cinema echo chamber

On That Evening Sun

2009-11-09T15:01:00.003-05:00

By Evan Louison

For those familiar with Hal Holbrook’s much revered “Mark Twain Tonight!,” where the veteran American actor seemingly exhorts and sneers in the same breath as Samuel Clemens with equal amounts respect and humour, it should come as no surprise to find some of that same poise and cunning in his most recent performance, as the southern stalwart Abner Meecham in Scott Teems' brilliant new film, That Evening Sun. An award winner in Sarasota, it is the type of small, quiet project that goes easily unnoticed. Lo and behold, it has opened in New York on another busy weekend for "specialty" films in new York. I can’t really recommend it highly enough.

Adapted from the William Gay short story which in turn had its title lifted from a William Faulkner line “I hate to see that evening sun goes down…,” the film is at all points engrossing and halting. In a way, it disarms the viewer with the patience and temperate pace of its narrative, while at the same time, providing exhilarating work from its performers in plentiful doses. It reveals characters whose lives and fortunes are, quite literally, on the line in a taut and stirring manner.

The long and short of the film’s conceit is that Abner Meecham, relegated to a rest home after he suffers a fall on the farm he’s run with his wife of many years, recently deceased, is fed up. It is this experience, one of the world around him changing at a pace beyond his reasons and needs, his understandings, that compels him to flee the safety of his nursing home exile and return home, by hook or by crook. Defying all demands to return placed upon him by his son, whose decisions we find, are the ones that matter most in deciding Abner’s fate, he wants back what he can never have. Abner’s return to his lifelong home is one of misery and disappointment; he finds it undeniably changed, leased to a local ne’erdowell at his son’s bidding, someone Abner refers to not just in passing, as trash.

This controversy drives the various interested parties (Holbrook’s reactionary, stubborn old man, his son, a successful, legally justified malcontent, and the new tenants, a family of drunken father, doting mother, and rebellious, equally sexed and innocent daughter) into a web of dependence, annoyance, and antagonism. The war at hand at times seems overwrought with obstacles, rife with an insurmountable discontent, a land feud blown curiously out of proportion by Meecham’s refusal to change or compromise, and his decision to launch an all-out campaign against the new residents on his land. It is a wall of humid, impossible conflict, which can only end in frustrating, inevitable tragedy.

In a world of images, media, and expressions less than stunning, we can at times be handed with great ease many spoonfuls of shit in place of nurturing, challenging work. That which asks questions of us the viewer, which drives us to question our surroundings in tow, is what matters. This film is not of that lot. Instead it provides a rare offering of stark, fluid storytelling, and visceral, at times confounding performances. One for the ages. If this one doesn’t grant Holbrook the honor he deserves, the establishment has another thing coming. Go hence and discover for yourself.

On Stanley Bard @ Royal Flush Fest

2009-10-18T16:49:00.005-04:00

By Evan Louison

As a cultural landmark, the Hotel Chelsea remains as much an enigma as ever before, despite repeated attempts in the mainstream to vilify or demonize it. Its many hedonistic and occasionally famous former residents, most of them long forgotten by those who have continued to inhabit it either for residency or work, seem to still haunt it. In turn, more recent attempts at lionization and pedestal placement have done little to illuminate most of the mystery behind what makes the place so site specific and original. Of these, Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks has been the most intentionally aimed at discovery and treasure hunting, although in an obscure and at times elusive sense, while Ethan Hawke’s Chelsea Walls stood as a newer, if faulty attempt at the type of historical fiction that Warhol & Morrissey once painted in minimal beauty. While Ferrara’s film portrayed the struggle between longtime residents of the Hotel with new management hell-bent on stripping the Hotel of any ties to the eccentric nature of its history, Stanley Bard, a new portrait both in the nominal sense and the literal, focuses solely on the Hotel’s longtime manager, his life, and memories.

As a film, Sam Bassett’s Stanley Bard merits equal parts praise and criticism. Questioning of an artist’s work and motives is unavoidable, and especially with Bassett, being someone who clearly identifies without hesitancy with such a title (and the inevitable responsibility that comes hand in hand with it). The rough sound and image quality, at times non-existent structure, editing that leaves a scattershot, possibly crazed and certainly frenetic feel, these are the marks of a creative mind working without regardless for the usual concerns of structural convention and audience comfort. While some may see these norms as a hindrance, formality and convention have there place. The picture, which Bassett referred to as “one of seven feature films completed in the last year,” is not a movie, not even really a documentary by any technical or traditional means. It is however a portrait, of a person and an idea of a place defined more by the ideas contained therein of the individuals who exist within it. Whether the ideas themselves are self-evident, or anymore valid than those of its detractors, the place itself remains self-reliant and justified to those who confirm themselves and the legitimacy of their lives with its concept.

If anything, the kinship between Bassett’s film and Ferrara’s film is glaring, the choppiness of both their styles or lack of style, the inherent weirdness of both seems to be their common ground, and perhaps exemplifies something in the place, something previously indescribable, something that just happens within its walls and the lives of those who pass through its doors. It is not always picture pretty, it is not by any means perfect or always interesting. In spite of the search for definition continuing, the one thing that is perfectly clear is that the place where Bob Dylan wrote “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and where Samuel Clemens and Nikola Tesla once regularly lunched, while perfect in its flawed history, is no longer what it was, just as much of New York City appears to be. In this realization however belies the question, is there any reason why it should be? For Sam Bassett, and more importantly, for Stanley Bard, we must assume the answer is no, if not entirely unnecessary in the first place. The question and the answer for them both appears to be the work, the work, the work. And be it a series of portraits or a piece of masking tape stretched late at night across 23rd st, there may be little difference, if any. Either way, Bassett seems urgent and with endless enthusiasm determined to show off his creations, of both worlds, to anyone and everyone who will pay notice. For that, he is to be commended. And for the privilege and shelter such a setting provides for creativity, Stanley Bard is to be regarded fondly and lauded for years to come.

Afterschool finally gets its day in the sun

2009-10-03T10:58:00.003-04:00

Antonio Campos' Afterschool opened yesterday at the Cinema Village. Its been a long time coming for the film, which premiered in Cannes last year and screened locally at the forty-sixth New York Film Festival last fall. Nominated for a pair of Gotham Awards, this most astounding of American Independent debuts was finally picked up by IFC Films after a lengthy, rather passive-aggressive flirtation between the corporate indie giant and the film's duo of young producers, who surely didn't make their negative costs back on the IFC theatrical agreement. Over at Hammer to Nail I've written a review of the film that was first posted during the run up to last year's Gothams. Here too is an interview I conducted with Campos last fall.

On Chelsea on the Rocks

2009-10-02T15:37:00.002-04:00

By Evan Louison

There are a great number of stepping stones through the rapids of taste and cinematic trend that must be surpassed in order for a filmmaker to transcend his own legend, his verifiable brand. These stepping stones are evident in the aesthetic path to captivating an audience as well, to convincing more sophisticated, cinema literate audiences to reach beyond their accumulated assumptions about a filmmaker, the stories that filmmaker chooses to tell, and their own assumptions about themselves as people, which of course informs the way they watch movies. These are the challenges that each Abel Ferrara film now represents.

One of the last true unreformed gonzo geniuses from the now distant and distorted downtown era has painted something of a seamless yet confusing portrait of the Hotel Chelsea, one from which we can take and learn yet remain confused by. Baffled really. Depicting a vaguely defined cultural institution in Chelsea on the Rocks, the infamous and much maligned Chelsea Hotel, Mr. Ferrara's excesses and his singular vision are right their for us all to see. Subject to much debate and legend, the place itself has been through the ringer over the last few years as Stanley Bard, its longtime manager, part owner and symbol of its lifeblood, is now in a sideline position. Stanley watches with dismay for much of the story as his beloved Hotel, a home for creative and eccentric types from all walks of life, begins to shift and disintegrate in the hands of a new, profit driven management. It is no longer the mecca, a shelter for both the counterculture and the merely fronting, that it once supposedly was.

Nostalgia for its past and uncertainty for its future are illustrated, with much reminiscing from such luminaries as R. Crumb, Rockets Redglare, Milos Forman & Dennis Hopper (who mercifully seems to not hold his experience on the set of The Blackout against the director any). Notable, more reent Chelsea Hotel figures like Lola Schnabel and Ethan Hawke (who made a regrettable narrative feature in its hallowed halls) also turn up. Quentin Crisp shows up for a second if you can spot him, and the memorable footage of William S. Burroughs personally defacing one of his books for a giddy and childlike Warhol also makes an appearance. The picture itself is bound to appear dizzying more than likely to most viewers. Yet thankfully Ferrera avoids many of the cliches of the contemporary reverential documentary, with their easily digestible, Phillip Glassesque codas.

The film traffics in three modes; beautiful, richly hazy archival footage of the Hotel’s hayday, contemporaneous interviews with B roll footage of the Hotel, and chaotic, often unfortunate, sometimes just barely audible recreations of notorious moments in its past that have become part and parcel to its legendary status. These moments include a bizare glimpse of a drugged out Janis Joplin in a bathroom arguing with an unnamed man and the infamous night that the most well-known hanger-on in the history of rock stars, Nancy Spungen, died of a stab wound that was attributed to her boyfriend/benefactor, Sid Vicious. Jamie Burke as Vicious isn’t nearly as bad as some have said. In fact, in terms of quality (or more accurately, a lack of quality) he doesn’t hold a candle to Bijou Phillips, who when not demonstrating how nice her singing voice is, should probably not speak; this suggestion stands also for the incredibly miscast Adam Goldberg as a venomous drug dealer and Giancarlo Esposito, who barely gets to speak here, as his lackey. Esposito , an incredible actor, somehow still steals the scene as the only compelling face of the bunch (Burke’s model perfect mug is unseen as Sid was, in Abel’s theory, unconscious at the time of the assault).

Regardless, these often silly recreations create an easy path through which to attack the film, if also a less than fair one. There is a fascinating, almost magical moment that occurs at the phi point, about two thirds of the way through this often difficult documentary, that has incredible power. It is also one which caught me off guard, startled me completely, and for a reason I did not realize until much later, completely threw me. There are many moments in cinema like this one, ones where we lose ourselves within them, and our ideas dissolve and drip away. They don’t always come out of nowhere in the way that they do here however.

A Vietnam veteran speaks directly to the camera, telling all manner of memories from battle, ones that might stand to chill even the most hardened listener, and certainly to pull even the most disinterested to the edge of their seats, desperately straining to hear and understand a truly mysterious inclusion in this much larger, and densely packed series of ruminations on the iconic 23rd Street Inn. It is his tone, his caged eyes and his words that demands attention, not just for the gravity of his narrative, one which Abel would recall to me during the course of an evening last fall, which we documented in the run-up to his 2006 film Mary’s US release, but for its place in the larger structure of this quickly disappearing cultural institution. This was a place that would house movie stars and Statesmen, but also people like this. He is a beam in the rafters, set in place long after the stones are laid upon the foundation. He'll be long forgotten once the furniture is moved in and out again.

NYFF09 - Dispatch #1: On Wild Grass and many others

2009-09-28T12:09:00.009-04:00

In these uncertain times, it’s impossible to talk about this year’s New York Film Festival in a vacuum that only considers its usual lineup of stalwart international auteurs. While the forty-seventh annual fest, one which has the reputation as the most self-aggrandizing, high falutin’ (and yet well respected) film event on New York’s cinema calendar, kicked off with octogenarian Alain Resnais delightfully absurd Wild Grass and a party in the renovated Alice Tully Hall’s brand new reception space (one which was much harder to penetrate uninvited than the opening night party’s previous home at Tavern on the Green), the doomsday predictions continued as insiders fret endlessly about the health of the independent film industry here in the States. As Scott Macaulay reported over at Filmmaker Magazine's blog, an unprecedented gathering of the indie film establishment’s most vaunted names took place at MoMA to discuss the problem on Friday. With everyone all gussied up for the veritable specialty film prom that is the NYFF’s opening night party, what better time to ruminate on the bad news that their standard of living, if not indie cinema itself, might be unsustainable.

Mr. Resnais probably couldn’t care less. His films are paid for in large part with government subsidies in European countries that prioritize cinema far more than we do in the States. His producers will happily take a low-ball offer from IFC; the US is just another territory to them. Fortunately for filmgoers, his new film is a definite improvement over his last outing with favorite late career star Andre Dussollier, the dreadfully baroque, slackly paced Private Fears in Public Places. He’s not growing any more refined as a filmmaker at 87, but he’s shirked off his trademark austerity for an accessible, vividly expressive melodramatic cinema that doesn’t take itself seriously at all and is, as Resnais’ films have always been, delirious with the possibilities of the medium to suggest varied states of consciousness.

As fun as it is, with a resolution largely borrowed from Jules et Jim and sizzling, colorful work from France’s greatest DP Eric Gautier, Wild Grass’ curiously familiar roster of French stars (Emmanuelle Devos, Matthew Amalric and Anne Consigny) and mad cap sensibility is Resnais’ attempt not to bite Trauffaut so much as it is to bite Desplechin, who he named checked in a stellar post screening Q&A. Of course Desplechin is often biting techniques and brash tonal changes from Trauffaut’s bag of tricks, albeit with panache that makes it all his own. Still, employing half the cast of A Christmas Tale, as fun as they are, only makes sense if you’re going to give them roles that satisfy our desire for their company. Amalric and Devos are largely on the sidelines, while Consigny’s character doesn’t have an emotional logic that makes a thread of sense. Dussollier and co-star Sabine Azema do their best with characters that feel half thought through.

Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere finds the talented Italian director, long overshadowed by his countrymen Bertolucci, Olmi and Moretti, in solid if unremarkable form. Recounting in a slightly overstuffed yet tremendously acted biopic how Mussolini’s seduction and post World War I abandonment of his first wife mirrored the fascist dictators’ love affair and betrayal of his homeland, Bellocchio tells the story too briskly, undercutting the emotional weigh of the narrative, and relies too much on stock archival footage that contrasts the real Mussolini with the both more and less remarkable fictional incarnation.

Encompassing over twenty-years of fairly complicated history in a two hour, twenty-minute movie is tricky and Vincere clearly suffers from trying to cover so much ground that the elements which would have allowed the story to register as tragedy just don’t congeal in the rush to explore all the story threads. With an at times needlessly elliptical editing style, Bellocchio so quickly stages the courtship, sex life and marriage of Mussolini and Ida Dalser (played by the luminous Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno), that we don’t get settled in our protagonist’s affection and trust of the man. Why was Dalser, whom Mussolini impregnated before leaving for war, willing to subject herself and her child to such abuse and torture from a man she still claimed to love after he abandoned and imprisoned her? Why Il Duce’s wartime love affair and subsequent marriage to the woman who nursed him back to health not given some dramatic heft and allowed to play more fully into a dramatized decision making process? Suddenly he just hates Dalser and decides to jettison her. There isn’t enough pre War set up for us to see Mussolini as a genuinely tragic figure. Likewise, its impossible to grasp their relationship as something that she would be so willing to fight for and metaphorically as symbolic of Mussolini’s betrayal of Italy. Bellocchio's gifts seems to work better in kammerspiel pieces like Good Morning, Night than on epic canvasses such as this.

Bruno Dumont was a middle-aged man when he began to make films, but given that Hadewijch is just his fifth film, he still feels like something of a l’enfant terrible. He certainly styles himelf as one, doing his best to infuriate audiences at every turn. His most confounding effort yet, Hadewijch centers on a wealthy French girl named Celine, who when we meet her is living in a convent and starving herself because of her unquenchable love of the lord. Kicked out of the convent by a duo of concerned Nuns who think her faith needs to be tested in the real world, she’s distraught to return to her government minister father’s Parisian palace. Placed within this spiritual void, she spends her days praying and rebuffing the advances of boys. Ultimately however, if we are to belive the incredible cynical logic of this exercise in nihilism, her love for Jesus is so profound that she chooses (spoiler ahead) to join a pair of dusky Muslim who live in the Parisian slums on a suicide bombing of the Parisian subway system complete with bad CGI.

Huh? Wha? Really? French Catholic Girls for Jihad! I can see the t-shirts now. To say that Dumont doesn’t earn this plot twist through the emotional mechanics of his characterizations is an understatement. Handsomely mounted, with the director’s trademark hints of lyricism, his heady mix of the profane and the profound, his subversion of Robert Bresson’s career project continues unabated and unchallenged. Dumont’s is a spiritual cinema that is so divorced from the actual practices of rank and file religious people that when he finally attempts to depict one, he has no idea what to do with her. After a marvelous first hour, Dumont’s misbegotten instincts ruin what could have developed into classic.

Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is a film that I admire more than I like. It doesn’t really want to be liked. I’m rooting for it in a way. I think people should see it, if just so witness how terrific an actress Charlotte Gainsbourg is Yes, it’s a despairing as Roger Ebert has claimed, although it’s not quite riveting enough for over two-thirds of its running time to truly be midnight movie material. It’s basically Von Trier deciding to make a Takashi Miike film. That’s fine. I still don’t know what all the fuss is about. Yes, Charlotte drills a hole through Bill Dafoe’s leg and attaches what looks to be a weight set to it. Yes, there is an explicitly glimpsed female castration late in the third act. So what? This film feels like a throwaway for its immensely talented director, as he’s readily admitted in several interviews. The notoriously travel averse auteur won’t be journeying to Lincoln Center, so you’ll just have to catch him on Skype (live, from his basement, in his underwear, Lars!) or check out the next issue of Filmmaker if you’re looking for some sort of explanation.

The most satisfying film of the festival thus far has to be Cornelieu Poromboiu’s absurd anti-policier Police, Adjective. This droll and highly comic movie, centering on a cop charged with the thankless task of doing surveillance on high school kids smoking pot near a local kindergarten, it slows the dynamics of the Police Procedural to a crawl, showing how such a small and pointless task can grow into an administrative nightmare in which local law enforcement will ruin lives just to save face. A worthy follow up to his equally troubling and amusing 12:08 East of Bucharest, it continues Romania’s rapid emergence on the world cinema scene. Just as capable of being infuriating as it is laugh out loud funny, it suggests the ways Totalitarianism is an ethic informed mainly by an abuse of language and procedure.

Quicktakes: On Disgrace, Fatal Promises, Harmony and Me

2009-09-18T10:11:00.007-04:00

Despite being a prize winner at Toronto last year and its impressive literary pedigree (J.M. Coetzee’s Booker prize winning novel is the source), I wasn’t expecting much from Disgrace. Maybe John Malkovich’s last top lining foray into a smallish “indie”, the morbidly unfunny and demeaning The Great Buck Howard, left a bad taste in my mouth. Or maybe, having not read the novel but being quite familiar with its story and themes, I was expecting the film to cop out, to not reach for the difficult truths Coetzee is trying to grapple with in South Africa’s dark and damaged heart.

At once provincial and accessible, it's a look into post-Apartheid psychosexual dynamics that threaten to swallow whole a white Afrikaner, a literature professor (Malkovich in top form) living in Johannesburg, who loses his job after a clandestine affair with a largely disinterested black student. First timer Steve Jacobs, while certainly no budding visual maestro, has given us a film that doesn’t shy away from presenting a country where white men like our protagonist, used to wielding their power over women and minorities both, have ceded control of the means of governance and production and must now deal with chickens that are coming home to roost sooner and in more morally troubling ways than they ever imagined. I won’t say more, but this is a film worth seeing and thinking about late into the night.

Fatal Promises, a new documentary about human trafficking from director Kat Rohrer, isn’t going to tell you anything the Dateline NBCs, Nightlines and 20/20s won’t. Dotting around the globe interviewing the formerly enslaved, those who have worked in this treacherous industry and the various individuals who are trying to stop this dastardly practice, Rohrer sticks to the issued oriented doc playbook pretty closely. Yes, talking heads galore. Although it's not breaking much new ground from a news standpoint and the aesthetics are simply pedestrian, the film does have its place in the dialogue and serves as a good primer for the uninitiated.

We trot out to conferences, listening to academics, NGO presidents and celebrities (Emma Thompson and Gloria Steinem among them) site statistics and invite us to ponder the human toll. We do, but as Susan Sontag once so elegantly pointed out, the suffering of others, especially as rendered in photography, will always seem remote to even the most empathetic viewer. It’s the responsibility of art that tackles matters of this gravity to make us care. While Fatal Promises doesn’t aspire to the level of artwork, it would need the same type of bracing impact to reach the level of affective advocacy. It doesn’t, but it was worth a try.

Don’t confuse Harmony and Me for a real movie, one with identifiable human beings pursuing recognizable goals. It is a cartoon. Nothing is at stake in its characters lives. No one has anything resembling values informed by experience and intuitive moral instinct. This cousin of mumblecore, featuring several of that already dead subgenres leading lights, it's a poorly executed attempt at free wheeling, low budget comedy. If only it were funny or insightful or a bit less mean spirited. If only the camera where not on auto-focus. Does the term, cinematography mean anything you, Mr. Byington? The film includes scores of performers I’ve found interesting a variety of different contexts (Kevin Corrigan, Pat Healy, Justin Rice, Alex Karpovsky), which only lends a greater sense of betrayal to the whole enterprise. Calling this filmmaking stretches the already malleable limits of that term even further.

On The Informant!

2009-09-18T01:12:00.005-04:00

A small movie writ large on billboards and bus ads, The Informant! is no Erin Brockovich and that’s meant as a compliment. As confounding as any Soderbergh film since Schizopolis, it’s not even risky for a studio to drop it, with the nationwide roll out and the bought and paid for fanfare, late in September, like its Bourne 7. Of course, Archer-Daniels-Midland are scum. Not like Warners really cares, which is why this oddly topical movie given our impending food crisis doesn’t mention a whiff of what it's really about in its beautifully constructed marketing campaign. Who would have ever thought big agribusiness/biotech price fixing would make for high end postmodern deconstruction of the Corporate Espionage Thriller bankrolled and P&A’d with studio checks?

This is the release you earn by making enough smart, semi-bankable high-end studio product in between your arty clunkers and genuine successes. Of course, it must have Matt Damon. A savvy casting move in both the commercial and aesthetic realms (not a thrown away beat the whole film, a whole, satisfying performance, every bit as good as his continents apart but oddly similar Tom Ripley), Soderbergh’s real coups are his deft 80s TV pastiche (Scott Bakula and music right out of Magnum P.I.), his feel for Midwestern mores (a place where sweetheart sociopaths bloom and the protestant work ethic lives on) and his this is real life or simply a Zodiac/Sexybeast mash up place and time inter titles, thrown at us in a zany pink that’s tackier that Mark Whitacre’s ties.

Damon’s voice over proves Mr. Whitacre to be the most amusing and thoroughly American unreliable narrator in recent cinematic memory. I’ll take him as my whistle blower over Jeffery Wigand any day, even if it’s harder to buy Damon with a gut than it is Russell Crowe. The respectively Corporate and Legal thrillers of Michael Crichton and John Grisham prove to be our unselfconscious protag’s self-imposed framework for the proceedings he blunders and lies his way through. Midwestern corn syrup hawks are bound to have lousy taste in fiction.

This is not a comedy to laugh at so much as its one to grin and scoff at, resting ultimately in the satisfying if melancholy tinged knowledge that the world is as grim and cruel and yet somehow still worth fighting for as you often imagine it to be. Left to wonder what Soderbergh would have done with the baseball wonks of Moneyball, having twice rebuilt another fragile subgenre for our age of cynicism and absurdity I now call for Amy Pascal’s resignation, but I suppose we have a better shot at The Public Option clearing the retirement home for millionaires otherwise known as the US Senate.

Screenings About Town, 9/11-9/13

2009-09-11T09:09:00.004-04:00

Having recently returned from an end of the summer sojourn to the provinces, I've found that the first weekend of fall offers too many cinematic choices to make any sort of informed and rational decision about what to go see (again). While many in this city will understandably spend much of this rainy Friday ruminating on the eighth anniversary of our countries' violent, headfirst plunge into the 21th century, ponder attending some of the terrific, little seen films on display in New York all weekend. Among the highlights:

Margarita Jimeno's electrifying portrait of the NYC based, Eastern-Euro flavored, rock act act Gogol Bordello opens at the Cinema Village today. In Gogol Bordello Non-Stop, she follows Eugene Hutz (star of Madonna's Filth and Wisdom) and his wacky, multi-ethnic band of Gypsy Punks to venues around the globe. While the doc doesn't push the envelope aesthetically, her subjects are never less than entertaining. Here's an interview with Jimeno I conducted last year for Spout.

Rooftop Films closes its 2009 season with a pair of shorts blocks, narratives on Friday and New York non-fiction on Saturday. Having fallen short of their 2009 fund raising goals, this indelible non-profit screening series and granting institution could certainly use your support, but the real reason to go tonight is to see a bevy of fantastic shorts, including two of my favorites from this year. Don Hertzfeldt's I Am So Proud of You, his award winning follow up to the Sundance winning short Everything Will Be Ok was made with financial support from the Rooftop Filmmakers Fund and is every bit as impressive as his previous effort. Meanwhile, 25 New Face Dustin Cretton's heartbreaking 2009 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Short Term 12 will close the block.

MoMA opens Edwin's Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly for a week long run tonight. Check out the interview I conducted with the IFFR FIPRESCI Prize winner when the film had its US premiere at Rooftop Films in July.

On Saturday night the venerable Williamsburg based collaborative center for "non-fiction media research and group production" UnionDocs will screen the still undistributed 2008 Best Film Not Playing a Theater Near You winner Sita Sings the Blues. Nina Paley's delightful DIY animated musical hasn't been able to find many audiences outside of the festival circuit because of rights issues concerning the Annette Hanshaw songs used on its soundtrack. Trust that it is a one of a kind movie, buoyant and uplifting, so see it when and wherever you can. Here's an interview I conducted for Spout with Paley last year.

On Unmade Beds

2009-09-02T10:29:00.005-04:00

Expanding on the clear promise of his debut feature Glue (2006), Argentine Alexis Dos Santos cements his place as a young auteur to watch with Unmade Beds, a startlingly energetic film whose HD visual elegance and studied grammatical anarchy breaths new life into its old hat tale of youthful ennui amongst London hipsters.

Working in an autobiographical vein is something few narrative filmmakers own up to and even fewer are able to do successfully. Dos Santos, who spent much time in London during his formative years as a filmmaker, gives us a pair of protagonists who's dislocation and joie de vivre bare the filmmakers social preoccupations. That one of them is a scruffy headed young man of Spanish origins who's shrewder than he looks should come as no surprise. He seeks a father he’s never truly known while squatting in a giant Artist space in some posh part of London where all the attractive youngsters live in, well, to quote David Denby, "moderately hip poverty" (not that Denby had any idea what that actually looks like, but I digress).

With style to burn and never a drop of sentimentality, Dos Santos interweaves the story of this young man with an equally adrift young woman, both of whom are undergoing the trials of being young and confused in a big, foreign city. Although they don’t meet until the final reel, both dressed in animal costumes after a music video shoot turns into a loft party, the Spaniard Axel and the Frenchwoman Vera share a loft with probably a half dozen others. She works at a bookstore, but spends the days in distraction and reverie, thinking about a broken love left in Paris and the fleeting nature of mutual interconnection. He plays at looking for an apartment under an assumed name, if only to spy on the realtor, who he’s deduced is the father who left him twenty years before.

A narrative thread that in lesser hands may have been played for melodrama is given a little weight but a large dose of comedic playfulness. It keeps the forward progress of the narrative tethered to some tension and some desire to find out, in the David Mamet sense of the phrase, “what happens next”, but still allows the film heady leaps into lateral stylistics. Dos Santos ultimately pays off the thread with panache, honestly displaying the way a young man bathed in a world of zero authenticity would actually respond to the dismaying revelation that his father is an average man in an average time who never thought to say goodbye not out of malice, but out of simple respect for the perceived meaninglessness of his condition he dare not broach.

Memory, especially its ephemeral, fleeting quality, is a strong factor in Dos Santos' vision. Axel ends every night drunk, often finding himself into the bed of a woman (or man, or both), the circumstances under which these events occurred escaping him the next morning. Vera can’t seems to escape her own, so much so that she threatens the prospect of a new relationship with a Londoner whose name she can never seem to remember. If this is all seeming a bit Gondry, it is.

Yet the film’s delicate formal touches, which include still sequences as flashbacks, the use of disruptive sound flourishes and saturated Super 8mm as an indicator of intensified experience, first person narration, in Spanish or French depending on the thinker, who may slip into omniscient at the storyteller’s playful discretion, recalls not just the French New Wave, but more recent work by filmmakers as varied as Lynn Ramsay and Arnaud Desplechin, Andrea Arnold and Oliver Assayas. Even Claire Denis might deserve a shout out. Yet what makes Dos Santos' work truly sing is just how much he makes these techniques his own. The milieu and concerns he shows us, which can seem so stale in lesser hands, seems fresh and alive in his.

On Big Fan

2009-08-27T19:09:00.003-04:00

Say you have a dead end job, not a terrible amount of education, but you’re savvy and you know what you like. You like football. Discussing it, watching it. You probably played organized ball, pee wee and the like, all the way through the early years of high school, but you weren’t very good. You were always better at talking about it, just like you were always better at imagining you were having sex with girls than actually having sex with girls. You’re not really that analytical (especially about yourself), or good looking, or have a suave, Vin Scully like voice, so broadcasting ain’t for you. It’s just that, being a parking lot attendent isn’t either. What makes it bearable is listening to sports talk radio well into the darkness of another boring night under the buzzing underground fluorescents. The comraderie of fandom, weather you’re calling to extol your winning teams virtues or sing the song of desperately needed change for a miserable, struggling franchise, the slapdash, overheated rhetoric of the call in sports talk show throwdown is what you live and die for.

This is the type of person Robert Siegel has in store for you in his nearly excellent debut feature Big Fan, an altogether more credible and rewarding experience than Darren Aronofsky take on his similar sports themed script The Wrestler. In the process of revealing the delicate nature of such a man’s existence, it suggests a whole American sub-current of men like this, the jerseyed hordes who flock (when they can) to publicly subsidized sports arenas, tricked out corporate welfare palaces, ATMs for billion dollar sports outfits that largely price out there most die hard fans from frequent attendance. The season ticket holders at most major pro sports events are gentry, but trust that Patton Oswalt’s Paul Aufiero will be sitting outside Giant Stadium with his TV watching the game as the other, more luxurious tailgaters actually enter the stadium. Best buddy Kevin Corrigan in tow, Quantrell Bishop jersey on his back, if the Giants win, he couldn’t be happier and you’ll certainly hear all about it WFAN. How wonderful it is to love big blue so much when the good times roll.

But what happens when Quantrell Bishop kicks your ass in a midtown club because you and your oh so unhip homie accidently reveal to him, in your star struck foolishness, that you followed him and his posse from a Staten Island gas station to his late night, first borough destination? When all that holds together your fragile masculine identity, the success of the Giants, wilts because of how you provoked your now suspended “hero” into behaving? When a rival Eagles fan (a well cast Michael Rapport) reveals to your call in audience that you, Mr. late night sports talk prodigy, are in fact the very person Bishop beat up? These are questions the film explores with a good deal of humor and something approaching pathos. That it pulls back from the Taxi Driveresque buttons it starts to push in the third act is a shame for sure, but Mr. Siegel, added by the ever nimble low budget technician Michael Simmonds, has an eye for how to stage this very dark and intimate comedy with stripped down style.

The real reason to see this film is Mr. Oswalt. Dim but not dumb, lacking in self esteem but not without a gentle toughness, just shy of fat but almost handsome if you look at him right, Oswalt has an All-American dough boy authenticity that goes a long way toward making his portrait of this troubled Staten Island super fan work, even when he’s acting so irrationally as to stretch the limits of credibility for what die hard sports fans are capable of sacrificing for the ephemeral glory of there favorite teams.

On Taking Woodstock

2009-08-26T13:08:00.003-04:00

Without having made a single film that one could unequivocally call a masterpiece, Ang Lee has hammered out a niche for himself as one of the world’s most easily recognizable narrative filmmakers. You have to applaud the breadth of his filmography, but is he an auteur?

He’s certainly not interested in singing the same aesthetic and thematic notes for an adoring fan base like most directors who earn that moniker. Perhaps Lee, like Steven Soderbergh, isn’t equipped to. He doesn’t write his own films, frequently works with different cinematographers (Eric Gautier does fine work this time out) and seems to have a primary interest in subverting genre codes within some of the most well established modes Hollywood and off Hollywood cinema have to offer. The results have been nothing if not solid. He delves into ambitious project after project in workmanlike fashion and his hits outweigh his misses. Yet, despite all of this, I’m never left with the impression when watching one of his films that I’m in the hands of a master, a personally expressive film artist with something urgent to say. His latest effort, Taking Woodstock, does little to quell that suspicion.

I guess it goes without saying that this one is "based on a true story". I couldn’t help but feel a bit duped by Lee’s look at the run up to the cultural phenomenon through the eyes of a few rural Jewish town folk who helped make this countercultural throw down a reality in a fairly conservative area of upstate New York. Like the worst of Mr. Lee’s collaborations with Focus Features honcho and his personal screenwriter James Schamus, I was left with the impression that, although there’s a lot of handsome filmmaking on display and some pretty nimble thesping (how about Liev Schreiber as a Tranny whose a Korean War vet), very little is at stake in the story for the filmmakers. Other than dreams of Oscars maybe.

Theirs is fortunately not a gauzy, romanticized 1969 summer of love, but Lee and Schamus are unable to imbue the film with tension and a sense of purpose. Demetri Martin’s character, struggling to keep his family’s roadside inn afloat, decides that welcoming the hippies/concert promoters who have been cast off by nearby Woodstock is smart business. He partners with his sympathetic and Jewish neighbor, played by a restrained Eugene Levy, and helps the groovy youngsters and their very ungroovy team of lawyers stage the concert, while this interaction with the counterculture allows our milquetoast protag to drop some acid with Paul Dano and embrace his homosexuality (props to my boy Darren Pettie, who is nothing if not fun as his construction working loverman). Meanwhile the comedy engine is kept afloat by the stereotypically combative Jewish mother attempt at retaining order. Let it be know, the definitive narrative film about Woodstock has yet to be made and probably, if Taking Woodstock is any indication, shouldn’t be attempted.

The trials of auteurdom: On The Headless Woman, Inglourious Basterds

2009-08-17T22:14:00.008-04:00

Lucretia Martel’s The Headless Woman is built to confound. Its filmmaker is in complete control and clearly never quite wants it to add up, but be wary of its enforced peculiarity. If its defense is its stubborn formal originality, it can’t quite be billed as building cinema from the group up; it most closely resembles the bourgeois women goes all wonky because of class guilt/environmental insanity genre (I’m thinking Safe and Red Desert right at the top here, but there are other entries) and I don’t think it’s a particularly distinguished entry.

I can’t wholeheartedly hold its willful flirtation with boredom against the film – that’s part of the raison d’etre of exercises like this, to fool the citizens of Cannesistan into thinking they’re seeing something profound by making them stare at it a long time. Sometimes it actually works. Boring isn’t a pejorative in all cases and yes, the underlying argument of these films, which all dabble in the metaphysical and the formally disorienting, is that satisfaction can, in fact, be quite boring. Or at least, to have all the trappings of satisfaction can. Fuckable, relatively unburdening husbands (even if they philander), nice shit everywhere; a particularly fetching woman foisted into these circumstances probably won’t have to work (Martel shows us so off handedly that Vera's a dentist, that I didn't catch it until glancing at the press notes). So one must find something to go crazy about for these films to begin their larger ruminations on completely untenable social and technological arrangements. In this case, it can all be traced back to hitting a dog on a sunny country road and being unwilling to look back. Industrial pollution and empty Eros (poor Monica Vitti) or late eighties LA dread and suburban excess (poor Julianne Moore) seemed to grip me more.

The Headless Woman’s intentions and execution don’t entirely make up for it’s at times needless and shopworn affectation. I’ll admit it right up front; this is a eight-seven minute film that made me want to check my blackberry to see how much longer I had in its chamber of existential malaise, which, as frequent readers may know, isn’t something I’m inclined to shy away from. Rendered with a great deal of skill and thoughtfulness by Martel, who stormed onto the largest stages of international Art cinema with her 2001 feature La Cienaga and the 2004 sophomore effort The Holy Girl, the film is less than the sum of its parts. Despite Maria Onetto’s fascinating performance and the obliquely pleasant artistry on display here (Ms. Martel is sure handed and inventive with every frame, she has an instinct for visual poetry and unnerving editing), the film’s fragile, overly implicit critique of contemporary Argentina’s very visible caste system and its gentle patriarchy never takes off.

Everything I wanted it to be and not a thing I didn’t. Although its burlesque (and very slimmed down) alternative history vision of the Great War was presaged somewhat by Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, also about a European (and European looking) Jewish girl who survives a massacre, changes her identity and stumbles into a plot for some small measure of comeuppance against the genocidal Huns, this week brings us perhaps the most broadly irreverent, almost but clearly not serious World War II film on record. With inventiveness to spare, Quentin Tarantino hasn’t quite made a masterpiece again, but its easily his best film in over a decade. If there were any haters left who aren’t sure Tarantino is a real auteur (you know you’re out there), all you have to do is watch Inglorious Bastards and think alittle.

Even in the most grim and maudlin of circumstances, he’ll make a comedy out of the bloodiest details. He’ll quote genres and celebrate the plasticity of cinema whenever he can. At his best, the words are almost always some kind of rhythmic, darting poetry and he creates tension without even trying. Smart, efficient film syntax is evident everywhere in this, his fourth episodic feature to cross the two hour twenty minute threshold and perhaps his most briskly paced. If anything, and perhaps like all good movies, Inglorious Bastards, which abounds with the most gruesome deaths, is filled with what come to feel like living, breathing beings whose experiences encourage you to see the world afresh. Bob Richardson’s rich, contrast heavy photography has a nimble quality here, but the often classical restraint on display in his second collaboration with the director makes it a much more visually pleasing experience then Kill Bill and of a piece with his best work (he’s an auteur too).

What Tarantino has given us is revenge porn for the descendents of European Jewry and anyone else willing to get in on the fun (Samuel L. Jackson for instance). Of course it was bound to be our most famous scholar of blaxploitation that had the toolbox to pull it off with panache, but revenge porn is a tricky thing. Especially when you also have the burdens of being a serious filmmaker who makes unserious movies, as the Cannes laureate surely does as he settles into the middle of his career. He allows us to watch a version of history in which Goebbels and Hitler get a Tommie gun to the dome courtesy of Hostel director Eli Roth (the cast’s weakest link, as he was in Deathproof), in which cinema is the key to ending the most epic of wars, but leavens the proceedings with an internal logic that never fails and dramatizations that both ramble and soar.

Despite being placed on enough magazines to clear the forests of the Amazon, Brad Pitt somehow doesn’t get credit for how consistently good of an actor he is --- he’s got echoes of John Wayne and Patton and a few of his other crazies here, but this is bravura comedic work that never feels false despite the rampant absurdity or derivative despite its moviedom forbearers. Nothing short of sublime, perhaps the real reason to see the movie, Cannes best actor winner Christoph Waltz won’t leave your head for a while. This is one Nazi I couldn’t help but want to like, even while I didn’t mind watching him (spoiler ahead) get a swastika cut into his head. Mission accomplished.

On Bad Lieutenant

2009-08-15T20:42:00.002-04:00

(Bad Lieutenant screens tonight at 10pm at Anthology Film Archives as part of a pair of benefit screenings to help Cinema Nolita pay its back rent)

“No one can kill me. I’m blessed. I’m a fucking Catholic.”
- Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant

Some films become emblematic of the times in which they were made. Other films become emblematic of the times in which you watched them. Few embody both. For me, such a rare film Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant is, as it meets both roles. A hard and unrelentingly lurid policier, one that doubles as a tale of spiritual confusion and longing, of desire for Christian love lost, it contains long time Ferrara muse Zoe Lund’s last film role and Harvey Keitel’s best, but its value is more than anthropological or thematic. Sure, it stands as a testament to the New York I never got to see (I moved to the city just after Giuliani’s era of crime busting and Disneyfication had come to an end), and yes, its as spiritually engaged as anything by Bresson, Ozu or Tarkovsky, but more than that, it speaks to the era in which I began to take the movies seriously, to see them as more than just facile entertainments.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Bad Lieutenant, but its more than any reasonable person would ever admit to. It became sort of a rite of passage while I was in film school (and afterwards), the movie you would hijack a perfectly civil gathering with, a litmus test for those new to your cinematic circle --- if you can appreciate this movie, if you can go all the way with it, then you can be part of our gang. Although I was never Catholic, going to all boys Parochial school has a way of inundating you with that particular Christian denominations’ at times peculiar and sublime preoccupations. Rarely has any filmmaker delved into the manifestations of the unattainable that Catholicism wraps its purveyors in with such potent and lurid energy as Abel Ferrara who, on the eve of the Venice unveiling of Werner Herzog’s less than Abel sanctioned “remake”, will present his masterpiece to an audience willing to pay fifteen dollars to see it on a DVD, all to save our beloved last lower Manhattan video store standing, Cinema Nolita.

I initially saw Bad Lieutenant it in an R rated, pan and scan copy I rented from a since closed Blockbuster Video store in the late 90s. I was too young to see NC-17 movies in the theaters and certainly had been far two young to see Bad Lieutenant when it would have played at Cincinnati’s Esquire in 1992 (yes, the Midwest does have arthouses that aren’t in Chicago. My hometown has two), so it wasn’t until a few years later, while watching a scene from the film in a directing class at film school, the scene where Keitel’s Bad Lieutenant humiliates the two under-aged Jersey girls by masturbating on the side of their car after threatening to bust them for driving stoned, without a license, that I realized I had only seen a bogus, corporate video store version of the film that surely had been altered against its creators original intentions. And what original intentions they are.

Ferrara is out to depict a man apart and at the bottom, a shake down artist, alienated from his family, doing bumps of coke while dropping his boys at school, largely too lazy (or drugged out) to satisfy his sex addiction, stealing drugs from crime scenes, spiraling into insurmountable debt as the Mets (the team this Queens based cop ought to be rooting for) are upending the Dodgers (whom he’s betting for, even as he tells his fellow cops to bet on the Mets) seemingly insurmountable three games to none lead in the National League Championship series. Indeed, “Strawberry is killing us”. (quick aside: two sports related oddities in this film - Evander Holyfield’s visage awkwardly dominates the final shot, one which would be at home in the oeuvre of Michael Haneke, and the shot of the Mets winning the NLCS is clearly stock footage of a Dodgers/Mets regular season game, but you only discover that if you’ve watched the film twelve times and happen to be a baseball nerd.)

The films narrative hinges on the rap of a redheaded Nun by a duo of nihilistic Latin crack smokers. The film depicts it as if some kind of disorienting, drug fueled rave has taken over a Church; bathed in red light, the beautiful young clergywoman’s screams echoing across jagged, shaky hand held shots, rosaries and candle sticks being used for all sorts of unholy purposes, it’s a sequence that stands apart from the rest of the movie by way of its manic amateurishness, as if through slipshod aesthetics Ferrara is preparing you for the thematic abandon the rest of this relatively handsome dip into the grime has in store for you.

How can she turn the other cheek and forgive? Keitel’s cop can’t figure it out. She doesn’t want to press charges. The young nun speaks of the boys as children in need. He’s been given the task of investigating the crime and as his fortunes turn for the worst, he begins to wonder in earnest what Jesus would have him do?

It’s the end of the era in which New York hosted 2,200 murders a year, in which the city’s reputation as a playground for criminals, punks and oligarchs was soon to fade, but was currently holding steady. How does one so thoroughly corrupted by this place find solace in the symbols of piety that give this woman strength, resolve, certainty? For Keitel’s cop, they are more than just mere symbols --- the film takes on the notion of the Christian God and his son’s divinity with the utmost seriousness, which comes to a head when Keitel (who invented his late, quivering, whiny pathos acting style with the film) literally imposes the image of Jesus on the cross onto a black parishioner while the cop cries and angrily asks Jesus, “where were you!?” We never get to know if Keitel’s oh so bad cop has earned God’s forgiveness, if his final act of crack smoking kindness to the worst of the worst is penance enough, if but for the grace of God go I will prove relevant, but how can the question not haunt you after this trip through the fallen world Mr. Ferrara, a lapsed Catholic (and junkie) has invited you along for. This is a movie I’ll never stop pondering.

Interview: Edwin of Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly

2009-07-17T10:38:00.006-04:00

Rooftop Films has teamed up with the International Film Festival Rotterdam this weekend to present a pair of films from the most recent edition of Holland's most well regarded cinematic event. Tonight's screening is the first in what I certainly hope is a long partnership between two organizations committed to independent and formally ambitious film. After having been to Rotterdam this year and seen so much interesting work that doesn't have a natural home stateside, the promise of some of those films trickling over via Rooftop Films is tremendously exciting.

Tonight's picture is from Indonesia and I promise you that after watching it, you'll never think of that country or Stevie Wonder in the same way again. Edwin's Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, which screened in competition at Rotterdam earlier this year, is at times uproarious, at other times somewhat impenetrable, but it is certainly never less than a strange and fascinating meditation on the repression of a culture and a people that is hard to shake and even harder to pin down. A film that defies simple synopsis or explanation, it follows in a distinctly non-linear fashion a number of story threads, including a dentist obsessed with Steve Wonder songs, a former championship badminton player who retired because of her uncanny resemblance to her chief competitor and a young woman who eats firecrackers. And yes, there's even a blind pig who wants to fly.

I was on the FIPRESCI Jury which awarded it a prize in Rotterdam and I can say that although each of us couldn't shake our impression that the film was a visually inventive rubix cube, one that demanded much twisting and turning in order to fully encompass its mysteries, its desire to shed light on the costs of repressing Chinese identity in Indonesia is accomplished with such finesse and subtlety that the unattuned could (and did) easily miss the narrative's underlying tensions. Despite its unconventional nature, Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly has an accessibility that's not sneaks up on you. It's also just a beauty to behold, not only because of its compositional inventiveness, but because so much of the thematic finds its way into the film through the dry ironies of staging and costume, the use of Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You" in the most seemingly inappropriate of situations and some clever editorial juxtapositions that leave you smiling or cringing in equal measure. Running a mere 65 minutes, its sweetness and brevity go oddly hand in hand with a brutal political circumstance, which was one of the many topics I got the chance to discuss with Edwin via email this week:

CEC: Many have observed that your film is a once a searing socio-political critique, a very bizarre dark comedy and an ensemble piece. That's alot to tackle in 63 minutes. Did you set off to make such a singular and unrepentantly strange film?

EDWIN: The film is a mozaic or sketches of feelings, of being a minority, in this case of being Chinese but living in Indonesia, nowadays. Of course there are also universal values, even if you don't have any background on Indonesian culture and political situation, you will feel them, but the sense of alienation, the sense of paranoia, the sense to sacrifice, the sense to survive, the sense of being minority are all ones I'm distinctly interested in.

The film also deals with how today's media, especially television, becomes closer to those in power. They have a significant role in documenting fake hopes, fake dreams. That said, I try to tackle many socio-political aspects in Indonesian today situation with subtlety and humor and shared emotions. I tried to document feelings, not informative data about Chinese Indonesian situations. That's why I decided to make it as a non-narrative. These issues are very personal to me. Its quite sensitive to talk about. I would rather not to say it loud, and not to be verbal. I don't want to exploit this kind of situation. I hate when people use these type of issues as commodities.

So yes, non-narrative and subtle humor were the perfect language for the film.

CEC: Tell us about how the various pressures of Indonesian society, its identity politics, the repression of the Chinese minority, and how the situation there specifically shaped your film?

EDWIN: There is alot of information out there on the internet about what we're going through.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2002/02/18/chineseindonesians-continue-suffer-discrimination.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Indonesian

Some in the media (literature, films, music, fashion, newspapers, televisions) are interested in using this issue as background. I appreciated the effort, but somehow, I just see it as something artificial, not really trying to dig closer to the essence of what's going on. It's kind of a sad situation to have that stereotypical portrait of Chinese Indonesians again and again. I don't want to look at these issues as an exotic thing. Because it is not exotic at all. We really deals with this problem for our whole lives.

Again. I don't want to exploit those emotions. I'm just trying my best to portray these complex and often absurd emotions as they are. I don't need to make it look simple, to have people enjoy the exploitation. We all have to learn a lot. But I don't want to preach. I know the limitations of human knowledge. But I believe there are no limits when we talk about emotions or feelings. I want us all feel it, like we feel the wind for the first time. When we don't know what the wind is.

CEC: Why Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You"?

EDWIN: Back in late 80s i grew up with that song. It was so popular. Somehow its like a terror following me everywhere. It was an early symbol for me of The American Dream and my evolving understanding of it. I have so many friends that are trying hard to leave Indonesia, to get green card and go to the United States to reach their dreams. To escape, to survive. The Stevie Wonder music can be your hope, can be your friend, but also can be your enemy. It depends on your mood and vision.

CEC: How were you able to make this deliberately political film in modern day Indonesia? How was the film's stance of the repression of Chinese indentity taken by the government?

EDWIN: I would say its more of a personal film than a political film. Nowadays everything can be examined through personal things. You can learn a lot from just reading a simple diary on a personal blog. You can read about culture, society, not only politics, by exploring personal video on youtube, for example. The film is political of course, the effects of the repression of Chinese identity taken by the government is there, but the most important understandings are personal.

The Chinese Indonesians have the responsibility for this chaotic situation. We all know there is repression aimed at us. But why don't we want to fight? At least, why don't we just talk about it? Why we choose to maintain the situation, by hiding our identity, by killing our emotions? Why Chinese Indonesians choose to kill themselves, rather than just talk and discuss what we want. This paranoia of being what you are, is the main problem for Chinese Indonesians. We let them manipulate us. We let corruption grows in our culture. We let those powerful people rape us, as long we can survive from our paranoia. It's ironic.

CEC: What are you working on now?

EDWIN: A new film called Postcards from the Zoo. Its the story of a 3 year old little girl who was left abandoned by her father in the zoo. She lives in the zoo with the animals, working there and also shares some stories with homeless people that are about living in the zoo. On her 17th birthday she meets a boy, who asks her to explore the real Zoo, what we call the city of Jakarta.

Rooftop Films and the International Film Festival Rotterdam present Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly tonight at 8pm at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus (232 3rd Street, Brooklyn, NY)

James Brown and the Boston he saved

2009-07-07T10:20:00.003-04:00

With Jeffery Levy-Hinte's magnificent Zaire 74' doc Soul Power hitting theaters this weekend (look for my interview with him in the forthcoming issue of Filmmaker), BAM's Afro Punk Festival is serving up a wonderful appetizer for the Godfather of Soul's most ardent fans - David Leaf's The Night James Brown Saved Boston. The seventy-five minute doc, which has been playing occasionally on VH1 and bouncing around the black festival circuit (I first saw it at last year's Martha's Vineyard Black Film Festival) after a premiere at South By Southwest, recounts Brown's April 5th, 1968 concert at the Boston Garden, the night after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, TN.

The show, which was televised throughout the Boston area, proved a cathartic one for a vengeful and deeply disillusioned black community. Many credit Brown's mournful, forthright charisma in the face of such tragedy with having spared Boston from the massive urban riots that quickly swept the land in the aftermath of King's death. Featuring interviews with contemporary black public figures like Cornel West and Al Sharpton (sigh...), the film screens tonight at 9:30.

BAMcinematek All Night takes on special poignancy after Jackson's death

2009-06-27T16:31:00.003-04:00

Cinephiles of various stripes will converge tonight on BAMcinematek as they wrap up their inaugural BAMcinemaFEST with a terrific program of events on the first day of the season that truly feels like summer. At 5:30 and 9 the ambient rock band 3epkano will perform their original score for Metropolis during Fritz Lang's classic sci-fi dystopia. Over at Fort Greene Park a few blocks away, an outdoor screening of Catherine Gund's food documentary What's On Your Plate? will take place at 8:30.

This is all prelude however to BAMcinematek All Night, which will feature an all night dance party in BAMcafe and four all night movie programs: "Diana Ross Coming Out" featuring Ms. Ross' 1970s forays into movie stardom, "Before They Were Scientologists" featuring favorites from the Cruise/Travolta oeuvre, pot movies galore in "All Night Bong" and "BAMcinematek favorites", which will include such 21st century auteurist standouts as In The Mood for Love and Demonlover. The midnight screening of Sidney Lumet's The Wiz may prove to be a heartwrencher, with the recent death of co-star and King of Pop Michael Jackson, in his only substantial film role. I doubt there will be a dry eye in the house.

Frank Perry's Last Summer @ Cinema Nolita tonight

2009-06-27T11:36:00.003-04:00

As part of its ongoing screening series, one which has wisely moved from Sunday to Saturday nights, Cinema Nolita will screen Frank Perry's 1969 summertime coming of age tale Last Summer. Its the cheapest movie ticket in town ($3!) and that comes with an assortment of goodies besides Perry's terrific movie.

Starring a very young Barbara Hershey, the film is an earnest look at four adolescents spending a summer on Fire Island. They form an insulated gang for themselves, in which to exercise both their carefree adolescent agenda and plot their emerging adulthood. Yet, as is always the case with growing up, their assumptions about who they will become prove less reliable than they could ever imagine. So if you're in NYC and not up to trekking to BAM for your late night movie fix tonight (more on that in the next post), then do yourself a favor and get over to 178 Mulberry St at 11:30.

On The Hurt Locker@H2N

2009-06-27T11:26:00.004-04:00

So far, halfway through 2009 (wow... it feels like it was January 20th just yesterday), my favorite film of the year is Kathryn Bigelow's terse and jagged Iraqi war thriller The Hurt Locker. I'm still haunted by it days after seeing it. Over at Hammer to Nail, I reviewed the film yesterday. I hate to resort to blind advocacy, but really, by all means at your disposal, see this movie.

Human Rights Watch Interview: Landon Van Soest and Jeremy Levine, Good Fortune

2009-06-24T11:37:00.003-04:00

An incendiary look at the difficulties that foreign aid has unintentionally exacerbated in some Africa's most impoverished regions, Landon Van Soest and Jeremy Levine's Good Fortune, which screens tonight at Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, traces the effects of a UN sponsored initiative to renovate one of the world's largest slums, Nairobi's Kibera. As this fascinating and infuriating doc illustrates, Kenyans in both the slums of Nairobi and the wet farmlands of the countries Western provinces are struggling with well meaning but poorly conceived and paternalist encroachment from the west. The film intercuts the struggle of one Kibera based midwife to keep her business afloat amidst the slum's infrastructural changes with that of a family farm that is threatened by a multi-national's plan to build a mechanized rice farm, one which could conceivably produce enough rice to help alleviate hunger in that part of the country, but not without flooding the lands of nearby independent growers.

Good Fortune, which premiered at SilverDocs last month, will screen at Walter Reade at 6:30. I caught up with Van Soest and Levine to talk about their film for Cinema Echo Chamber's first ever podcast, available at the title link above.

BAMCinemafest: ******core grows the fuck up, sort of - On You Won't Miss Me & Beeswax

2009-06-23T17:07:00.003-04:00

First off, a confession.

I’ve had an unshakable antipathy toward a certain species of low budget American cinema, one whose name shall not be uttered, for some time now. Regardless of the context in which it was made, I try to give every filmmaker the benefit of the doubt. After all, I’m a filmmaker myself. Objectivity, if such a thing exists, is one of the central tenants to any respectable critic’s philosophy. Yet, when it comes to much of what finds film festival screens in America these days, I’m clearly biased. I can’t help it. When I see films that were obviously financed by wealthy families for their debutante children, nieces and nephews, a feeling that isn’t exactly envy, but probably belongs in the same universe of emotions, tends to wash over me. This probably wouldn’t be the case if the films themselves were of much merit. Yet most often, regardless of weather I was aligned against them from the start, they aren’t.

Thinking back on the last few years, I can’t trace back my feelings on the matter to the precise moment when this particular emotional malignancy began. Perhaps what I often feel isn’t that different than any other ambitious middle class kid who went to film school with the wealthy and the super wealthy (or any other film producer who struggles to get by while others pay for insurance, overhead and development with their trust funds). Even if the film was paid for on credit cards for less than the price of a used car, I still find the self-absorption and aesthetic laziness of most Generation DIY cinema to be indicative of our generation’s lack of engagement and intellectual bankruptcy. There’s something distinctly Bush era about mumblecore (there, I said it) and the narcissistic, reductive, unengaged worldview that these films generally contain. Micro indies about comfortable yet jobless or marginally employed Caucasian-American young adults looking for love, at least the ones produced in droves during much of this decade, never made much of an impression with me, I’m sorry. Why make a movie if you have nothing to say?

This being the case, I’m very happy to report that two of the most promising figures to arise from these ranks have new films that are making their New York premiere during the inaugural BAMcinemafest which show growth for the individual filmmakers and the cycle as a whole. Both films are giant leaps forward for their progenitors, who surely have yet to reach the height of their powers. Ry Russo-Young’s You Won’t Miss Me and Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax both center on young women (in Beeswax’s case, a pair) and feature, in their very different ways, remarkably empathetic portraits of individuals trying to make their way in the world and come to terms with their own vices and limitations.

In Beeswax, Bujalski focuses on a pair of twin sisters (Meg and Tilly Hatcher), one of whom is crippled and co-owns a thrift shop that she feels she has too much responsibility for, the other an attractive post-collegiate freelancer who’s just broken up with an older man and is drifting toward various opportunities. Bujalski uses color expressively at times, but generally he has refined his rough hewn, Eric Rohmer gone all DIY aesthetic only slightly; what makes Beeswax special are elements that have already been strong in his previous films getting even better. His casting is perfect and his ear for contemporary post collegiate vernacular among the pale is without par.

He gets a performance out of fellow filmmaker Alex Karpovsky (who was much less funny in Bob Byington’s nearly unwatchable Harmony and Me), playing the dual romantic foil for the two sisters, which is worthy of vintage Albert Brooks. The Hatcher sisters are incredibly warm and appealing screen personas. The dynamics that exist between them are often unpredictable, never malicious and always fun to watch. Beeswax is ultimately about the ways in which adulthood forces us to reconcile our own desires with those of others, subject matter that’s hinted at in Bujalski’s first couple of films, but given a fully textured rendering here. He delivers plenty of trademark awkward laughs that hinge on his performers lack of verbal dexterity, but also suggests, without being mawkish and without losing his cool, legitimate depth of feeling for the first time.

You Won’t Miss Me, shot on multiple formats and featuring a fascinating and visceral performance by Stella Schnabel, is the second feature from Ry Russo-Young. It’s an altogether more impressive movie than her debut feature Orphans and shows that she has the potential to grow into a terrific stylist. Schnabel’s Shelly Brown is a woman that one imagines isn’t that much different than Schnabel herself: privileged child of a successful artist, strong willed, libidinous, neurotic and altogether irrepressible. In short, she’s a spoiled terror.

When we meet her, she has checked into some sort of institution, where she’s told by an offscreen evaluator/psychiatrist that although she’s out of control, she has no business in a place like this. These scenes, which the film revisits frequently, anchor it to some plausible concern about where Shelly’s hijinks might land her. Playing out across the gamut of low budget film and video formats, the rest of the film proceeds to revisit moments from Shelly’s recent past. She brings a few boys home to her mother’s empty west village haunt, hangs out in Williamsburg with a crusty looking friend/occasional romantic partner, takes an ill advised trip with a equally challenging friend to be groupies for a rock band performing in Atlantic City and goes on a few a series of progressively more volatile auditions. As all of this unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that Shelly is dubious about her abilities, but never her awareness. She is looking desperately for affection in the wrong places, but despite her sheltered naivete, this very watchable young woman has an innate toughness that’s not an affectation.

Yet, mixed in with all the non-narrative cinematic poetry the film makes much hay from (props to ace DP Kitao Sakurai, he’s one to watch), Russo-Young also pushes Schnabel to make Shelly just annoying, bratty and clueless enough as to leave any discerning audience member wondering if they would miss Shelly. I certainly won’t; she’s the type of exhaustingly self-absorbed hipster girl you might just cross the street to avoid, but I’ll never forget her either.

Taylor's New Muslim Cool & Morrissey's Madame Wang tonight

2009-06-20T15:25:00.005-04:00

A pair of intriguing New York City screenings this evening are largely flying under the blogosphere's radar. This is perhaps no surprise during the same weekend in which BAMCinemaFest, Silverdocs, Edinburgh, NYAAFF are all on going.

Tonight in Harlem, Rooftop Films will screen Jennifer Taylor's New Muslim Cool. A fascinating documentary that details the life and times of Puerto Rican-American rapper Hamza Perez, an ex-drug dealer and born again Muslim. A single father of two, he forms his own Mosque and spiritual community in the rough northern section of Pittsburgh and tries to make a difference on the streets, projects and jail cells of that decaying industrial city, even while being harassed by the FBI for suspected terrorist activity. Perez will be on hand for the screening and perform a few cuts immediately preceding the event. Show starts at 8 at Museo del Barrio on 104th Street in East Harlem. If you miss it tonight, you can catch it on the season premiere of PBS' POV this coming Tuesday night.

Cinema Nolita will unfurl Paul Morrissey's Madame Wang, another one of his notorious collaborations with Andy Warhol, at 11:30. Using his trademark grimy, just this side of amateurish aesthetic, Morrissey once again delves into the abyss of New York's most seedy denizens.

Minding the glut: On New York's June film festival proliferation

2009-06-16T16:33:00.005-04:00

How many film festivals can one city, even a metropolis that can legitimately claim to be one of the capitals of world cinema culture, support? The greater San Francisco area has long been the American and perhaps the world leader in its capacity to support niche film festivals - Asian, South Asian, Black, Jewish, Latin, Italian, Arab, Irish, Armenian, Native American, LGBT, Tranny, Short, Fantastic, Documentary, Silent, Noir, Labor, Environmental, Ocean, Bicycle, Gay Black, Gay Black Women, Black Women, you name it, in San Fran, you got a film festival. Although New York City doesn't boast the 55 film festivals that San Francisco does, the New York festival landscape is a crowded one and we're in the middle of its busiest month.

Only a month and change after the almost pubescent, would be behemoth Tribeca wraps up, NewFest and the Brooklyn International Film Festival run side by side (June 4th-11th versus June 5th-14th). They are normally overlapped by Lincoln Center's Human Rights Watch Film Festival (June 11th-June 25th) and the New York Asian Film Festival (June 19th-July 5th) which this year will overlap with BAMCinemaFest (June 17th-July 2nd), a retooled Sundance at BAM that will expand the slate of films on display beyond Sundance approved American indies, to a broad cross-section of new independent works that have world premiered at a host of the fall and winter's more prestigious foreign and domestic fests as well as a few repertory selections, shorts Sunday and an all night screening series.

In short, its a dizzying time to be a cinephile in New York, and as someone who spends a good deal of time writing about, going to and occasionally exhibiting work at film festivals, it gets me pondering a few obvious but difficult questions, chiefly, are all of these events worth having in the first place?

With the best of world cinema reserved yearly for the fall's New York Film Festival, with edgier international work usually finding its way to Film Comment Selects or the Hamptons, many of these festivals, especially Tribeca, have struggled to find their identity. While the two oldest of the bunch, Human Rights Watch and NewFest, are well established among their clearly defined constituencies, the other fests in the late spring/early summer grouping are all in flux. Despite rumors that it may be moving to the fall and the yearly complaints issued about its brazen, often false marketing, Tribeca has been getting steadily better the past few years. BAM's revamped, rebranded fest is perhaps the most hotly anticipated new film event of the year.

Having spent a good deal of time at the recently wrapped Brooklyn International, I can say unequivocally that although there are some interesting films amount the 100 plus that found their way into the selection, its clearly a fest that is desperately trying to brand itself as hip and relevant, despite its somewhat rarefied, Brooklyn Heights local and uninspiring roster.

From its expensive animated pre-film sequence showcasing a twisty, shifting abstraction that gives way to images of brownstones, LP spinning DJs and the looming Brooklyn Bridge before morphing into a tree to its kitschy, genre heavy selection, one feels BIFF's desire to draw hipsters west from Park Slope and South from Williamsburg, but its Dumbo/Brooklyn Heights locale seems too far and its selection too benign and bloated, to court them effectively. Among the few highlights for me was Landscape No.2, a captivating slovakian bloodletter that particularly stuck out - it feels like a low frills Eastern-European answer to No Country for Old Men.

Still, nothing about the program as a whole seemed at all cohesive or compelling. The world premieres were few but the New York premieres were plenty, including a few by local filmmakers. Daryl Wein & Zoe Lister-Jones' opening night film and best narrative feature winner Breaking Upwards has some actors I find compelling, among them the co-writer/director/producer/stars, but its bogus conceptual desire to craft a mainstream rom com at a DIY budget just doesn't much interest me; The filmmakers' clear intelligence will be better suited in other contexts. Craig Butta's Sea Legs, who's DP Sean Williams seems to be given co-billing, was one of a handfull of world premieres in Brooklyn, but was unseen by me.

The boatload of independent European and American narrative filmmaking on display felt, for the most part, like fairly derivative stuff (oh, here's the Haneke rip-off. Boy, this guy sure has seen alot of 80s American horror movies) that probably got rejected by SXSW and Rotterdam's often lenient, often unadventurous competition programming. At the best festivals, the selections are constructed so that various films inform the programming of others in a balanced and legible manner. While "Open Source" was the festival's theme and slogan this year, it the context of this festival it felt like a pejorative, an example of the festivals lack of curatorial vision.

Hal Ashby's The Landlord @ Cinema Nolita tonight

2009-06-13T14:17:00.003-04:00

Tonight at Cinema Nolita, a venue for old school New York City film culture that is desperately in need of patronship, there will be a super rare screening of Hal Ashby's 1970 debut film The Landlord. Starring a twentysomething Beau Bridges and scribbed by nearly forgotten black auteur Bill Gunn, its a laugh riot and was the introduction for a number of major talents to big screen work.

On Mississippi Damned and Ballast over @ H2N

2009-06-10T16:07:00.003-04:00

Followers of this blog or of my writing for other sites know that I've never been partial to Lance Hammer's Ballast. I was able to explore those feelings a bit more in a review just published over at Hammer to Nail of Tiny Mabry's outstanding new drama Mississippi Damned, which just had its New York premiere last night at Newfest. It shares many things with Ballast (drama about black folks, Mississippi locale, impressive cinematography), but certainly not its phony ideological presuppositions and imposed mannerisms.

The Believer's JLG in USA and One PM tonight @ BAM

2009-06-01T11:24:00.002-04:00

Packaged within this year's The Believer Film Issue is a fascinating disc of shorts detailing Jean Luc Godard's travels through the United States during his "in the wilderness of Maoism" period, stretching roughly from the the late 60s (after the shutdown of the 68' Cannes film festival and his completion of Weekend) through the early 80s, when young Isabelle Huppert graced his comeback to narrative filmmaking, Every Man for Himself. Put together by The Film Desk and BAMCinematek's inimitable programmer Jake Perlin, those shorts as well as the abandoned One PM, a quick sketch of a movie on which Godard collaborated with Rip Torn and the famed cinema verite team of D.A. Penebaker and Richard Leacock, will screen tonight at BAM. I've written at length about both One PM and the shorts at Hammer to Nail.