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“Small Changes” by Jennifer and Christopher Gandin Le!!
Tonight was the Intelligent Use of Water Film Competition Screening and Awards ceremony, held at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. It was thrilling to see our work on a big screen and to hear the audience’s reaction. And it was even more thrilling to receive the Jury Prize, complete with big check and all!
For an encore, here it is again:
Small Changes on Vimeo.
Written by Jennifer & Christopher Gandin Le
Edited by Matt Donaldson
Music by Liz Clark
Starring our brilliant friends and cohorts!
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
I’m watching Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s 2008 documentary “The Garden,” a film about urban farmers in South Central Los Angeles and their fight against developers.
And I’m nearly speechless.
For 14 years, 350 familes grew their own food on this 14 acres, once scorched by riots and pain. It was the largest community garden in the U.S.
In 2006, the garden was bulldozed – all 150 plant species – and plans are underway to build a Forever 21 warehouse and distribution center on this land. This, even though the farmers had raised the money to buy the property from the developer. He’s on record as saying, his words smacking of self-righteous privilege, “Even if they raised $100 million, this group could not buy this property… It’s not about money. It’s about I don’t like their cause and I don’t like their conduct. So there’s no price I would sell it to them for.”
A flood of words get jammed in my fingers when I try to express how I feel about this. Did I mention that most of these farmers are Latinos and Latinas from the community? Are you surprised?
What I can manage to stammer is that this is the mark of everything wrong about the United States, about our dominator society. This is a prime example of what will destroy our national soul.
In the movie, there is footage of heavily armed police officers storming through tall rows of vegetables. If it were fiction, it would be hilarious. But it’s real, and it’s powerful and embarrassing.
The footage of carefully tended, productive, green vegetables, fruits, herbs, being torn up to put in concrete buildings just wrecks me. I feel that loss viscerally, and it makes me hungry for the social upending that will bring in a nurturing, partnership society. Right NOW.
This week, I’m sharing my own work, because I’m so dang proud of it. Chris & I, along with our incredibly talented Austin-area friends, created this 2 minute water conservation PSA in response to RainBird’s “Intelligent Use of Water” film contest. Austin is in the middle of the worst drought in 50 years, and last week, officials announced even tighter water restrictions, so this awareness-raising contest comes at a crucial time.
We had a great time making this film, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out. Enjoy!
Small Changes from Jennifer Gandin Le on Vimeo.
Written by Jennifer & Christopher Gandin Le
Edited by Matt Donaldson
Music by Liz Clark
Starring our brilliant friends and cohorts!
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
Remember studying The Jungle by Upton Sinclair in Civics class? We read excerpts and made gagging noises when we got to the parts about rat pieces and feces found in American food. Maybe we didn’t quite understand the other call for social reform in the book: to end the profound mistreatment of immigrant workers at the turn of the century. 1906 seemed like another world. We had no idea how close this book hit to home, to now.
Everyone who eats should watch Food, Inc. Or at least the trailer.
Should you buy popcorn and M&Ms? Probably not– unless you can down them during the previews. This documentary isn’t for the faint of heart, but it’s tasteful and informative. Most importantly, it argues for our right to knowledge, to be able to find out “what’s in the kitchen.”
Dear Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber, Marc Webb, Eric Steelberg, the producers, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, and everyone else involved in making the movie (500) Days of Summer,
I’ve been subconsciously writing this letter for four months, since I first saw your movie at SXSW. I wrote on this site about my screening experience, but looking back, my post seems flippant and doesn’t indicate the depth to which your story delighted me. My husband wasn’t with me at the SXSW screening, which was unfortunate, because as soon as the credits rolled, I knew he would see himself on that screen. (As will many, many men my age.) Last night, I took him to see the movie at another screening in town.
I loved the movie again, maybe even more this time. You have created a masterful film that captures countless desperately honest moments. It was a visceral pleasure to watch. And I want to articulate some of the reasons why it has touched me so significantly.
I’ll cut here so I can spill lots of spoilers below. (Crucial Minutiae readers, if you’re going to see this movie, bookmark this post and come back once you’ve seen it. I don’t want to ruin your viewing experience.)
via Ekwa MO and Melissa Silverstein
Ela Thier, a director and filmmaker for 20 years, wrote this letter about her experience in the film industry as a woman. It’s four pages of pure passion, focused specifically on fundraising for her new project, but it speaks to so much more than simple donation dollars. For example:
After years of learning, practicing, and teaching, after years of query letters, phone calls, meetings, film markets, panels, classes, LA trips, networking, more networking, even more networking, my scripts – those ones that this market reader liked better than the 150 scripts she read that summer – those scripts sit on a shelf. After years of trying and falling and getting up and trying, something finally dawned on me: maybe I’m not the most unlucky bastard that ever lived. Maybe I’m female.
There is no petition to draft. There is no policy to fight. Yet, of the 250 top-grossing films in any given year, 6% are directed by women; of the 50 top-grossing movies each year, roughly 5 star or focus on women. In 80 years of Oscar history, with roughly 250 directors receiving a nomination for best director, 3 nominations went to female directors. No woman director ever received an Oscar.
It would be so much easier if someone would just flat out say it: “You’re not a director. You’re a girl.”
As a screenwriter and aspiring filmmaker with my own taste of the industry, I often fight feelings of defeat and depression when I read statistics like this. It would be simplistic to blame all of the slow movement or rejections in my career on my being a woman; I know it’s more complicated than that. But I do wonder, what if I’d put the name “J. Gandin Le” or “J.G. Le” on the title pages of my scripts instead of “Jennifer”? And I’m a young, white, straight, middle-class woman who’s worked with a legendary filmmaker. I melt into a useless puddle when when I think of the challenges or downright refusals that women of color, transgendered people, lesbians, or poor women must face.
So I give major applause to Ela Thier for resisting that instinct to lose hope, for fighting, for putting her anger and frustration into such eloquent words, and for vowing to work 20 times harder if it means her work will make it into the world.
Read the full letter below the cut.
Did you ever think that you were wasting your time in high school? That it wasn’t the best place for you to spend seven hours a day, five days a week? If you had determined this and you had failing grades to prove that you and high school were not a good fit, would your parents have let you stay home and watch movies all day?
David Gilmour’s book, The Film Club: A Memoir, came out last summer, but when I heard him read some of the final chapter on NPR yesterday, he had me near tears. And no, it wasn’t preggy hormones. Even Douglas McGrath, in his New York Times Book Review, said that the book moved him to tears… more than once.
This new indie movie is definitely worth seeing. Imagine the Breakfast Club set in Christa McAuliffe’s New Hampshire high school. She was the teacher aboard the Challenger space shuttle that went down in January of 1986. Only we never see her or the crash. Instead, we watch people collide and try to assess the damage. And finally, a papier-mache shuttle crashes to the ground on the high school’s auditorium stage.
Unlike other teenage angst movies that wallow, this one is seen through the eyes of a British, middle-aged reporter (played by Steve Coogan) and is so quirky that you’re almost never prepared for what comes next. With its calculated tone and pace, the movie teaches you how to watch it– be patient, don’t grab at storylines, don’t expect answers– and then it stays with you after you leave.
I’ve heard that THE film to watch in the next year is going to be Precious, based on the incredible novel Push by Sapphire. It won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award and is set to storm Cannes soon. The trailer was just released by Lionsgate:
It will hit theaters in November. I can’t wait.
For more on the director, Lee Daniels. And yes, that’s Mariah Carey as the social worker.
I got the tip on this clever, well-shot short film via Facebook. “Validation” is a fable about the magic of free parking, starring TJ Thyne (on “Bones”) and Vicki Davis, and directed and written by Kurt Kuenne (“Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father”). Spending 16 minutes watching this film is highly preferable to reading panic-bloated coverage about the swine flu, I promise.
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
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Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays
I can’t believe it. The 2009 SXSW Film Festival is finished. 25 movies in 9 days. Consider my brain and eyes officially and absolutely full.
I saw three final movies today, all of which involved some elements of fantasy and magic: The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, Monsters From the Id, and 500 Days of Summer.
Though I enjoyed all of them, my favorite was 500 Days of Summer, a surprising and funny not-love story, directed by Marc Webb, written by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber, and featuring Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
I won’t lie; much of my enjoyment of the movie came from the pleasure of his (completely surprising to me) charm and sexy handsomeness. Also, his karaoke version of “Here Comes Your Man” was super-hot. (What can I say? I’m a sucker for the Pixies.) Also, we share the same initials, which I only realized this because the young women behind me in line kept startling me by talking about “JGL” this and “JGL” that, and I kept thinking they were reading my mind somehow. It finally dawned on me that they were talking about the actor in kind-of code.
But I also enjoyed the movie because it was well-told, beautifully shot, honest romantic comedy that tells you right from the start that it isn’t a love story. The filmmakers and lead actors were on hand to answer questions after the screening, and, it being a SXSW audience of filmmakers (aspiring and current), most of the questions were for the director and writers.
The writers both expressed how lucky they felt to have found a director who was on the same wavelength as they were, who took their unusually structured and wacky script and ran with it in the direction they’d wanted. I want exactly that for my movie — I want to stand on a stage in front of an enamored audience, expressing gratitude for my film’s director and standing in awe of how well the movie turned out, even better than my wildest dreams. And I want my movie to star two really hot guys.
A great way to end a film festival, I’d say.
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
There was a moment in the middle of Sissyboy, a short and sweet documentary about a raucous, grotesque, gender-bending performance troupe in Portland, OR, when my heart suddenly felt warm.
As I listened to these men’s stories of love, loss, family, art, and how much the troupe had changed their lives for the better, I felt proud to live in a country where places exist for these men to feel at home, welcomed. Even though there are still many battles to be fought and won, I felt amazed and grateful as I watched them go on tour, getting hugs from passers-by, performing in clubs and cities to full audiences, and moving through city crowds — all without harassment. I’m sure some of that was due to the film’s editing, but even if that’s the case, I appreciated it. To me, the main focus of the film wasn’t the trouble that these men face in the world; it was about how they transform their monsters into art, and find community with each other.
As Jeffrey (stage name Fannie Mae) says in the movie, “I never thought in a million years — I don’t think anyone of us did — that we would ever find a group of people that would make you not feel like you are weird and wrong, and actually makes you feel like you are fine.”
That reminds me of one of my favorite poems, by Raymond Carver:
Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
~ ~ ~
May each of us feel ourselves beloved on the earth.
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
0 movies seen today. 1 short bike ride to dinner. 4 hour nap turned into very early bedtime, as demanded by body’s sleepiness level. Recharging for the last two days of movies = gooood.
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
I’m just home from seeing my 19th movie in seven days. I saw my first real stinker tonight. I won’t name names, but I will explain why it was so bad: the filmmakers’ attempt at humor was based solely in basic physical comedy (not in itself a problem), poop and fart and balls references, misogynist jokes, and racist caricatures. It was really really lame. And the worst part is that there were people laughing in the theater.
The crappiness of that 90 minute experience was countered by the simple pleasure of riding my bike to and from the theater at dusk. The day was warm but the evening was cool, and it felt satisfying to move my body outdoors after days and days of sitting in dark theaters engaging my brain.
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
Hands down, the coolest moment of my day? Watching the new Spike Lee Joint, Passing Strange, on the big screen — while sitting right behind Spike Lee himself. It was wild to get to watch a director watching his own film. I don’t get star-struck easily, but that was really freaking cool.
The movie is a dynamically filmed and edited recording of the Broadway play of the same name, created by the musician Stew and his musical partner Heidi Rodewald. As I got the chance to tell him after the screening, I have never seen the raw energy of a live theater performance captured so well on film.
This one will be coming to you via IFC and PBS eventually, so keep an eye out for it, and see it on the big screen if you can. It destroys the old assumption that you can’t film theatre effectively. Spike Lee and his team just did.
Photo by Flickr user s.maentz
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
After my six-film mania yesterday, it was inevitable that I’d need to take it easy today. I attended only two movies today, including the “Super Special Screening” this morning at the Paramount. I got in line with no idea what it was, until Janet Pierson, producer of the SXSW film festival, announced that we were about to watch Richard Linklater’s latest film, called “Me and Orson Welles.” It’ll be released in October, so I won’t say much about it, but I will say that one of my favorite moments of the day was watching Claire Danes’ performance in the movie. I know her mostly from her early and mid-1990s movies like R+J or Little Women, in which she played a tremulous ingenue, which was appropriate for her age at the time. In this movie, though, we get to see the actress playing a grown-ass woman, complete with gravitas, wit, and resonant lower-pitched voice. Something shifted between then and now, and she has come into her own presence as a strong actor. It was a pleasure to watch.
My real-life favorite moment of the day was sitting down to a Tex-Mex dinner and margaritas with four friends from out of town, two local pals, and Vu. One of my favorite things to do is gather together people that I adore and find fascinating and introduce them to each other. Good things always follow. My relationships with these folks span from being college roommates to meeting through a mutual friend and hitting it off from there. They’re all cool, talented people who are bringing new creative endeavors into the world, like a cooking site rich with recipes from the world’s best chefs, an online platform where artists connect with audiences, an interactive storytelling and publishing project for girls, innovative video games, creative commercials and short films, and a gal without a website who’s kicking ass as a fiction writer in the prestigious Michener Center at UT.
Yeah, I’m bragging on their behalf. I can’t help it; I’m thrilled and humbled by my friends’ talents.
The two hour dinner break turned into six hours of conversation and laughter, and I was glad I didn’t rush off to cram in another movie. It is a beautiful thing to know your limits, and to follow what feels warm and good. Sometimes that’s six movies, and sometimes that’s a relaxed dinner in the warm light at sunset. Today, it was the latter, and I will go to bed happy and satisfied.
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
That’s right, folks, I watched six movies in twelve hours today. I think it’s my personal record. Even more surprising than the sheer amount of movies is the fact that they were all good — in fact, four were excellent, moving films.
In the interest of my bedtime and ability to do this again tomorrow, here are my top four, in the order I saw them, and with high recommendations that you see all of them if you get the chance:
1) Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
This movie follows Youssou Ndour, Grammy Award-winning Senegalese singer and hero, over two years as he releases “Egypt,” an ambitious and controversial album on which he sings about his beloved Islam. (Western listeners not familiar with his name will certainly recognize his voice — he sang backing vocals on Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”)
Ndour’s story and the movie’s telling of it brought me to tears several times; from the sheer power of his voice in performance, to the scenes with his grandmother, the film was beautiful and I want to see it again.
Trailer, and three more stellar films after the jump.
A surprise (to me) hit at the 2008 SXSW film festival was veteran actor Jeffrey Tambor’s acting workshop, a two-hour class for those interested in bridging the gap between actor and director. I missed it, but as soon as it was over, a palpable buzz shot through the crowds at the Austin Convention Center.
So this afternoon, after an energizing and encouraging pre-production mentor session, I slipped into the acting workshop to see what was the big deal.
Everyone was right. Jeffrey Tambor’s workshop was dazzling and lucid, like light through a diamond. His basic goal is to help artists burn through their fear and self-doubt so they can give their talents to the world, which needs them so desperately.
There is no bullshit about this man. He led two actors through a scene rehearsal and helped them crack open. As audience members asked questions, he put his attention fully on each questioner, touching the heart of their creative talents and dreams with frank yet sensitive observations that were, in every case, absolutely accurate.
Much of what he said mirrored the work I’ve encountered through the School of Womanly Arts or The Artist’s Way, but it was refreshing to hear it from a masculine point of view.
He gave us some real gems this afternoon, but my favorite was that whatever teacher(s) you choose, they should say, “You know what you’re doing,” rather than “Do exactly what I did.” Don’t be an acolyte; don’t stay too long.
He ended his workshop with urgent words: “Go to work! The world needs your voice!” His words echoed one of my favorite lines from a play, from the end of Angels in America: “You are fabulous, each and every one, and I bless you. More life. The great work begins.”
Begin.
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
This is my second year attending the SXSW Film Festival, the eight-day panel-attending and movie-watching blitz in March. It’s exhausting bliss to plunge into dozens of movies, immersing yourself in a new world created with great care by filmmakers every time the lights go down.
For the next eight days, I’m going to post daily my favorite movie/video/panel/moment, to highlight a tiny slice of the abundant creativity found here.
Tonight I saw a showcase of music videos, including great ones for Gnarls Barkley’s “Going On” (dir. Wendy Morgan) and Talkdemonic’s “Duality of Deathening” (dir. Orie Weeks III). But this one was my favorite — it brought me to tears. It’s the Fleet Foxes video for “White Winter Hymnal,” directed by Sean Pecknold:
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
