1.
“Joe Swanberg Talks Jake Kasdan’s ‘Sex Tape'”: Chicago’s trailblazing indie auteur, whose new film, “Happy Christmas,” opens in the Windy City on Friday, analyzes the failings of Kasdans’s latest big-budget bomb for The Talkhouse.
“Once you invoke the iPad and the Internet you open a Pandora’s Box of problems for narrative storytelling, and the people behind ‘Sex Tape’ just aren’t up to the task of dealing with these problems. One of my friends used to talk about watching ‘Seinfeld’ in syndication and realizing that most of the episodes wouldn’t work now that everyone has cell phones. The characters can’t get lost in a parking garage anymore, for instance, no matter how big and confusing. One of them would find the car and just call the others. Or they would have taken a quick photo of the section they parked in, the way I do when I find myself in a big, confusing parking garage. I actually end up in a lot of conversations with filmmakers about solving the cellphone problem, because it’s a big roadblock for many scenarios, especially now that phones also have access to the Internet. Watching ‘Sex Tape,’ I could feel the filmmakers having these conversations. ‘How …read more