WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2010


KLMNO MUSIC REVIEW


R


C7


Venice Film Festival shows recession is pinching directors


by Colleen Barry


venice — In film, recession might be the mother of innova- tion. The Venice Film Festival opens Wednesday with its share of potential big-screen block- busters, from Darren Aronof- sky’s “Black Swan” to Sofia Cop- pola’s highly anticipated “Some- where” to Ben Affleck’s sophomore directorial effort, “The Town.” But director Marco Mueller says the economic downturn has forced even big- name directors to come up with cheaper means of production, giving rise to innovation and an “in-between” budget category that bridges “low-budget” (less than $1 million) and midrange ($6million to $9 million). “In between, there was very


JOSH SISK BUSTING OUT: Jim Avett brought heartfelt songs to Iota in Arlington on Monday night.


Avett rocks out like a rookie, and loves every minute


Family ties are plentiful in the music business, but there aren’t many careers launched like Jim Avett’s. He’s given up the day job as a welder and is now riding the renown of his two sons, Scott and Seth Avett of the North Carolina folk-for-cool-kids combo, the Avett Brothers, onto club stages all over the place. Playing before a small crowd at


Iota on Monday, Avett showed where his boys get their laid- backitude. He didn’t give a rip about the empty floor space in front of him. He was happy to have an audience of any size sit and listen to him and playmate Ray Morton pick guitars and sing tunes about loving and leaving that he’s had in him for years but


that are only now bursting out. With a charming drawl, he ad- mitted being very proud of a cou- plet — “I hope your life works out fine, but if it don’t it don’t matter to me” — that he recently threw into a song while sitting “in a mo- tel in Knoxville.” Avett described “Game of


Love” as the “toughest song” he’s ever written, because it’s a break- up tune from a woman’s perspec- tive. “I’m not a girl and I don’t lose at love,” he said. “I’ve been married 41 years.” That song, like much of Avett’s set, had echoes of Roy Orbison, minus the crescen- dos. Avett invited a pair of locals,


singer Lissy Rosemont and fid- dler Sadie Dingfelder, to join him


MISS MANNERS Judith Martin


Dropping in unannounced, online


Dear Miss Manners: When one signs onto any form


of instant messaging and notices via one’s contact list that someone else is already online, who has the ultimate responsibility to take notice? The person signing on or the person already there? I take daily comfort from noticing that my brother must be alive and reasonably well as he is online, but he has never, ever, initiated a chat with me by something as simple as “Hi, sis, how are you?” I get stubborn and decide to wait, and after months, I will break down and initiate a chat with him. He almost always responds and we chat for a bit, exchange pics, news, etc. Then, months later, I break down and do it again.


Am I unreasonable to want him


to evince an interest in me? Also, what about friends who


never reply when I initiate a chat? “Hi, how are you?” Nothing. And, then, there is the friend who almost always “hides” that she is online. If I send an offline message, she usually signs in and we chat.


Try picturing these people at their computers. They’re working, aren’t they? Well, that’s what they claim. As you and Miss Manners suspect, some of them are playing games, some of them are shopping, and some of them are opening their little hearts to strangers. But at any rate, they are all


busy at something, and you are dropping in unannounced, so to speak. True, the existence of this system invites one to do this, which is why Miss Manners finds it objectionable. Why can’t you just take a chance that your friends will answer your offline messages when they are free? Or get in touch with them by other means? In any case, Miss Manners does think it unreasonable to consider that failing to be ready to drop everything and chat at any time is an indication of callousness.


Dear Miss Manners: I have a GPS navigator in my


car, which I use when I am going to an unfamiliar location. If I have a passenger who claims to know the way, I usually rely on the passenger rather than the GPS, though sometimes this has proved to be a mistake. But when traveling to a place that is unfamiliar to both of us, I use the GPS. Now it has happened on several occasions, and with different passengers, that while the final destination may be unfamiliar, during some portion of the route, such as getting out of the city or passing through a nearby community, the passenger has argued with the GPS navigator by calling it stupid, asking me why I bought it in the first place, or telling me to throw it out the window. One person actually sulked for an hour because I took the GPS directions instead of his. Another person told me he would rather get lost than rely on a silly box with a simulated voice. If I am a passenger in someone


else’s car, I don’t give directions unless I am asked. I feel that most drivers have their favorite ways to travel, and it is not up to me to question their decisions. I would like to know how to respond to people who develop adversarial relationships with my GPS navigator.


No etiquette query has yet come to Miss Manners from the GPS lady herself, but with the number of people who love or hate her, it’s probably only a matter of time. All that cursing and courting she must endure, while only trying to do her job, must be hard to bear. As captain of the vehicle, it is your duty to defend her. Miss Manners suggests a gentle: “Please don’t be too rough on her. She’s had a difficult day. We’ll humor her and let her have her way.”


Dear Miss Manners: My husband and I have a lovely boat. While I was away on


vacation, he took a female friend of ours out on the boat to teach her how to run it and then meet up with other friends. This friend has a significant other, but he was not present on that day either. Although I know that nothing


would have happened, I have a problem with it. I just think it was quite inappropriate. He doesn’t understand why I would think that, and I can’t get him to see my side.


What exactly is your side? That you can go off on vacation by yourself and then chastise your husband for having what you acknowledge to be innocent fun while you were away? Society once believed that any unsupervised lady and gentleman would be bound to be up to no good. In that case, you would have been under high suspicion for going off on vacation — or even on a business trip — without your husband. Society has now found more


blatant ways to be scandalized. Miss Manners suggests that you accord your husband the same trust that he accorded you.


Dear Miss Manners: If you had your own personal letterhead (i.e. not company stationery, but stuff you had made up for your own home/personal use), is there any significance in crossing out your last name when composing a letter?


It is done in order to acknowledge that one is on a first name basis with the person addressed. Oddly, personal paper is often


marked with a title, whereas business paper is not — and you can also draw a diagonal line across it all. Just as well for Miss Manners, who has nothing left anyway when she crosses out her surname and title.


Feeling incorrect? E-mail questions to Miss Manners at MissManners@ unitedmedia.com; enter them at www.missmanners.com or mail to United Media, 200 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016. © 2010, Judith Martin


While I’m away, readers give the advice.


On working with someone who is terse, verging on rude, and intimidating:


I may be that abrupt person. While I continue to work at this, there are folks who would argue I’m intimidating and can be very short on the phone.


Those folks tend to fall into


certain groups. When they call, they say things like, “I think maybe I need . . . ”; “Let’s see here, I think those notes are somewhere . . . ”; or just generally haven’t made up their minds about what they need. My favorite are those who call and want to meet with you but haven’t looked at or even opened their own calendars to see when they are available. Suggestions that they call back, that I call back, that we talk after the immediate deadline is over, etc., fall on deaf ears. With that acknowledgement


upfront, I suggest that people who fear a rude colleague might get a better result if they (a) are organized and concise about what they need; (b) ask if there is a better time to talk (one individual calls regularly 30-40 minutes before a known deadline; when I suggest calling at another time, she says, “Oh, no, this will only take a minute” — and her minute is always at least 10); (c) listen carefully and move on once the question has already been answered; or (d) don’t treat it as a personal chat. Don’t open the call with, “So, how are you?” or have “ending remarks.”


Oh, and call in the morning.


Often we of few syllables manage to maintain our patience for the first five or 10 rudderless calls of the day. It’s call No. 11 that puts us over the top. Yeah, I know. I’m working on


it... Anonymous CAROLYN HAX Reader advice on getting to the point


for “I Know That You Know,” an- other breakup ditty that Avett said he wrote while channeling Buck Owens.He appeared to tear up while introducing “Naomi,” written about the victim of a do- mestic killing whose battered body was found close to Avett’s family farm. Late in the set, Avett asked the crowd if anybody knew what a “hoe” was, and after a pause, went into a description of the farming implement. “I told you this is gonna be like Grandpa was here!” he laughed, by way of fighting off groans from the gal- lery. It was a rookie mistake, to be expected of a performer just get- ting started.


— Dave McKenna


little. And now, several people rush to occupy that special space,” Mueller said. “Because it’s also the space where with some local, regional subsidy, some private money and maybe with a few distributors inter- ested in the project, you can get your film off the ground.” Oscar-winning Italian direc- tor Giuseppe Tornatore — lim- ited after last year’s big-budget bonanza “Baaria” — turned to documentary making this year, with a portrait of Italian cinema- tographer Goffredo Lombardo that will be shown out of compe- tition.


Vincent Gallo will be at the Li- do both as an actor — playing a terror suspect plotting his es- cape in Jerzy Skolimowski’s “Es- sential Killing” — and as the di- rector of two films. “Both films are entirely self- produced,” Mueller said. He started with a short film, then realized that using the same mode of production he could dare to look forward to a feature. The result is “Promises Written in the Water,” which will com- pete for the Golden Lion. The film tells a romantic story about a man — a professional as- sassin — and a woman confront- ing terminal illness. It was shot without preparation or a tradi- tional script. And U.S. director Monte Hell- man, whose influence has been greater than his popular ac-


VITTORIO ZUNINO CELOTTO/GETTY IMAGES


AT FESTIVAL OPENING:Franca Sozzani, editor in chief of Vogue Italia, and director Quentin Tarantino at a festival dinner.


claim, will show his movie “Road to Nowhere” in competi- tion. The film is described as a romantic thriller about a film- maker who becomes involved in a criminal conspiracy. “Monte made the film he has wanted to make for several years, on a shoestring budget, with an incredible cast using quite a few important names — and all of a sudden we have a film with special effects. With- out being a travelogue, it does move to a number of countries — and it cost less than $2 mil- lion,” Mueller said.


Second only to Cannes in terms of prestige, Venice has suf- fered since the economic down- turn of 2008, with many Holly- wood producers preferring the cheaper option of taking their movies to the Toronto Film Fes- tival, which overlaps with Ven- ice.


Mueller, however, has contin- ued to insist that his festival will accept primarily world pre- mieres — 79 are showing — and he believes that events are mov-


ing back in Venice’s favor. “A lot of people now are count- ing on a two-step operation where the visibility, the credibil- ity of the film is built in Venice — Venice reveals the immediate aesthetical qualities of the film, or everything that makes this film very exciting,” Mueller said. “And Toronto reveals the market value of the film.” The Venice festival opens with an unprecedented triple-header: Golden Lion winner Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” and Hong Kong di- rector Andrew Lau’s “The Leg- end of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen,” starring Donnie Yen, followed by a special mid- night screening of Robert Rodri- guez’s “Machete.” “I can predict that at mid- night, the atmosphere will still be the atmosphere of a rock con- cert or a football match,” Muel- ler said.


Quentin Tarantino heads the


jury that will select the winner of the prestigious Golden Lion on Sept. 11.


— Associated Press


NICK GALIFIANAKIS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST On being a long-distance


grandma/grandpa/auntie/uncle without growing estranged:


My way of keeping a close


relationship with my five grandkids is to have a journal for each child. Every few months, we have our journal time, where I ask about classes, best friends, favorite movies and video games, frustrations, teachers, cartoons, etc. They also have to supply me with a writing sample each year and photos — all of which go into the journal. It has been a great way to get alone time on the phone and certainly when I visit. On my recent visit, the 13-year-old asked if I’d brought the journal with me because he had new info. Who knew? Something else I do to stay


involved: I have my daughters e-mail me the spelling test for the week. Each Thursday, I call to go over the newest words in preparation for their Friday quiz.


One boy is struggling a bit with reading, so he calls me weekly to read from a book that we both have (thanks to public libraries). I read a chapter and then he reads the next. The 3-year-old gets a bedtime story twice a week — again with a book we both share so I can ask questions about the pictures. It’s no more energy than what I would expend if they lived here, it’s a thousand times better than e-mail/Facebook.


GMa in AZ


Write to Tell Me About It, Style, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071, or tellme@washpost. com.


ONLINE DISCUSSION Carolyn Hax’s weekly Web


chat is at noon Fridays at www. washingtonpost.com/discussions.


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