Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Interkosmos

This movie made me miss the start of a quite frankly incredible baseball game, so I can't forgive it.

Aside from that, though, it does sort of get me thinking about the idea of film as art. The Brattle had "Celebrating Film as Art" as its slogan for a while - it still may - but it's not quite into the hardcore obscurity that places like the Harvard Film Archive and MFA's film program can be. Something like Interkosmos is pretty darn non-commercial; it costs, per IMDB, roughly $10,000 to make and requires people to come upon it kind of randomly. It might show up in an "underground film festival" or it might grab the attention of someone like me who will see absolutely any sci-fi film no matter what the budget, nation of origin, or obscurity (I own a copy of The Sticky Fingers of Time, for crying out loud). But that means that a ridiculously large portion of the population will pass it by. It's not just that it will only get one ten-thousandth of the audience of something like X-Men 3; it will probably only have one one hundred-thousandth of the actual awareness of its existence.

I'm not sure whether that's actually unfair or just me comparing apples and oranges. The idea of making money might just be a thoroughly secondary or tertiary concern for this movie. It might just be this thing that Jim Finn wanted to make, and eventually put together.

In which case, bully for him. He'll probably never get rich at this game, but he'll probably make some nteresting films.

Interkosmos

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 June 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (New American Independent FIlm)

I have mixed feelings about films like Interkosmos. A new filmmaker like Jim Finn has to start somewhere, and this no-budget parody documentary constructed out of stock footage and what are basically home movies shows a knack for stylization and (very) offbeat humor. That humor is dry to the point of being arid, though, and if Finn wants more mainstream success, he's going to have to work on that.

Of course, maybe Jim Finn isn't interested in mainstream success. For all I know, this sort of of retro-weird movie is the sort of thing he wants to spend his life on, or he wants to do different but similarly artsy low-budget films. Which is cool; film needs its outsider artists just as much as any other medium. We're often just so used to looking at it as corporate-produced and made by committee that we forget that anybody can make a feature-length film.

Read the rest at HBS.

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