Wednesday
Mar252009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009 at 4:44PM Who Doodled on the New ' Away We Go' Poster?
I said my piece about the trailer for Away We Go last week. The new
Sam Mendes movie appears, based on those two minutes, to be almost purposefully indie, like
it's trying way too hard to position itself outside the mainstream. Of course, with an Oscar-winning director and a star who's on one of TV's most successful comedies, that's hard to do.
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Reader Comments (14)
To me that's an even more blatant try to be indie... it reminds me of the opening credits of Juno.
Well, Sam Mendes has always been an "Indie" director. I can't think of even one mainstream movie he's done. And don't even throw "Road to Perdition" at me, because that was "indie" too. So claiming that Mr. Mendes is "too indie" seems a little preposterous.
Now, is this "of the Mendes style".
No.
In fact, it looks like it's a little "Baumbauchican" as a famous blogger once wrote.
Either way, Krasinski needs some legitimacy, and I'm not sure that this is his "Road to Salvation".
Fair enough...
by 'indie' I was referring to what colin had mentioned in his comments about the trailer. The characterization, the sound, the handheld look, etc...
However, do we mean indie in style or indie in production, they are two different things... and Mendes filmography, American beauty, dreamworks, Road to Perdition, dreamworks/fox, Jarhead, universal, and Rev Road, dreamworks, are all neither. Innovative in style and subject matter perhaps but 'indie,' not in my opinion.
The worst handheld movie I've seen lately is Rachel Getting Married, which was great from a performance standard, but terrible from a film-making standpoint. Is it true that the dude who made Silence of the Lambs made that flick????
As for Mendes and the Indie style, we'll never see them in this climate, unless you are hitting the festival circuit. So this has to look like Nick and Norah PT. 2.
I was referring to Mendes making a movie that hits those indie stylistic benchmarks - drab, coffeehouse music, characters far too literate for their circumstances.
However, on the other stuff, I'd argue that Sam Mendes has never been indie. Thematically, maybe American Beauty can get that reputation, but it was produced and distributed by DreamWorks. It was not made on a shoestring budget outside the system somewhere. It was a $15 million drama that had enough cash to pay for Thomas Newman's score and Conrad Hall's cinematography. And it had plenty of marketing. Stylistically, it's not representative of independent film of that time and it certainly wasn't financially. Is it a formula movie? No, but it was given every advantage to succeed by the studio.
Perdition was a Tom Hanks movie released in the summer. It had an $80 million budget. That's ten times what Juno cost. Is it not "mainstream" because the graphic novel isn't as well known? Maybe. But throwing Hanks and Paul Newman on the cover of EW for the summer movie preview that year didn't hurt.
He has never had to raise his own money or work the festivals to gain a groundswell of support, so by the terms that came to define independent film, he's never been an indie director.
Fuck Juno.
Beyond that, it's not like "The Reader" was mainstream,
Besides, Mendes will never have to make a movie on his Discover Card. We all know that...
Still paying off Clerks, bitch.
Still paying off "Welcome to the Dollhouse".
Punkass.