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Shared Darkness

A Communal Life in Film, Examined

Daily Archives: May 22, 2008

Danny McBride Will Kick You in the Face

For a 16mm movie shot in three weeks on a shoestring budget of credit
card financing and $30,000 in savings, The Foot Fist Way has paid huge
dividends for ascendant funnyman Danny McBride, even though it hasn’t
yet grossed dollar one from audiences.

The movie was accepted into competition at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, where it was embraced by a legion of comedic heavyweights, among them Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. Surprised it wasn’t acquired at the festival, the pair later snapped up the movie, via their Gary Sanchez Productions shingle, for distribution through Paramount Vantage. It’s had a long and winding path to release, but the movie quickly conferred “made man” status upon McBride, helping him land memorable supporting roles in Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod, Ben Stiller’s The Heartbreak Kid, Owen Wilson’s Drillbit Taylor and two of this summer’s most highly anticipated comedies, Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder. “It’s been pretty insane,” says McBride of his at-once-quiet-and-quick career trajectory. “I live in Virginia, and every time I would come back out to L.A., I would suddenly hear of all these other people who had seen the film.”

“When we were in college, we would just sit around and drink beer and watch the same movies over and over again,” continues McBride, who will also topline the forthcoming HBO series Eastbound and Down. “And when we made this film, we wanted it to be something that could have that sort of lifespan — something that some other guys in college would sit around and drink some beers to and enjoy. Now I’m running around with Will, and running from dinosaurs in Land of the Lost. It doesn’t seem real.” For the full interview, from CityBeat‘s summer preview issue, click here.

The Cool School

In the late 1950s, as the post-war rise of Abstract Expressionism became the new wave of painting in the United States, a small but determined band of California painters, curators and collectors exercised impulse over calculation, and in the process created their own scene. Eschewing the trickle-down influence of the New York City set, and battling an apathetic public and L.A. Board of Supervisors who derailed citywide arts fairs under the rationalization of communist infiltration (at one point claiming a painting of a sailboat nefariously concealed a hammer and sickle), these headstrong Left Coasters brought a new and vigorously American slant to contemporary painting, as this lively new documentary details.

Director Morgan Neville has to his name a smattering of excellent serial biography small screen credits, and had a hand as a writer-producer in the excellent tele-doc The Night James Brown Saved Boston, about a Beantown concert following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Here, he imbues The Cool School with a style at once engaging and unpretentious. Using the late Walter Hopps, co-owner of the influential Ferus Gallery, as its
nexus, the film shows how art of the time came to be informed by the
laid-back, anything-goes culture of the Southland, and particularly
Venice Beach. Similar in perspective to Stacy Peralta’s Dogtown and
Z-Boys and Riding Giants, which documented the origins and rise of
skate and surf culture, respectively, The Cool School is a fascinating,
well-packaged and artfully told story of outsiders cracking the
mainstream. Jeff Bridges provides the narration, and interviewees
include critic Peter Plagens and dozens of notable artists, as well as
scenester benefactors Dean Stockwell and Dennis Hopper. (Arthouse Films, unrated, 86 minutes)

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