I had an image pop into my head this morning: a large, expansive book store with its shelves crammed full of books.  Who reads all of these things?  Who sorts through them?  Who plucks the unlikely ugly one from the far corner, the one wedged between two bold, flashy great American novels?

It reminded me of how short our time is, and even if we spent every day reading and reading and reading, we could never manage to fill our brains with a thousandth of the material worth absorbing in this world.

It's depressing.  But on the other hand, perhaps it's not.  Perhaps it's liberating and wonderful to know that there is so much amazing, life-enriching and thought-expanding work out there, that we shouldn't feel bad about skipping the drivel.  And it's encouraging to think that there are so many needles in the ever-growing haystack of thought and entertainment, that we can fill our lives with an unending sense of discovery.

Perhaps it's just nice to know that if we write something worthwhile, there might be a place on a bookshelf for it, somewhere out there.  And someone, somewhere, might actually pick it up and read it.  Or even stumble across and order it off of amazon.com.

Which brings me to movies.  It's horribly scary sometimes to imagine all of the content being produced and looking for distribution.  The number of films being sent to festivals is exponentially higher, and the number of films who get distribution from a festival is getting lower.  Let's face it, folks: the mere act of making a movie is no longer that big of a deal.  Home movies get mistaken for art, and art gets mistaken for boring.  How do we navigate these vast and stormy seas?  How can a filmmaker ever hope to have his work seen, much less be paid for it?

The bookstore is growing, the shelves are expanding in every direction.  But people are still reading... now more than ever.  And if there's hope for those little eclectic books, who take a reader hours, days, or weeks to get through, then there's certainly hope for independent film, which only requires a one or two hour (or minute depending on the film) investment from its audience.

As our methods of viewing and distributing movies expands, it's daunting to consider what method is appropriate for an aspiring filmmaker's work.  Is the goal simply to get work seen by as many people as possible, or is maintaining a certain level of prestige or quality control important to the film's integrity and the filmmaker's reputation?  YouTube offers an enormous audience for mass consumption, but does little to lend the film any more cultural weight than a 1980's music video remix or a clip of someone's yawning cat.  Vimeo and other video services offer higher quality and a more cultured audience, but still marginalize the work.  And between these free venues and the traditional box office there are countless other methods of distribution and exhibition, almost all of them untested against the marketplace, much less that of time.

But I'm beginning to believe that these venues will eventually help filmmakers get their work seen (and even paid for), even if they do not serve as the actual avenue.  As expectations for how we receive our media begin to change, more and more subcultures and micro-demographics are being created.  We begin to turn to new places for our quality content, and not rely on traditional modes of discovery.  I believe that the dream of the big box office distribution will always exist for filmmakers, and I don't believe that the movie theatre experience will ever go away (that's a whole other topic for discussion), but I do think that we're going to see new hope for independent film unlike any we've seen before... once this cultural shift begins to settle, and once the industry has figured out how to incorporate and redefine itself.

And we can hold out hope that if we keep trying, keep pressing, eventually we'll get that coveted spot on the Best Seller's shelf.  But even if we don't, we can take solace in the fact that the authenticity of our voice now has a microphone, however small, and that now, more than ever, audiences are willing to browse the back shelf, too.

Mike Leigh's 2008 film is one of the best I've seen in a long while.  It's an insightful journey into the world of Poppy, an ever-positive, funny, and goofy woman whose undying optimism both inspires and infuriates those around her.  We travel with her through her wild nights out with friends, her silly girl-talk sessions with her sisters and flat mate, her adventures in elementary school teaching, and her dabbling attempts at romance.  But it's the darker experiences, the ones that shake her, that reveal the most about her uncommon wisdom.  

Sally Hawkins is unforgettable as Poppy, but equally stunning is Eddie Marsan as the embittered driving instructor Scott.  Their relationship is a microcosm of the dialog of the entire film, and when the two personalities crash we can't help but be blown away.

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY does what most of my favorite films do: establish a tone and texture based on the main character's sub-culture or perception of reality, and then throw it into disarray by exposing them to a conflicting worldview, or merely through the "piercing light of reality."  Leigh manages to take what some would consider a superficial, or just plain obnoxious, woman and transform her into a fascinating individual with whom we not only empathize, but learn from.

Bob Byington's new film has a lot in common with its predecessor R.S.O. (Registered Sex Offender): shot in Austin in a psuedo-documentary style, it follows a character wandering from one strange or mundane encounter to the next. The character runs into a lot of other quirky folk who happen to be played by fellow filmmakers or familiar Austin film scene faces. There is a plot, but it's largely hidden beneath the characters' personalities, the disconnect between scenes, and the seemingly stubborn avoidance of traditional story structure.

Unlike R.S.O.'s main character, who was funny but somewhat despicable, Harmony (the film's main character) is an every man of sorts: his girlfriend recently broke up with him (she is "still breaking his heart" because she hasn't finished the job), and he's sad about it. As the film goes along, he gradually works his pain out through his songwriting.

It was an odd experience watching this film in Los Angeles: far away from the familiar context of SXSW, where films with Byington's quirky humor and sensibility are the norm, the film felt both more stylistically bold and artistically less important here. R.S.O. had some brilliant interplay with the concept of merging documentary and narrative film (at one point the film's producer intervenes on screen and tells the lead character he isn't providing the type of reformation they were hoping for), but there's no such high mindedness that I could detect in HARMONY. It's more like Austin mumblecore meets THE OFFICE. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: there are lots of laughs to be had, and there are some great performances by a splendid supporting cast. To a particular audience, that will sound like a perfect unison of youthful love-spurned angst and deadpan humor. And on that level, the film is successful.

But I think it's interesting to consider the film as a representation of the work being done by a fairly good sized group of working independent filmmakers. In fact, the film is almost as intriguing as a cultural study as it is as a stand alone film. Byington is just one of a league of nearing-middle-age white male artists making films that explore these same themes through a similar aesthetic, whether wholly intentional and self reflective or not. Their rejection of traditional "production value" can either be interpreted as a striving for an authentic texture, or as a sign of amateurish meandering. Or, perhaps, as a sign that on some level production value no longer holds any intrinsic value (in defense of HARMONY, it does not beg us to take it seriously in the same way the other films I'm referencing might). How does it compare to a similar rebellion in the literary arts during the 20th century? The fact that this film was developed at the Sundance Institute (which "picked the project from among 2,200-plus others during that grant cycle as the sole recipient of its Annenberg Fellowship") and premiered at New Directors / New Films reveals a lot about the current landscape of independent filmmaking in America.

I'm at a crossroads: I hesitate to pass judgement, and see the language employed as something only newly made malleable, a (potential) movement in its infancy, and its speakers as harbingers of a further democratization of the medium that may or may not yield positive results. I fear I continue to beat a dead horse by covering this topic, but I must again reiterate the increase in angle of my eyebrow upon viewing this film amidst a unique audience. I cannot tell if the films continue to gain traction and expand their admirers, or if they have begun to grow stale in the public's eye.

At the end of the day, the fact remains: this film and others like it speak to a particular demographic of filmgoers in a unique way.

I haven't seen BOXING HELENA, the debut of writer / director Jennifer Lynch, but I would like to.  By most accounts, it's more successful than her followup, which feels about how you would expect a film by a woman who grew up on the set of BLUE VELVET to feel.

Ultimately the film just felt uneven and not quite fully conceived, despite some strong performances and very intense moments.  Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond play a pair of FBI detectives investigating a string of murders in the middle of Nowheresville, America.  They encounter a group of imbecile cops that also happen to be abusive, along with the survivors of a recent murder spree: a little girl whose family was killed, and the drug-addicted young woman she seems to have bonded with (the scene-stealing Pell James).  

We begin to sense that something is wrong (whether intended by the director or not is unclear) when Sam Hallaway (Pullman) sets up the witnesses for their interviews: rather than taking his time and visiting them one-by-one, in person, he sets them up in three separate rooms (one of the crooked cops is also a witness), has them interviewed by different people, and simultaneously watches all three take place on a set of video monitors.  Huh?

From there the film loses a coherent point of view or structure, as we whimsically follow the different witnesses' stories, which kind of blur into a single recreation of a very drawn-out police pullover gone wrong.  The twist at the end of the film feels forced, but does lead to one of the film's most memorable moments, when, as the director described in the Q&A, the killer "bong hits" the victim's dying breath.

I would enjoy seeing Lynch direct a stronger script, because she does have a distinct style and sensibility that might be mesmerizing if lent to the right story.  Here, though, her talents can't overcome the lack of narrative compass.  While this style might have been adopted from her father's often obtuse plot lines, this film lacks the surrealism and thematic unity to weave the pieces together into anything more than a curiosity. 

I appreciated the story and its timeliness, but the amateurish acting by all cast members other than Eastwood only occasionally served the film's eagerly genuine tone. Compared with my follow-up viewing of HALF NELSON, this film felt too manufactured even for an Eastwood film.  I did, however, enjoy Eastwood's direct confrontation of his character's stubborn racism, and the play on his own mythos.

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