the Tribeca Film Festival ended and nearly a month after celebrating our four year anniversary, my girlfriend and I broke-up. I'm hoping that by the end of this weekend -- after a pretty huge job interview this Friday and hopefully having nailed down an apartment by the end of the day Saturday -- I'll have another date to look back on noting this summer-from-hell has come to an end. That date will not be today, my birthday. Today, in my life, is just like any other. I was basically 34 yesterday, and I will continue to be 34 tomorrow even as I enter my 35th year. And hopefully when 2006 rolls around and I look back onto this post, I'll be able to see that this period of transition not only ended a few days from now, but was a valuable one from which I learned and grew. Today, that seems far away, and I guess a whole year, no matter how quickly it seems to fly by, is a pretty long period of time. Although now, as always, it becomes a smaller fraction of my life than before.

Now I have to hurry up and get to a NY Film Festival press screening at 10 AM. Can I just say, seeing movies at 10 AM is much harder than one might expect, especially when you're doing it every day. At least for me, I'm still tired; not completely awake; and sometimes, it becomes difficult to stay awake (although I do) throughout the film.

But whatever -- that's another post. Happy birthday to Jen, happy birthday to Bill and Stephen and Ethan and of course birthdate-mate Alfonso. And happy birthday to me. Can't wait until tomorrow.

YET ANOTHER QUICK NOTE ABOUT THE BEST SHOW YOU'RE NOT WATCHING

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.