Mpls.St.Paul Magazine - Out + About - Film

Cinema Vérité: Is The Uptown Doomed?

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 14:56:01 GMT

DESPITE ITS CLASSY ANGLICIZED SPELLING, the Uptown Theatre has always been a dump. Well, for as long as I can remember. When it replaced the old Lagoon, which burned down in 1939, the Uptown's sparkling 50-foot tower was supposedly an Art Deco beacon for the aspirations of the commercial district just east of Lake Calhoun, a monument to the mercantile dreams of a new kind of Midwestern neighborhood (and more recently an annual outdoor haven for the free-market exchange of bad skyline photography and overpriced ceramic wind chimes). But for most of the last 70 years, including all of my lifetime, the Uptown has been a dump.

We sat in broken seats with smelly upholstery that was dissolving from the brown acid of millions of
spilled diet cokes.

Which was great! As a kid, my two best friends were dudes who thought cutting old movies into gag reels to entertain their less technically adept buddy was way more satisfying than hanging out with, say, girls. While everybody else was into Michael Jordan and Family Ties, Mike and Vaughn were arguing whether Barton Fink was really a cinematic step forward from Miller's Crossing. Mike's mom would drive us to the Uptown's annual animation festival to see underground but somehow still "award-winning" claymation shorts. We watched Wallace & Gromit in a balcony full of Uptown kids who matched army fatigues with electric blue hair and unusual piercings. We sat in broken seats with smelly upholstery that was dissolving from the brown acid of millions of spilled Diet Cokes. Those weird green neoclassical murals loomed over us, the ones that look like they were constructed by Soviet elementary-school children. It was a rare aesthetic experience, and it made a burgeoning film snob's year.

Sadly, I peaked as a film snob at those festivals. I still haven't been to a midnight movie. I always had a weakness for the suburban comforts of the multiplex with its extra-large Icees and computer-generated wonders starring Tom Cruise. Yup, my taste was shaped by Maplewood II and Star Wars Episodes IV through VI. Probably why I'm writing an essay on the Uptown instead of enjoying my post-USC Film School career in Hollywood like Vaughn and Mike. [CUE: violins. CUT TO: close-up of author's face, wearing beret and smoking clove cigarette, one tear sliding down left cheek.]

I still get back to the Uptown a few times a year for "the important films." The old dump is still where smart people see smart indies before they break through to a lamestream audience. It's still important to consider myself cooler and smarter than everybody else except Mike and Vaughn. But my sense of nostalgia for the old dump has been overcome by a desire to see a movie in actual comfort.

Sure, the Uptown is still great when it's packed on Memorial Day weekend for Woody Allen's first funny movie in 10 years, with film snobs gathered from miles around competing to see who can laugh at a Gertrude Stein joke the fastest. But what about on a Wednesday night when there are only four people in the audience for Werner Herzog's documentary on the Chauvet cave paintings? When the Uptown marquee for Cave of Forgotten Dreams has been reduced to a bit of self-mockery for projecting Herzog's 3-D masterpiece "IN GLORIOUS 2-D!!!"? We lapsed film snobs keep track of each other, and when friends from Chicago and Portland are Facebooking you to say, "No, it's actually cool seeing those ancient paintings in 3-D!" somehow it's not as easy to laugh off the Uptown's small screen or its broken seats.

It might be that nostalgia no longer works as a business model, even in the movie business. The Uptown sits in a rapidly changing neighborhood, with the nearby façades reflecting the latest retail trends: There's an Apple Store down the street, next to an Urban Outfitters and The North Face. There's an American Apparel right around the corner. The old dump has never seemed so out of step.

Landmark Theatres owns art houses in 56 neighborhoods that look a lot like this one, with the same stores and the same kinds of restaurants nearby. In fact, Landmark opened The Lagoon Cinema in 1995—it used to be state of the art: movies and espresso—because of the sorts of urban alts who shop and hang out in neighborhoods like this. But the Lagoon looks like a penny hasn't been spent on it since the day it opened. Might this be evidence of the floundering indie movie business, the fact that the big six studios would rather wager $200 million on a potential blockbuster such as Transformers: Dark of the Moon than $25 million on an artfully bleak Ryan Gosling breakup movie?

Maybe, but it's hard to believe that all of Landmark's art houses are in as rough shape as the Uptown. In fact, I know firsthand that they're not: After all, some of my friends in other cities actually got to see Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3-D at a Landmark theater. Why is our historic art house so dumpy?

Cocktails & Cinema

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:52:55 GMT

Dan Huiting

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:48:32 GMT

Before launching City of Music, the best-looking local music video show of all time, Dan Huiting was a guitarist without a band, spinning ’za in the kitchen of Galactic Pizza. “It was literally like I hated every second of every minute of my life,” he says. Now Huiting is poised to become more successful than many of the bands he shoots. He has a new day job as director of photography of Twin Cities Public Television’s Minnesota Original program; last summer he co-directed a video for folk-pop sensation Bon Iver; and City of Music, the show that originated on MPLS.TV, got picked up by national music website Pitchfork.

Now that City of Music is on Pitchfork, why do you stay here? Why not shoot national bands somewhere else?
I love it here. I grew up here. It would take some serious extenuating circumstances for me to ever leave.

How did Pitchfork discover you?
I was out in New York with Bon Iver at Jimmy Fallon, and I was chatting with Ryan Schreiber, the president of Pitchfork, about how hard it was getting national bands on City of Music. Schreiber said we were on his radar already so why don’t we do a series together? I was like, “Hell, yes.”

I heard that you met Justin Vernon of Bon Iver years ago at a jazz camp.
Not Justin. But the guys from Megafaun [who were in Justin’s old band DeYarmond Edison]. Phil Cook was my roommate at Shell Lake Jazz Camp. Then when I went to the Gayngs shoot, I showed up and they were freaking out. It was like a big reunion. That’s the day I met Justin. His girlfriend at the time went to Jazz Camp with me, too, and she had these photos of me in this photo album in his den. So he knew about me and had photos of me already. And I’m like, “That’s super weird because I’m a big fan and this is like The Twilight Zone.”

So video killed the radio star and then the reality star killed the video star. But now with the iPad, video is coming back.
Yeah, the big part of it is the iPads and the phones—most people are connected to some device that can always be on the Internet. That’s driven a demand for music videos and live performance videos and interviews. It’s basically the way a label can promote their artists. But along with demand, the other factor is that these DSLR cameras we shoot on are so cheap. Ten years ago you had to have a big budget if you wanted to shoot a music video, but now you can have a camera that’s between $1,000 and $2,000 and go make a music video that looks every bit as professional as anything else, as long as you have the skills and light things correctly. So now anyone can make art.

What were you doing before shooting City of Music for MPLS.TV and videos for Bon Iver?
Well I was a musician my whole life, kind of on and off. My first music video I shot was called “Sharted,” and it was a video about shitting your pants at a party. It was a comedy video. A kind of joke YouTube viral video. But I fell in love with the process: lighting things and shooting. I’d always taken photos, and so I had the idea of going to MCTC, and I thought I’d take a crack at this.

So you were 29 enrolling in film school. Kind of a late-20s crisis.
Well I was doing odd jobs, and I made pizzas at Galactic Pizza for a couple years. You know, I always loved being creative, but the music thing never went anywhere. So this was a way I thought I could be creative but also maybe make a living at it as well.

You don’t think you could ultimately have made money making music?
No.

My sources tell me that you’re a good guitar player.
Well, I think technically I’m pretty proficient, but I don’t sing, so I don’t write songs. I was always joining someone else’s bands. But I never felt at home with it like I do with what I do now. Which is collaborating with people that are awesome.

Does being a former musician make you better at finding the dramatic arc in live performance?
I really like putting additional footage in live performance videos, which I’m not seeing anywhere very much. Most people keep it real time. There’s a Battles video on Pitchfork, and it’s all this footage of driving around and cool imagery. If you pick cool imagery that helps communicate the mood of the song, then it’s all good. And that’s what we’re trying to do on City of Music, to blur the lines between live performance and music video. Location says a lot—it communicates the mood, too. From the start with City of Music it was always about location.

Do you think you’ll ever graduate to making films?
Well, it’s kind of what I do on Minnesota Original. It’s a segment show, and we make short documentaries about artists and painters and stuff. Every day we go into some artist’s studio and make a little short film about them. Yesterday we shot Mason Jennings in this Hollywood Theater. We do documentary work about local arts. I’m super interested in documentary film, and that’s where I see myself going in the future. I don’t make much money on music videos.

Five Things You Didn't Know About Dan Huiting

1) He has never actually owned his own camera. “I don’t think a cell phone counts.”

2) He was a rapper in a viral video called “So So Vegan.”

3) He didn’t graduate from MCTC. “I’m like one or two credits away.

4) Ninety percent of the “Calgary” video was shot in Justin Vernon’s pole barn outside his April Base studio.

5) He recommends Galactic’s Alfredo pizza (pictured).