cinema echo chamber

Interview - Benh Zeitlin, Glory At Sea

2008-07-23T13:16:00.004-04:00

This week, Benh Zeitlin, director of the oh so glorious SXSW winning short film Glory At Sea, was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces in Independent Film. I had the pleasure of profiling Benh for the magazine's new issue and recently I caught back up with him to talk about his film, the burgeoning new film collective Court 13 and whatever else came to mind.

CEC: What provided the initial spark for Glory At Sea? How protracted or brief was the development process?

Zeitlin: The spark was an image of naked greek men catapulting out of the ocean in a symphonic hairy porpoise inspired resurrection finale that settled on an island paradise of obese naked love, which has almost nothing to with the finished film. The script was written in the middle of an absolute spree, in an hour, send to The Rooftop Filmmakers Fund and it wasn't 'till I got the grant that I realized I was actually going to make it. The project didn't truly take shape until after searching for locations in Europe I decided to come back to America, where the flurry of thoughts about redemption, reunion, and resurrection combined with the miraculous frontier town that is post-Katrina New Orleans, where I met the people who ended up acting in the film, who brought with them a force of communal tenacity and fatalistic passion that shifted the focus of the film from just wild surrealistic bombast to something that's more human about how people can respond to senseless tragedy rebelliously, with hope and love and total insanity.

The one thing that stuck from the original inspiration was the song I wrote that went along with the naked human manatee finale that ended up being the reunion theme in Glory, It has secret lyrics about how "we are going to our own afterlife" which was inspired by the story of Carlton Pearson, an American televangelist preacher who had a spiritual revelation that there is no hell, and that true hell is created here on this earth by people who fail to take care of their fellow human beings, which to me, spoke to the disgusting religious fanatical notion that tragedies of biblical proportions are brought on by their victims sinning ways. What carried through the project form beginning to end was the notion that people condemned by senseless tragedy can save themselves by virtue of their own camaraderie, bravery, and passion.

CEC: You work within a collaborative group of Filmmakers called Court 13. Tell us a bit about the origins of the group and some of its key functionaries.

Zeitlin: I'm not at liberty to describe the inner workings of the Court on my own. Suffice to say that it is ever growing - our captain is Jimmy Lee Moore - Josh Penn, Victor Jakovleski, Dan Janvey, and Michael Gottwald man the bulwarks, and we strive toward work that speaks love, honor, and friendship, and are ever vigilant to bring down the hegemony of that hollow feeling. I think I can also safely say that everyone in Court 13 rocks with Sam Cooke live at the Harlem Square Theater.

CEC: What is your background in cinema? Where you a cinephile from a young age on or did you come to appreciate and work in cinema gradually or not until adulthood?

Zeitlin: Always, I think. I played Superman in Batman: the movie when I was 6, directed by my current editor and camera operator Crockett Doob, who was also 6, and who was also involved in a very significant place called Pycior's basement, where Pycior lived, and where there was a VHS camera that me and my 12-year olds buddies, who like me, were spurned by the women of middle-school, would make these ultra-violent action epics, that had this true ferocious lunacy that I never really grew out of. Even though what gets me these days is Cassavettes, Sturges, Moodyson, and more obscure stuff, I think what's always in my head, are the movies I saw, and continue to watch in Pycior's basement- Wayne's World, Die Hard, Willow, Roger Rabbit, Aliens, Total Recall. Pycior himself now rocks with O'Death and Skeletonbreath, both close allies of Court 13. I'm also a huge football fan, which I wouldn't consider unrelated.

CEC: Your film won a shorts prize at SXSW - sadly, you we're hospitalized just prior due to an auto accident, correct? How is your recovery going?

Zeitlin: The accident happened days after finishing a year and half of breathing Glory at Sea around the clock, so it was kind of a mandatory vacation, Not one I've particularly appreciated. I just added a massive geezer-led hospital prison break to my next film, which is certainly inspired my experience in our health care system. But all in all considering the pretzel of metal they pried me out of I'm lucky to be able to wiggle my toes, and its certainly seeming like I'll make a full recovery down the line. Also, I'm happy to be living proof that watching movies, drinking whiskey, and making love can all be done without the use of ones right leg.

CEC: The production design in the film is quite, for lack of a better word, glorious. You worked with Ray Tintori, an accomplished shorts director in his own right, on that aspect of the film. Tell us about that specific collaboration.

Zeitlin: Because the film was about a group of people who attempt something impossible on purpose, with total disregard for practical physics and personal safety, we felt obligated to follow the rules of their mission in every element of the production. So the design of the boat, and the project itself, began with me, Ray, and producer Par Parekh wandering around the streets of NOLA, us seeing something on the side of the road like a gigantic burnt limousine or a discarded bathtub and say "that has to be on the boat," and that was that, nothing would stop us from putting it on. Things would also find us, we'd be talking about how we needed a piano on board, and someone would see what we were building offer us their grandmother's 18th century organ, which is just the kind of thing that happens in New Orleans. So the boat was built, and the script was written, to accommodate these objects and people that that found each other through the bizarre magnetism of the project, not the other was around.

And like everything else in the film, it was a massively communal project. Ray did a lot of the conceptual work, the actor who plays Sgt. Mgr, Jimmy Lee Moore engineered how to make the fucker float, Sophie Kosofsky (art director) welded the massive structure, and my sister Eliza dressed it and made it appropriately vicious and heartbreaking. When we finally had her floating our one-armed maniac tow-boatsman Mike Howell, who used to rescue home-made rafts refugeeing between Cuba and Florida said that in 36 years it was the least sea worthy vessel he had ever laid eyes on. Luckily for us, it was protected by miraculous forces.

CEC: What is your next project?

Zeitlin: I'm heading back to New Orleans to develop two guerilla features about the end of it all, this first is a comedy about a 10 year old girl in Georgia preparing for orphanhood in the wild as her father's cancer and a mythological southern apocalypse descend on her little world. Beasts of the southern wild, the hospital jailbreak, essential life lessons, and a lot of Italian dance music, and half-time show spectacle are going to be major.

The other is after the end, tentatively called Santa Maria, it takes place in 90 minutes of real time aboard a boat led by a maniac whose brought all the ingredients for a new civilization on board and gotten them stranded in the middle of the arctic ocean. A monstrous childbirth, divine interventions, continental mirages, and an impossible romance are involved. One of the two should be in production within the year.

Quick Notes

2008-07-12T12:16:00.004-04:00

- In lieu of a number of work related and artistic commitments, I've handed over the keys to the blog (temporarily) to Evan Louison, whose terrific takes on the Afro-Punk film festival are below. Look for more from Mr. Louison in the coming weeks.

- IFC Center opened a pair of splendid films yesterday. Kent MacKenzie's 50 year old The Exiles and Jacques Nolot's Before I Forget. Run and see them both - you won't be disappointed. Look for a full review of The Exiles from yours truly at Hammer to Nail and National Board of Review early next week.

- Shout out to Bruce Connor, the legendary avant-gardist, who passed away this week. I was quite taken with his collage driven found footage films, such as A Movie, Mongoloid and especially his take on the Kennedy assassination, Report, which uses loop printing of Kennedy's final moments, spasm like, seizure enducing strobes and sound pulled from radio reports of the assassination, to build an altogether terrifying cacophany of voices and documents. It is, in its own way, no less a nuanced portrait of the whole affair than Don DeLillo's Libra or Stone's JFK are. Here's a link to Manohla Dargis' wonderful appraisal of the man and his work - she most likely first saw Connor's films as I did, on educator and avant-garde filmmaker Jon Rubin's 16mm print, in his freshman seminar at Purchase's film conservatory.

Afro-Punk interview: James Spooner & Ayinde Howell

2008-07-12T11:57:00.003-04:00

By Evan Louison

James Spooner's second feature and first step into the world of narrative storytelling is called White Lies, Black Sheep. Filled with jagged video imagery and rapid pace score and source music, the film is as much a document of the LES / Williamsburg party scene as it is a critique of the subtle racism that lies implicit white bohemia. AJ (or Ajamu as his father calls him) helps to promote a popular weekly party on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, lives in Williamsburg, and feels more at home with white women than those of color. As he says when asked if he ever even thinks about being with a black woman, "Man, that would be like kissing my mom...". Largely concurrent in theme with Spooner's first feature Afro-Punk, Spooner tells the story of someone taking a role and fashion in a scene that will never truly be their own. Not everyone is so accepting of AJ's punk style and implicit white self-identification, including his Black nationalist father, and even many of those in the rock scene he considers his friends. He becomes disillusioned in the world he sought refuge within from his original disillusioned state.

Cinema Echo Chamber spoke with James Spooner and the star of the film, Ayinde Howell, after their final screening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

CEC:It seems like you [James] have defined a problem with both your films, and in this film [White Lies, Black Sheep] it is no mistake that you are quite literally stepping into the frame of this problem, both with surrogate characters like AJ [actor Ayinde] and your interview subjects in Afro-Punk. In this film you appear as the first person in frame and also the last person in frame in the story. How does this kind of decision play into your choices for directing a narrative, making it so personal?

JS:You're absolutely right to say that both of these stories were about identifying problems that were personal to me and to come up with a solution whether it appears on screen or not. With Afro-Punk, I wanted to tell my story through these kids...I asked the questions knowing the answers already. I went around and talked to all these kids and knew the protagonists I was looking for before I found them. I knew I was going to find someone who was very political but was still struggling with their identity, their racial identity. You know, I know you exist because I was you at one point. So I did do that with Afro-Punk certainly.

CEC:You break the fourth wall for various reasons throughout the narrative of White Lies, Black Sheep, and this overstepping of that boundary between the filmmaker and the audience serves as both a source of humour and also a very intense, borderline confessional statement to make.

JS: Right, well with White Lies, it started out as a more comical thing. I wanted it to be like I was making this documentary, and when you're making documentaries, people are always coming up to you and going, "Hey what kind of camera is that man?," and you're like, "Dude, I'm shooting something right now!" So I thought it would make for comic relief and make for things like having a sex scene in a documentary because I set it up beforehand that I would put the camera down and leave the room.

CEC: That's a pretty intense scene because you see nothing and are told all the information of what plays out [AJ, the film's protagonist, sleeps with a girl he meets at a bar without using a condom, after going on at length to his friend Josh about always using them] without us ever seeing anything, it is all just shadows and sound.

JS: I wanted to let that happen. [When the girl's roommates go out to "get beer"] I say, "You know, I'm gonna go too, but can I leave my camera here?" And then when it was over I came back in the room and picked up the camera and said, "See ya later."

CEC: Right, you come back in the same time as the girl's roommate, who says "Not again, in my bed again! You said you just needed to talk to him"

JS: It's just a funny New York thing.

CEC: Something that happens all the time...

JS/AH: laughter.

CEC:In the film's conclusion the character of AJ undergoes a serious transformation physically, tearing off his clothes, wrecking his bedroom, cutting his hair. It is a scene so serious that he actually breaks down and collapses. At this point you enter the frame again, and actually help him to his feet, and help him to complete the transformation. This again, is a very telling action and role for the director of the narrative to take on.

JS: When I [went over to Ayinde in the last scene of White Lies], that was real. He was doing this thing on camera and you can't really hear it, but he sort of stopped and said, "I can't do it..." And the whole crew was sort of looking to me like, "When are you going to stop this?" What was great was I said cut, I said, let's give him some room to breathe, and that was when I stepped in to say just, "Are you ok?" We still had B-Camera rolling. It was only the good sense of my DP to run in with the other camera and turn it around on the rest of the crew watching us play this last scene out together.

CEC: Did you shoot chronologically?

JS: No, it was all over the place. We shot stuff after the end where he cut his hair with a wig that was supposed to be a year later, we just didn't end up using that stuff.

CEC: Was it difficult for you [Ayinde] to go back and forth in the worlds of the character and play the part of him one day that was growing and learning more about who he was as a black kid in a scene made up of white kids and then back to the part of him that didn't notice or care?

AH: What I tried to do was to have AJ before and after, I gave him two different ways of speaking, just changing him a little bit. I shot blind and just let James direct me, I didn't watch any of the dailies, which was what he wanted and it was very interesting and challenging but very new to me. It would just be James saying "Ok, now you're this..." and my voice would be this way, and then we would do him before and he would be back to this cocky, asshole type. You know, theatre stuff. So it was good to shoot it kind of blind, cause I could just focus on the acting and in that way it wasn't difficult, not being concious of the frame. It was so raw. It was the first time I was in a lead role number one, and then it was the first time I was so exposed.

CEC: That's a good way to describe it. The image of you in the bed at the end, which is very vulnerable and naked looking, says alot about what you're doing in the film: You're wearing certain clothes, that don't necessarily fit, and you are surrounded by different outfits and styles of things that people put on, that people dress up in, that make up the world around you, the worlds you want to be a part of and those you don't. When you remove the clothes, a large part of the identity of the character disappears, and he appears very exposed and weakened.

AH: Alot of that was just the last day of shooting, we had a really good crew, and the energy just came together into one moment. It was what it was.

CEC: You really have Ayiende put himself in a place there that can only bring out extreme emotions in a person, especially a performer. Those feelings of wanting to tear down everything around him, from the posters on his wall to the clothes on his back.

JS: Some people ask the question, "Why did you make the answer to his problem just throwing away all the rock and roll, why can't he still be that person?" For me it was just a physical, beautiful, metaphorical statement about rebirth.

AH: Purging.

JS: And that wasn't the original ending either, but the way that he performed it, we didn't need anything else. In the script it just said, "AJ trashes the room, cuts his hair, lays in bed." I was afraid of doing too much, because of this movie Gleaming the Cube, [1980s skateboard Christian Slater classic] and not wanting people to think it was a rip-off.

CEC: Like American History X.

JS: Yeah. Thankfully because of the way he played it, it became its own thing.

CEC: The film is so powerful that one doesn't have to be taken in by all the characters, in fact an audience member could not have any sympathy for certain characters, and it still manages to give something very affecting to the viewer. It has a lot to do with the cliches of a lot of these characters, and these cliches playing themselves out in people's behavior. AJ is very adamant that his whole life he has been different from other black people, but the white LES or Williamsburg rock kids he runs with are largely the same superficially to each other, so it becomes a situation of running from one cliche to another. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

AH: Right. James and I had discussed making people hate the character for the first half the story and then making him more real for the second part, really pulling that emotional response out of people. So I was just trying to be either the best AJ or the worst AJ I could be at any given time. I mean, it got to the point where we were on set and the DP had to stop and say to James, "Look, I can't shoot that boy anymore, cause he's making me want to beat his ass."

JS: Yeah, it would be like, I know that's how Ayiende feels about AJ, but I'm not sure if that's what AJ feels about AJ. I didn't want people to hate him because he was arrogant, or a cocky guy, but more because there were things in him that they didn't like about themselves. Some of these cliches, after it was all done I realized, I did hit them kind of hard. I think someone at the screening said to me, "You said all these things and made white people look so bad..." And someone else spoke up and said "I've heard white people say all those things." You only get so long to build a story. You condense things and put them into one character. For better or for worse, you do ultimately understand why AJ is who he is, and don't dislike him just because of the things he's saying, like when he says something about kissing black girls and says it's like kissing his mom.

AH: There's a little piece of the character you're drawn to, but you take a little with you when you leave.

JS: When I met him [Ayiende] he had dreads, facial hair and baggy clothes, you know, straight hiphop style, and I said we have to flip your appearance. Next time I saw him his pants were tighter and he had a mohawk. I was like, are you living AJ?

AH: I immersed myself in it.

JS: Going to the parties, flirting with the girls. I remember he was like, "These girls aren't so bad!"

AH: I had seen AJ around before, but I was always the other guy, you know, laughing at him. So it was hard to figure out what made him tick. But it was really fun to disappear into it.

CEC: Someone at the Q&A mentioned the racial stereotypes being divisive, but that wasn't what I felt. It seemed that the stereotypes were a part of the conceit of the film.

JS: I think if someone watches the film they see it one of two ways: They either identify with AJ or Josh [AJ's white friend] or they don't. They're either laughing at the right parts or not.

CEC: I felt closer to AJ's transformation than to his friend Josh who always seemed to say the wrong thing unwittingly, especially in terms of what he has to say about race in general.

JS: Ultimately, identity is identity. Granted, racism and sexism aren't the same thing. But the issues of feeling like you don't belong or feeling like you want to be a part of something that you might not be welcome to, those feelings are universal. I like it when I'm able to hit an audience who might not normally get it.

AH: James gets a lot of flack for that, like "Oh, you use these stereotypes..." But from an actor's standpoint, a movie standpoint, you have to use certain stereotypes to tell the story, and there's only 84 minutes. You're never gonna get the whole person. What you have to get is the character trait in that person which then you identify with a person you know. I know this person, that person, you also know the good parts about them. You have to know the base things. You don't have a whole backstory and then one moment of story.

CEC: There is something pure about AJ wanting to be a part of something beautiful that he can't be completely apart of.

JS: Yeah I mean, punk rock evolved. It was a reaction to something else. Kids said we don't want to go to lazer-light shows and listen to Boston and now it's thirty years later and you can buy the aesthetic at the mall. With anything, it grows and splits. It didn't take long for the National Front to become a part of it, for people to be like, "We don't do drugs, and you do..." and once you start getting into all that, there's not 200 kids anymore. There's hundreds of thousands. So race does matter. It doesn' t have to, not like it's every day, but for this whole event to exist, there has to be plenty of people who are sick of being the one black kid at shows, or being afraid to go to shows because they are so sick of it.

CEC: And it draws a great deal into question that way. Whether or not it matters that AJ is black or something else that separates him.

JS: When I lived in California, in the desert, the first show me and my friend Travis went to when we were in 8th grade, we were in the mosh pit having a great time, and all of a sudden it was like, "Where's Travis?" He got jumped by a bunch of skinheads, and we were victimized by a lot of that 80s white power stuff. When I moved to New York, it was like, "Yo, there's fucking brown kids everywhere! Race doesn't matter!" Then I started going to shows in Jersey and Connecticut and it became white privilege and not white power.

CEC: Right, and that's what these party kids represent. A more implicit threat.

JS: Yeah. They enjoy blackness as an idea. And that's it.

CEC: They don't actually bond with it as they would think they do. They trivialize it.

JS: I don't think most of them are the characters who quote unquote, "...want to be black." I just think that when it comes to things we deal with everyday, it's a hassle to talk about it. But if they're the DJ at the "raw-funk" party, then they'll be the first person to tell you about this piece of classic "BLACK" culture.

CEC: Do you feel like it's hurtful the amount of novelty that can be placed on certain parts of black culture, for instance the hairstyles and the clothes?

JS: I mean, it's just passing comments around. Our film is a film of passing comments.

CEC: There's a scene in the film where the AJ character discovers just how uncomfortable he feels in the white rock show scene of Brooklyn at an Antibalas [NYC internationally renowned Afro-beat ensemble] show. The show itself is used to portray a larger part of the problem you define throughout both films: That those who largely benefit from black culture and black influence in culture are for the most part, not black, and that young people who are black can subsequently feel very out of place in these scenes.

JS: Those are all true experiences. Everything that happens in that segment is an amalgamation of several things I observed in seeing them [Antibalas] a lot over the years. And we did it in their presence, so...

CEC: I couldn't help but wonder if the guys in the band had any idea of what they were representing in the course of the film, what part they were playing in the narrative, one of disenchantment for the protagonist...

JS: I am a little nervous. I tried to be clever about it, and obviously the character of the girl who works their merch tables is the most out of touch character of them all... [No one in Antibalas has any dialogue in the film or acts at all, they simply appear in performance onscreen] I do think that some day I will hear about it.

CEC: I don't think they come across negatively, I just think it's interesting to use a group of people who do that in real life in a fictional story playing themselves but clearly being present in the story for one specific purpose and meaning. They mean something very specific to the AJ character's experience.

JS: It's one of those things when you have this band that's an Afrobeat band, but only one guy in the band is Black, and that's what they do, they've blown up off ot it. They're good musicians and I didn't have the intention of disrespecting them, but when I was writng I wanted to ask myself, "Where could I place AJ, where he'll see all of this for the first time even though he probably has seen it many times and not been in a place where he could realize what it meant to him?" And if it means anything at all, none of that crowd there in Zebulon [Williamsburgh cafe/bar in film] were cast. We just said to them, "Bring all your people," and they did. If it had been a room full of brown people, that would have been a different thing. But that wasn't what it was, and that's important too. It's important to show that.

AH: That was the most extras we had.

CEC: Shifting gears, you had a background in visual arts as a sculptor originally.

JS: Yeah. Filmmaking came out of this necessity to reach a black audience, which is what I wanted to do. Not to just have people of color up on the wall and then an all white crowd in the gallery. Being a fan of artwork, I would always growing up be like, "Minor Threat saved my life!" To hear someone say, "Afro-Punk saved my life!," or, "I thought about suicide every day my whole life before I knew there were other people like this..." I realize, "Oh shit, I can make a difference." Filmmaking is what I can make a difference through, so I'm like, "Fuck it, lemme make another film." I mean, this one just happened.

Afro-Punk Festival invades BAM Part 2

2008-07-12T11:50:00.006-04:00

By Evan Louison

The Brooklyn Academy of Music has a strange feeling when you step inside, mostly because of what resides just outside its doors. At first walk one might feel an alien energy flow through them were they to be swayed by the height of the ceilings or the way the sound changes from Lafayette & St. Felix Avenues outside. Out there, on adjacent Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, you encounter not just the Atlantic Center and Long Island Rail Road, not just the hustling of Crown Fried Chickens, but the gentle mysteries of street-side bubble blowers, religious text and bootleg DVD vendors crowding the Fulton St Mall. You cross that threshold into BAM and enter a vacuum, one where you may not recognize yourself or your neighbor, and indeed may find yourself petitioning the ceilings for where exactly such beautiful young people as those who fill these halls came from. The answer is usually Brooklyn.

Afro-Punk is like the neighborhood it resides in, unique and uncompromising. It is a festival that now in name carries more weight than the film that germinated it, James Spooner’s 2003 Afro-Punk which received another screening at this year’s edition. While Afro-Punk the film was the seed, the branches that have sprung forth from the fertile earth of an untouched group of young people who, be they black, may ascribe to the identity that Spooner's festival and work at large speaks or who, be they white, may have spent some large part of their adolescent involvement in such scenes as punk rock or hardcore wondering exactly where all the colored folks were. As Spooner's first film begins, there is a title card that reads: "This film is dedicated to every black kid who has been called nigger..." The following card concludes the statement, with every ounce of confrontation intended: "...And every white kid who thinks they know what that means."

What cannot be disputed is how readily apparent both the idea of resistant culture and the racial lines that still abound in modern, cosmopolitan New York become when experiencing the films included in this year's festival.

A stand out of these is Soul to Soul, Denis Sanders' 1971 document of an Ike and Tina Revue led musical celebration for Ghana's national independence, then in its fourteenth year. The fact that the musicians are mostly Western (and famous) should surprise the viewer little, but what one can't predict is the outcome. Sure you have the wonderful Wilson Pickett, creator of the coolest na-na-nonsense I've ever heard, and the "shamanistic" Carlos Santana, along with the interminable Eddie Harris, whose segment is one of the most captivating sequences (in it a northern witch doctor performer who hitchhiked 700 miles to step onstage demonstrates a ritual ballet with a homemade medicine ball size rattle instrument which played is visually akin to lighting fast b-court skills). However, the most intriguing part comes in the late Phi-point oriented second half of the picture, when Roberta Flack steps onstage accompanied by a band of three. Her subdued performance seems so dope it's hard not to fall in love with everything about how she and her band plays. Of course it was Ike and Tina's show (he goes to every length to upstage her), but the film really shines when documenting the exquisite Voices of Harlem and the intense traditional Ghanian music included throughout.

Cedar Stables is a 26-acre ranch on the border of East New York, Brooklyn and Howard Beach, Queens. Considering the violence that still exists in East New York (Jimmy Breslin once called neighboring hood Brownsville "Berlin after the War") and the racial violence that's occurred across even recent history in Howard Beach, we can understand from the beginning why the pride of the lions roaring down the streets of these little villages on horseback in Eric Martz's documentary The Federation of Black Cowboys is so self-evident. Based on the same principles of public service as the Panthers of Pete O'Neal's time (the subject of Aaron Matthews’ A Panther in Africa, which also screened at the fest) and original American culture interpretations (the epithet cowboy was in origin a derogatory term for Black ranch hands), the Federation have been teaching inner-city kids the ropes and the way of the spur for a long time. A real long time - one elder Federation member was a pre-WWII National Rodeo Champion! The highlight of the film, aside from beautiful moments between the Junior members of the Cowboys and the local youth,) is when, on their way back to the stables, one of the younger Juniors asks a cowboy slightly older than him to race. What appears before us as the elder cowboy whips away like lightning through a public park is true, unadulterated beauty, as seen through very modest video. The elegance and prestige of these animals is only succeeded by the admirable precision with which their riders handle them, regardless of age and setting.

Jonestown was never meant to appear as a joke or a passing novelty for history to allow us to sidle against innocently and then ignore. Jim Jones had an intention with his People's Temple Agricultural Project, and it was to provide a shock more than it was to soothe the huddled masses he found crawling to his door. Their removal from society as a whole, financially and spiritually committed at first, only to be emotionally bound and gagged by an outcast leader who bred the mentality of the eternally outcast within them during a painful progression from normality to seclusion to death was shocking, extreme, and violent, in all its hand-clapping, hymn-singing fellowship. The hardest part of sitting still for the duration of Stanley Nelson's documentary portrait of the Temple's self-destruction, the dream's demise, and the survivors' testimony (how there could be any is still a mystery to me) is knowing that the notion of community and empathy is not confined to a church setting - it is in the theatre with you, sitting next to you, hissing at you through your popcorn’s clenched teeth. With Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple, you have no choice but to admit it. Thanks to Nelson's eye and his choice to put these survivors onscreen before us as free of judgment as they might ever have existed in their original, zealous dreams, to accept the undeniable, that they are our neighbors still, and always were, is nothing short of an act of love. When a man says his wife died in his arms, clutching their only child, it matters not the jeopardy he put his family in, the questionable nature of that man's judgment --- it is the weight of another's impenetrable sadness welling up behind your eyes that you feel, and that hopefully is what will remain as a lesson. That is what matters most.

I was not prepared for what lay before me when the recently departed Jules Dassin’ Up Tight! began. This magnificent film freely retells the story an Irish revolution era story "Betrayed," previously adapted by an early John Ford for the screen as the Oscar winning The Informer. The setting now is Cleveland is in an uproar after the April 68’ assassination of MLK, and The Committee is poised to start some serious summertime shit in the Huff district. Only problem is when a white guard awakens at the munitions factory as committee ace Johnny Wells (Max Julien!) and his team make of with guns and ammunition do the complications start. He kills the guard and leaves his facket, name inscribed in the collar, making him Cleveland’s public enemy number one. Now on the lam, Johnny is the only one who trusts his completely wasted friend Tank (Julian Mayfield, also co-screenwriter with Ms. Dee and Dassin), who is the classic rejected conspirator trying desperately to find his way back into the fold, at first by helping The Committee reconnect with the fugitive Johnny ("He's gone to see his mother!"), and then upon being ostracized, his efforts refused, ratting his friend out in a drunken, manic rage. Dassin's use of POV techniques in several of the more intense sequences, including the jailhouse betrayal, fit with Chief of Police swabbing shaving cream across his cheeks and staring directly into camera, have a very clear effect. Dassin puts us right in the pain at the root of the scene by allowing us to see it first person. We understand Tank's betrayal and his guilt from then on, because we experienced the transgression itself with him, as he looks into his enemies face as sees his only, sad hope for, well, something.

It is the weight he carries as he comes closer and closer to being exposed as the informant for the remainder of the story that is the most troubling aspect of his journey. How can a man atone for such a mistake? Surely there is no more visceral a scene to demonstrate such conflict than when Tank drunkenly stumbles into an arcade funhouse and is approached by a gang of upper middle class whites practically licking their pink lips with curiosity into the inner-workings of a big, black revolutionary. The entire scene plays out in the hall of mirrors, each white face becoming distorted and stretched to demonic levels, Tank's face going through similar contortions along with his audience, as he entertains them with a roaring, fantastic version of what things will be like for them, first day of the revolution in swing. You almost forget what he's done there's so much joy in it Dessin and the great DP Boris Kaufman’s lensing of the material. No scene spells it out better. ("Where you goin'? Where you goin'? You ain't goin' nowhere, some little nigger's blew the fuse!")

It is truly a outrage to learn, in the still very elegant Ms. Dee's Q&A that followed the screening, that Paramount never distributed the film faithfully, spilling it into a handful of theaters in the winter of 68’/69’, and that it has no place in the world of home viewing to this day. When hearing how the majority of the story was already shot when King went down in Memphis and that Dassin quite literally wrapped the entire production into one caravan and made way for the funeral procession in Atlanta (the beautiful documentary hold of the opening sequence in Up Tight! only makes for more immediacy and foundation in truth for the story, with Jesse Jackson as pallbearer our first recognizable character), is altogether moving and adds a poignancy to the proceedings. A late masterpiece from one of the great’s of 40’s film noir, this is a film that must be seen more.

We should be thankful the film has finally found a champion and what better champion than Afro-Punk. If a revival is in question, let us hope that this is only the beginning of the film's life. As rebirth, reinvention of identity and revision of history's oppression of Blackness run parallel as currents throughout Afro-Punk, make no mistake: There is nothing to revive if what we see before us ain't dead yet, and never was and in the case of Up Tight!, than seems like a pretty accurate description.

Afro Punk Festival invades BAM

2008-07-05T02:29:00.002-04:00

By Evan Louison

There's something that happens in the heat of every summer, on the border of the neighbourhoods of Downtown Brooklyn and Fort Greene, that truly draws into question as much about race relations in modern America as it does about independent cinema or the craft of filmmaking itself. It is a festival that grew out of a film, and representative of what creators James Spooner and Matthew Morgan call simply, "a movement." It's name is Afro-Punk, and it is as much about New York, and the art and skateboarding communities in the city as it is about the worlds it spawned from --- those of punk music, resistant Black culture and independent film. This year's slate of films is no different.

The film Afro-Punk has blossomed now into something more than what it was, as it remains synonymous with the festival itself and the movement at large, it has grown from a gripping and controversial film document of the roots of the Black influence in punk music into one of Brooklyn’s and the New York filmmaking community’s most exciting cultural events over the five years since its release. When I first came into contact with the film, it was on tour with a crew of young boys in punk bands in the summer of 2004, in Louisville, KY. Spooner, who directed the film, was in the mode of travelling the lower forty eight with his documentary, showing it anywhere and to everyone he could. He was as inspiring then to a lot of us as he appears mysterious now, as it seemed that in his process there lay someone who understood that the punk work ethic of moving in any circle no matter how small or low-key could be applied to filmmaking and film exhibition just as easily as it could to music performance and distribution. His new film White Lies, Black Sheep, which plays the festival this year, promises to take the dichotomies he explored in Afro-Punk, those of African-Americans in mostly white punk communities, and deal with them in a narrative form.

Of the films playing the festival this year, the sense of the outsider identity is prominent in most if not all of them. The festival kicked off yesterday with Aaron Matthew's 2004 documentary A Panther in Africa, which covers the experience of the exiled Pete O'Neal, a Kansas City Black Panther living for 32 years in Tanzania to escape prosecution on the trumped up charge of transporting a firearm across statelines. The film starts with a voiceover of O'Neal describing the irony he found first living in Tanzania, where owning a gun is not a question of choice in the midst of wildlife and with the question of survival always looming. O'Neal describes his experience as a non-citizen having to go to the American Embassy in Tanzania and apply for a permit to buy a 12-guage shotgun, the same model weapon he was arrested for "illegally transporting," two years earlier.

The film mixes old footage with more current documentation of O'Neal and his wife Charlotte's work as founders of the United African Alliance Community Center (UAACC) in Imbaseni, Tanzania. What is most compelling about the subject is the truthful evolution of someone with the steadfast desire for social justice and a drive to achieve it, both as a youth and as an elder. After being persecuted by a certain Missouri congressman, O'Neal went on television and said he'd like to march right into the House of Representatives and "take [his] head." When the interviewer responded, "You don't mean that literally?," O'Neal calmly replied, "I mean that literally." In looking back though, the most interesting piece of insight the elder O'Neal offers in the course of the film is that something a person says at a certain time, in a certain situation, because they truly felt a certain way, cannot be taken to be indicative of any way that they might feel later in life. In other words, who you are is not who you remain.

The late, brilliant, and still to this day largely overlooked Hal Ashby, who is receiving something of a renaissance these days (and who is currently the subject of a forthcoming book by Filmmaker Magazine colleague Nick Dawson) makes an appearance in this year's lineup as his first film, The Landlord, plays Wednesday. Starring a young and handsome Beau Bridges, produced by Norman Jewison (Ashby had by this time already made somewhat of a name for himself by editing In the Heat of the Night and The Thomas Crown Affair for Jewison), and written by Bill Gunn (of Ganja & Hess semi fame, see Brandon Harris' piece in Hammer to Nail), The Landlord contains much of the same snide humor and racially charged progressive politics as that of Brian DePalma's contemporaneous films, Greetings and Hi Mom: Confessions of a Peeping Tom. What Ashby's film shares with DePalma's is a sense of revery in the blunt, at times almost sickening display of the racial divide in the US at that time, and moreover the undeniably disappointing parrallels to our current situations here and abroad (just as we remain stuck sending young men to die in foreign lands now as we did in the time of DePalma's first films, still we remain trapped in real estate situations in New York that I can't describe but to say, well, just ain't right).

Bridges plays Elgar Enders, a wealthy young man from a rich Westchester family who is a self-described Cancerian, to whom as he puts it, "Home really matters." Though of course you couldn't tell this to his self-absorbed aristrocrat dilletante mother, played to a fucking-T by Lee Grant, who argues with Elgar what his astrological sign really is and ends the argument by asking him when he was born. Elgar buys a tenement in what he describes to be "a little ghetto area," which we later find out to be none other than stroller-infested (yes I said infested) Park Slope. He has every intention of evicting the entire building of black families and gutting the inside, to put up a really "radical, psychedelic, chandelier-thing." His plan changes when he finds there is a lot more going on in the building than he realizes, and that shouldn't imply to any reader that this is in any way a morally-sappy story. Elgar eventually moves into the building himself, much to his family's dismay, at one point even impregnating one of the tenants accidentally. The most intense and radical part of Ashby's film remains the editing, the flashes of non-descript, seemingly unrelated abstractions, fractions of other worlds that we literally only see for a few seconds at a time, but weave in and out of the narrative to create an unavoidable hysterical streak painted down its blackfaced side. Nothing is more moving than when Elgar's mother hears his tenant approach him about her pregnancy, and Ashby without any introduction shows Lee Grant surrounded on her Westchester estate lawn surrounded by a litter of upwards of a dozen young black children, dressed like Bo Peep and singing in a strangely Qawwali inspired melody, "Lay your kinky, woolen heads, on your Mammy's breast..." Her nightmare is enough to knock over your grape soda.

Ethan Higbee and Adam Bhala Lough's The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee "Scratch" Perry, which plays Saturday night, is a film built upon an intense and simple recrafting of ancient video footage mixed with that of the current day. Scratch is a man of many names (Upsetter, Dr. Perry, Superape, Pipecock Jackson) who has always managed the existence of enigma quite well in the eyes of age. In a way, he has always appeared ancient, just as he has always possessed an undeniably youthful energy. To watch him shovel the walkway to his Swiss home or playfully make snow angels in the hills feels the same as to watch a degenerated video recorded nearly 40 years ago showimg him ranting and playing with fire, drawing frantically upon a chalkboard while he holds court on JAH and the Word Sound Power system of Rastafari culture, all while wearing heart-shaped glasses and a maniacal grin, waving his arms in the air. Even when the narration lets the audience know that Scratch spent the decade following his self-induced exile in depression and an alcoholic's haze, the man we see before us dressed in white with mirrored glass hanging from his body, playing with a plastic sword, seems strangely blissful, or at very least as blissful as he might appear to be sad to some. When we see him dressed all in red, hair and beard dyed to match, videotaped next to a television showing a different angle of him, ultimately two Scratches, side by side, the image is a powerful one. A man in many worlds, his words at one point echo the essence of what James Spooner must have had in mind when he began this yearly tradition with his own film: "I am a punk...because I am out of control, and I cannot be controlled...Punk is magic."

On The Wackness

2008-07-03T00:55:00.003-04:00

Ok, I guess I’m never running for president (well, these days, maybe not)- I buy pot on a casual basis from a Jewish, Upper East Side dope dealer in his early 20s who, in order to protect the innocent, we’ll call D. D is articulate, with a fairly strong working knowledge of cinema and baseball, and although not unattractive, not likely to set the ladies on fire. In short, D’s not all that unlike the type of person Josh Peck’s Luke Shapiro, the hero of Jonathan Levine’s, The Wackness, a film that has been likened, buy more than one astute critic, as a potential Juno for boys of sorts, is supposed to represent. I can tell you one thing – his life ain’t anything like this, and it wouldn’t have been in 1994 either, Giuliani or not.

Although it wears it authenticity on its sleeve, there’s a point about fifteen minutes into The Wackness, poised to be the indiewood hit of the summer in a dreary season in which Tom McCarthy’s marginally effecting The Visitor is about the only specialty narrative finding any traction in the marketplace, where my bullshit meter, always at its most sensitive when watching a period youth picture, just about erupted. Method Man, who in his first truly dreadful screen performance, plays an armed body guard totting Jamaican pot distributor from Queens, one whom our apparently unpopular and friendless Upper East Side pot dealer hero (give me a break, look at this guy Josh Peck) would have had no way of crossing paths with if he wasn’t savvy and tough, adopts a Caribbean accent that’s worthy only of a Saturday Night Live sketch. When the movie finds itself ready to posit that these two are in business together, it immediately begins to falter on the plausibility front, a thing I suspect the filmmakers picked up on, as Meth’s screen time is pretty minimal and, aside from a nifty montage set to A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It?”, the film doesn’t try to delve too deeply into the actual mechanics of being a pot dealer, a criminal profession that can be rather lucrative, stressful, and unassuming, one that is often full for boredom and quiet desperation, although its never portrayed that way in cinema.

This is not a film without things to like – it’s extremely well cast, elegantly mounted and very funny at times. As the neurotic, pot smoking ex-hippie turned sour faced psychoanalyst who trades sessions for dime bags with Luke, Ben Kingsley is terrific, as good as his been since his legendary turn as Don Logan in Sexybeast, and Olivia Thirlby, as his daughter, who has a summer fling with the depressed, dope slangin’ leading man, continues her string of realty impressive, subtle work. She’s as dynamic and skilled a perfomer as any American actress under thirty working today. People like the ever radiant Jane Adams, Famke Janssen and even Mary Kate Olsen, as a mushroom dropping, dreadlocked blondie who ends up making our with the 64 year old Kingsley in barroom telephone booth, show up and turn in terrific supporting work. But as the bildungsroman clichés mount, we anticipate the various arcs of each relationship before they surface and this film, which has been trimmed by fifteen minutes from the version which took home the audience award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, begins to feel a bit over long.

No matter how many murals to Kurt Cobain we see or Illmatic cues we hear, one can’t help but feel that the film, which is always quite inviting and entertaining, lacks the soulfulness its aspiring to. Perhaps it seems beside the point, but the Upper East Side has no lack of its own suppliers for kids like these and I doubt anyone like Luke Shapiro would venture that far to be in business with a guy who has heavies with Uzis. Meth generically represents all the trappings of danger low stakes pot dealers try like the plague to avoid. The film needs a character for a rapper to play though, to lend it that much needed “authenticity”, that, of course, doesn’t really exist in the ecosystem in which films like this get made.

The carefully molded world of the movie is one of its major selling points for a large portion of the target youth audience that geriatric seeming Sony Pictures Classics is hoping it can lure with this sweet and sugary, yet oddly colorless summer of 94’ hip-hop fantasia. From the desaturated hues of its early and middle passages to the alabaster pallor of almost its entire cast, this movie is lily white, regardless of how many Nas, Biggie and Wu-Tang Clan songs can get stuffed into the final mix. Its no surprise the only black participant in this black culturally infused movie is Meth, making a mockery of himself, the gentle irony of his actual voice on a Wu-Tang song playing in the background of his silly scenes here just another reminder of the spirit and verisimilitude that the film, despite best efforts, isn’t able to extract from its antecedents.

On Gonzo

2008-07-02T21:23:00.005-04:00

Simultaneously triumphant and tragic, the Hunter S. Thompson constructed by Alex Gibney in his latest documentary Gonzo, a phantasmagorical look at the both under and overrated New Journalism figure, is something of an American hero reclaimed and forever misunderstood, that is until now. Thanks to Gibney's new film, we can firmly see him as a supremely talented man trapped by his cult fame and ultimately subsumed in self-generated myths.

As a man of letters, the precocious middle class kid from Louisville, one who loved guns, dope and America with equal measure, was remarkably erratic and perhaps, in the end, not good enough to attain the furthest reaches of his ambitions. That he knew it, and that it ultimately killed him, is one of Gibney’s central premises in his altogether riveting portrayal of the ever stylish iconclast. The film never bores and goes to great lengths to show just what a remarkably gifted and innovative journalist he was, even while, and perhaps because, he was stoned out of (or far into) his mind.

At the film’s opening the director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi from the Dark Side delves into Thompson’s Colorado home, delivering Johnny Depp, Thompson’s Hollywood alter ego in Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, reciting a terribly prescient column Thompson wrote after 9/11 of the unjust wars and magnificent lies sure to come in the wake of that terribly tragedy.

Hooked from the beginning, Gibney then deftly guides us through some of Thompson’s well known adventures (riding with the Hell’s Angels, the excursion to Vegas with his lawyer, Brown power figure Oscar Acosta, his long partnership with British illustrator Ralph Steadman his coverage of the 72’ Democratic presidential primary) and some which are lesser known (his fascinating run for Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, the botched attempt at a Rolling Stone piece on "The Rumble in the Jungle", his key early coverage of Jimmy Carter’s speeches to decidedly fascist factions like the Georgia Bar Association in 1975), while weaving through a mountain of interviews with major political and literary figures of the era (Jimmy Carter, Tom Wolfe, George McGovern, Pat Buchanan, Jann Wenner, even Jimmy Buffett).

Gibney's expertly gathered archival material, photographs, drawings (many by Steadman), contemporary interviews and doc footage, has previously been mostly absent from the parade of self important docs about 60s icons and is used to zippy, staggering effect. No waiting for the next rally or political speech or dope smoking hippie or southern attack dog here; the water hoses are checked at the door, but not without effectively contextualizing each of Thompson's journalistic adventures within the larger political and social struggles of the day. Even the period music doesn’t seem tired and retread.

Gibney has quickly become one of the most consistently fascinating of American documentarians, one who is as vital a contributor to the cultural conversation as we have. He vigorously approaches the moral questions raised by our volatile age of greed, one in which historical perspective and rampant fear mongering rule the day while legitimately grave concerns about the environment, pandemics and nuclear proliferations are ignored, with intelligence and wit.

Released less than a year after his Oscar winning Taxi to the Dark Side, Gibney is already at work on a documentary about Eliot Spitzer, our fallen ex-Empire State governor. This film and Gibney’s Enron picture were both backed by the now defunct HDNet films, which was fronted by smart veteran producers Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente with Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner’s significant resources. Here’s hoping Gibney continues to find the money to make these spectacular documentaries.

An Interview with Adam Yauch

2008-06-26T11:34:00.003-04:00

Adam Yauch is a busy guy. He's recording a new Beastie Boys record with fellow members Mike D and Adam Horovitz. Along with ex-ThinkFilm exec David Fenkel, he's recently opened a new film distribution house, Oscilloscope Laboratories. There first release is his feature directorial debut, the high school basketball documentary Gunnin' For That #1 Spot! After a premiere at last month's Tribeca Film Festival, it opens commercially tomorrow. I caught up with Adam to talk about his new film.

CEC: When did you initially conceive of the project?

AY: It was a pretty last minute thing. A friend of mine was organizing this high school all-star game at Rucker Park and was essentially asking me for advice about how to document the game. I started having ideas about profiling some of the players that we’re coming out and became more interested in the world of elite high school basketball. It started sounding like a cool documentary. This is only like a few months before the game so I put it together pretty last minute. Shot it. Spent about a year editing.

CEC: I noticed you didn’t profile all of the players. How did you go about prioritizing them?

AY: I wanted to pick eight players to do profiles of and from those, pick the most interesting five and use five in the documentary, but I actually liked all eight and used all eight in the documentary. The way they were chosen they where actually recommended by the guys that were putting the game together. I wanted diverse bunch, from different kinds of backgrounds, different geographical areas, guys with interesting personalities, guys who were pretty decent backgrounds and I really liked all of them. They chose well for me.

CEC: Tell me about the consumerism aspect and how it melds with these players lives, how from the earliest stages there asked to sponsored with shoe companies and being pursued my marketers. How do you think that effects them as young men and what persective did you have on that in your film?

AY: I don’t know that that’s really the perspective in the film too much, but it’s certainly an interesting thing. I think as a country the United States is obsessed with consumerism. It revolves around consumerism. I don’t know if it’s much a part of there… it’s so intertwined with these guys lives, with professional sports. Consumerism is so entangled with professional sports its hard to imagine separating them at this point.

CEC: Did you have any particular inspiration or models for the aesthetic of the film? Certainly you took tremendous care with the sound design; it’s quite immaculate.

AY: In terms of the structure, I had some ideas about doing profiles of the different players whiched colored the game. The idea being that you could watch the profiles first and then know the players and then watch the game. The other idea was just to capture some aspect of the world of elite high school basketball to just get a sense of what their world is like. Some of the ideas were pretty rough going into it but those were basically the ideas. Part of the ideas of the film was to not have it be the traditional stiff documentary, but to have it move with the energy of a narrative and hopefully we achieved that, I think that the film moves pretty well.

CEC: What are some of your favorite sports films? Did you draw on them for inspiration at all?

AY: I saw Hoop Dreams back when it came out. I love it. In terms of inspiration for this film, it might have been more in the line of Spellbound, things like that, something that takes a look at another world. In terms of sports films, I always loved looking at slow motion photojournalism of the NFL, of football players in the 70s they used to make these cool slow motion films where there using a long lense of players running in slow motion. I always liked that.

CEC: Tell us alittle bit about your new film label Oscilloscope Laboratories? This is going to be your first release. What else do you have in the pipeline and what are some of your priorities as a film distributors?

AY: There are a few films that we have. The idea of it was to start a small indie film distribution company. There seems like there’s a lot of cool films that are falling through the crack, that aren’t getting distributed, that aren’t getting out there. The next thing we’re putting out is Flow, a documentary about the world water crisis. There are a few others we’re going to be releasing but they haven’t been announced yet. I don’t want to put my foot in my mouth.

CEC: Do you plan on making more films? Do you have to find the right thing to embark upon?

AY: Yeah. There’s sometime to find the right thing to do. At the moment I’m working on music, I’m recording with Adam and Mike on our new record. I’m sure I’ll make more films at some point in the future, when the time and the right project presents itself.

On Trumbo

2008-06-26T01:43:00.003-04:00

In his new documentary Trumbo, director Peter Askin sticks to the basics; he by and large succeeds. His film, while not quite Ken Burns dry, hews to the basic playbook of stock archival footage accompanied with interviews of the friends and loved ones of the talented maverick author at its center, one whose story perhaps holds a lesson for all Americans living in these troubled yet fascinating times for our democracy. Trumbo was a man who in perhaps an equally absurd era, stood up for the underlying liberal American ideas that were challenged by the post war fascistic paranoia known as McCarthyism and, as such, represents a very appealing figure to, while venerating him, wrap our contemporary concerns around as well. Askin, with the help of a slew of famous people, does just that, but not it such a way that he risks his credibility or his subject’s grace.

Dalton Trumbo was a fun loving Mountain boy who grew into a skilled scribe, playful drunkard, loving family man, poor manager of money and, perhaps most importantly in the docs view, an eloquent defender of the 1st amendment in the face of the brute congressional hordes. Made with the full support of the subject’s family and surviving friends, this look at the life of blacklisted screenwriter and Charlie Got His Gun author, who wrote Hollywood screenplays for nearly a decade under assumed names in Mexican exile after the blacklist took effect, won an Oscar for The Brave One (no, not the Jodie Foster shitstorm), a script he was not given credit for many years and winner of the only Academy Award not to be claimed at the ceremony.

Askin doesn’t hide its absolute adoration of its wily subject, nor should he. In this unassuming and deliberate doc, one which, while documenting a fascinating if at times difficult to penetrate life, takes a hard look at how Amrica’s past resonances in our dark contemporary times, Askin views Trumbo's life as a prism through which to offer us the vaguest blueprint for some way forward. To wit – the courage to speak and act with commitment, loyalty and wisdom in the face of the narcissistic moralizing and war mongering of the American right and the hegemonic forces of control beyond it is paramount.

Trumbo was also who would in the film’s most humorous revelation of his letters a supreme appreciation for masturbation. As rendered by Nathan Lane, one of many celebrities who appear on camera to read Trumbo's words, this letter to his son is just about perfectly delivered.As the film weaves wonderful archival footage of his evasive and quick-witted House Committee on Un-American Activities testimonies with readings of his work by the likes of Lane, Liam Neeson, David Straithairn, Joan Allen, Paul Giamatti, Michael Douglas, Brian Dennehy, Donald Southerland and Josh Lucas (Josh Lucas? Sticks out like a sore thumb) is the film’s biggest aesthetic (and commercial) coup. Fortunately, they have word well worth reading.

On Gunnin' For That #1 Spot!

2008-06-26T01:23:00.003-04:00

Packed with style and expertly positioned for a theatrical release the day after many of its teenage stars are drafted into the slipstream of NBA superstardom, Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot! unabashedly celebrates the talents an elite class of high school basketball stars as they gather for an all star game at Harlem’s legendary Rucker Park, a place where street ball legends and NBA millionaires have routinely rubbed elbows, traded jump shots and exchanged smack talk.

Packed with familiar hip-hop, much of it the partial product of it’s director, Beastie Boy ringleader Adam Yauch’s directorial debut delivers us, perhaps too briefly, into the lives of ten kids who haven’t paid for sneakers in a long time. Many of whom (UCLA’s Kevin Love and Kansas State’s Michael Beasley for instance) will be immediate familiar to anyone who watched last March’s NCAA tournament. Although one could argue that Peter Gelbert and Steve James’ magnificent 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams or Spike Lee’s He Got Game cover similar territory with a bit more grit and intelligence, Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot manages to be enjoyable and informative, for the casual basketball fan and the obsessive junkie.

Yauch's juxtapositions seem to be more interesting than he realizes; he presses the go button pretty hard at times in his attempts to infuse the film with the energy of his pop music and its clearly not necessary. He quickly guides us into a world of cold realism and talent evaluation on the part of college scouts and sneaker pimps, while sharing the pleasant comraderie of black barbershops with wingman phenom Brandon Jennings or the gentle guidance his ever supportive grandmothers gives him and his extended family on their stoop, while a few rungs down the intraracial class strata, Tyreke Evans learns to play on the hard scrabble streets Chester, Pennsylvania without the comfort of either institution.

Yauch visits people who are “grassroots consultants” for Nike and scamper around in Air Jordan shirts preaching corporate careerism at young men who can't wait to fall in line. It doesn’t escape the viewer or Yauch just how manufactured their existence seems at times, but Yauch doesn’t seem to mind too much. That these teenage athletes, much like their counterparts in tennis and gymnastics, now live in a world where the illusion that anything other than basketball has or could take priority in these “non-professionals” lives is a myth that has been banished to the dust-bin of history. It’s so 1995 to call these kids’ “student athletes”.

Yauch’s film, which presents us with basketball sequences that are slowed down, sped up, played in reverse, repeated and sound designed within inch of their life, is clearly the product of a devoted basketball nerd, but it is perhaps too complacent at times, too willing to gawk with awe at the amazing talents of these young players and not committed enough to exploring their individuals worlds, which offer an at times fascinating glimpse into the cultural, racial and class divides that still exist among Americans, ones that are clearly broached by the transcendent skill of these players. Where else, other than in the worlds of sports and hip-hop, would the comfortable white, upper middle class existence of a Kyle Singler and the lower working class black existence of 16 year old Tyreke Evans so easily mingle?

Perhaps expectedly, Yauch, while occasionally throwing us some House of Pain or 50 Cent, mainly stuffs the soundtrack with Beastie Boys cues, most of which are well picked. He wisely sticks to their Check Your Head/Ill Communication era songs. Sure, I can’t get enough of these Beastie Boys songs either, but the wall to wall music begins to wear thin well before it should. At times the editing style of the basketball footage, especially that of the Rucker Park game that the doc builds to but doesn’t reach until the 1 hour mark, grows stilted and without the graceful pacing that it could have had given the astounding acrobatics on display extra heft. Ultimately, Gunnin' For That #1 Spot! is a noteworthy entry in the "street basketball as metaphor for American life" genre, but clearly with a fan boys fascination as its primary raison d'etre more than the myriad of interesting subjects on its periphery.

On The Second Line at Hammer to Nail

2008-06-25T11:00:00.004-04:00

Although currently uncredited (c'mon Mike. I know your kayaking on the Na Pali Coast to recover from the disaster that is The Happening, but what gives?), over at Hammer to Nail, Mike Tully, Mike Ryan, Corbin Day and Ted Hope's terrific new site, is a review I wrote of John Magary's fantastic short film The Second Line. John is currently blogging from his cush spot at the Sundance Director's Lab for Filmmaker. I interviewed him for Filmmaker's Blog during the Tribeca Film Festival. By whatever means necessary (mainly film festivals. Or begging the director. or iTunes), see his film. It's something special.

Don't trust student film festivals

2008-06-25T09:52:00.004-04:00

The following is a reprinted email which I sent this morning to, well, alot of people. It's relatively self explanatory.

Greetings,

I write today to the former staff of Northwestern's Flicker Film Festival, at one time one of the country's most lauded student film fests, and to the members of Northwestern's Associated Student Government, who until this past February oversaw the committee which put together the yearly festival, before derecognizing the group this past February, in order to state a grievance and ask for immediate action on the part of the ASG to rectify it.

I'm a graduate of State University of New York at Purchase's Cosnervatory of Theatre Arts and Film and a former Northwestern University Cherub in its Media Arts division. I have a fondness for the University forged during the very formative summer of 2001 during which I attended Cherubs and I was hoping for a fun and slightly nostalgic return upon the acceptance of my short films Happiness is no fun. and Evangeleo to last year's festival.

Of course, that was not meant to be - at the time the website for the festival didn't list the dates for the 2007 edition, which were several weeks earlier than the previous year's edition had been, and no one from the festival staff contacted filmmakers with screening dates, travel information or accommodations, as respected events tend to do. I was unable to attend. However, Evangeleo won two prizes at the festival, including its top prize, which is the reason for this admittedly bizarre and unfortunate correspondence.

I was never paid the $500 grand prize that the festival's website and submissions chair Laura Mayer assured me I would be receiving promptly after the festival ended. I did accept the other half of my prize, Evangeleo's admittance to an altogether enjoyable student film festival in Wilmington, NC, where me and a few of my collaborators were treated quite hospitably. Time and time again since April of 2007 I have reached out to former festival presidents Vladimir Gutman and Muindi Muindi, who have shown nothing but contempt for their responsibility to pay me what is owed and have ignored my requests for over a year, well before Flicker's funds were seized and its student group status derecognized. Other members of the staff have been more forthcoming, but save a few fall 07' correspondences from Mr. Muindi, in which he assured me I'd be paid within a month, I have heard nothing from the staff a Flicker concerning payment. This situation just won't do.

Of course, who sues anyone over $500? What is this, Judge Judy? I know nothing of the festival's other unpaid vendors or filmmakers (what of the $200 prizes promised to the runners up? Did they receive their prizes from Flicker 2007?), but legal action is clearly not worth the time, energy or finances. Rather, I'd like to appeal to the ASG's finance board, the group that essentially disbanded Flicker, to pay me what is owed. I am a freelance film producer and journalist. This does not engender an extravagant lifestyle - I scrape by in a rather inhospitable New York real estate climate by living cheaply and well into the frontier of Brooklyn gentrification. Although the denizens of an exorbitantly priced private institution like Northwestern might not realize it, $500 is no small amount of money for someone like myself. If the situation is not resolved to my liking, the only recourse I will have is to report on the altogether unacceptable treatment I have been privy to by representatives of this historical institution in the reputable publications and blogs I write for: Filmmaker Magazine, Hammer to Nail and Cinema Echo Chamber, to name only a few. Trust that I will do my best to make sure, should Flicker or any other film festival find its way onto Northwestern's campus again, that student and independent filmmakers the country over know just what to expect from the festival's braintrust - for them to fuck you.

Best,

Brandon Harris

Hammer to Nail welcomes a new contributor

2008-06-17T12:11:00.003-04:00

I've joined the list of contributors to Hammer to Nail, a film criticism blog edited by Michael Tully that seeks to bring much needed attention to low budget American Indie narratives and short films. Check out this review of Moon Molson's Pop Foul and stayed tuned to HtN as it becomes fully operational in the next few weeks, with a new layout and a quickly growing list of voices.

On Brick Lane

2008-06-17T11:16:00.004-04:00

More matter, less art. Although it often visually contemplates the lush natural beauty of the Bangladeshi wilds or Tannishtha Chatterjee’s face, this lingering over such pleasing details adds up to little more than empty exoticism in Sarah Gavron’s Brick Lane, a movie that can’t sustain much visceral drive despite the potentially fascinating tale at its core, one which holds the promise of an all to rare glimpse into the lives of working class Southeastern Asian immigrants in contemporary London. It’s a polished and mannered effort on the part of a director with clear gifts, but one whose feeling for the inner lives of her characters feels undercooked. In joins a tradition of handsome, but not terribly effecting adaptations of modern British literary sensations, such as Joe Wright’s Oscar nominated take on Ian McEwan’s Atonement or the BBC’s miniseries treatment of Zadie Smith’s sublime White Teeth.

Monica Ali’s well-regarded debut novel is set in the Bengali sects buried within London’s drab suburb, Brick Lane. In the early 1980s, after the untimely, perhaps suicidal death of her mother, Nazneen (Chatterjee) leaves behind her free-spirited sister and relocates to London. She’s been married off to a fat, educated man Chanu (Satish Kaushik) and quickly, at least in the film, which substitutes a deft montage for a large chunk of her festering Thatcher/Major era disillusionment, enters a life of marital unhappiness, providing him with three children, one of which was lost in childbirth, and plenty of boring sex. Finally 2001 comes, Chanu wants to return his family to their Bengali roots by moving back home, but Nazneen is finding herself increasingly distracted by the charms of tall, twentysomething Karim, (Christopher Simpson), a local kid who helps her around the house before engaging in a torrid affair with her. Of course, 9/11 changes everything, causing Karim, a vocal member of a local Muslim activist organization, to grow increasingly radical. Despite being a borish, self satisfied fat ass, Chanu’s moderate political stance and mature sense of his Bengaliness begin to seem more appearing to Nazneen, who, unlike so many classic British literary heroines, doesn’t find political and social awakening in sexual liberation, although she’s ultimately able to discover just what she wants – to be left alone.

Gavron along with her cinematographer Robbie Ryan strain to create a rich, densely colorful palette in the Bengali sequences, while shooting London’s backwaters in cool blues, yellows and low saturation grays to create a since of maximum sterility. But in reaching for sensuousness and style, Gavron has forgotten to spin her tale in a way that lifts it above the banal concerns of a made for basic cable weepie and was never able to genuinely win over my emotional participation in the events. Its clear that Ali has written a work clearly engaged in the world, a thoughtful and timely novel, but its concerns have not been dramatized in a way that allows them to resonate back out into that world, its cool dissection of the ways in which British provincialism insidiously effect the lives of its often forgotten immigrants made secondary in Gavron’s hands. Sadly, she empathizes what movies can capture with great ease, but with little nuance or care: salaciousness and aesthetic beauty. Makes me want to pick up the book instead.

An interview with Guy Maddin

2008-06-13T12:38:00.003-04:00

Beet.TV and the Cinema Echo Chamber are partnering to deliver incisive and timely video interviews with film directors, technicians and industry personalities that delve into the cross-section of aesthetics and technological innovation. Our first subject is Canadian director Guy Maddin, whose sublime new film My Winnipeg opens today via IFC Films. Filmmaker Magazine's Scott Macaulay did a neat interview with Guy in the current issue and The New York Times had a terrific piece on him and the film run last sunday, in lieu of A.O. Scott's glowing review of the film this morning.

SXSW shorts winner screens at Rooftop tonight w/O'Death!

2008-06-12T14:54:00.004-04:00

Quick screening tip, NYC cinephiles. The burgeoning summer long screening series Rooftop Films, hot off a terrific if slightly rainy Ft. Greene Park screening of Steve James and Peter Gilbert's powerful new doc At The Death House Door, move to Williamsburg tonight for a screening of Benh Geitlin's Glory at Sea, winner of a prize at SXSW this year, shortly after the director was seriously injured in an auto accident en route to Austin. Perhaps the real treat of the evening will be the set by O'Death, the civil war gospel meets rockabillie punk band that spawned among the long cold nights and blistering florescent lights of Bush era SUNY Purchase and its Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film.

On Encounters at the End of the World

2008-06-09T13:58:00.002-04:00

Working on commission from the National Science Foundation and lured north otherworldly deep sea images taken by friend and producer Henry Kaiser, many of which are reminiscent of The Wild Blue Yonder and The White Diamond, Werner Herzog set off to see just what’s going on among the thousand or so people who live in Antarctica, where five months out of the year the sun shines all the time. In his newest documentary, perhaps his most effecting and urgent in quite a while, Herzog, the cinema’s consummate chronicler of nature’s cruelty and sumptuous beauty, finds some of the world’s most gifted scientists huddled together in Antarctica’s McMurdo Station, watching closely as the natural world begins to come apart. Its getting warmer there too and Mr. Herzog, who has never shirked from asking the big, tough, existential and metaphysical questions that lesser artists shy away from, takes us on a journey into the heavy hearts of men and women who can see that, as the ice melts under their feet, as species after species continue to slide into oblivion, any assurances human beings have of their perpetuation on this planet are bordering on vanity.

Herzog encounters eccentrics from all walks of life, people who’ve traveled across continents in sewage drains, hitch hiked across great swaths of sub Saharan Africa after being held hostage; clearly, its takes a certain intestinal fortitude, a mettle and adventuresome spirit to travel to this place. Physicists, biologists, ecologists study the giant mass of ice and land and its natural inhabitants with vigor and a bit of melancholy. Herzog dwells on these people with a palpable empathy and a legitimate sense of intrigue, not just into the wealth of knowledge they provide but into the spaces of their emotional lives. Surely the creatures found in the ocean depths below these epic masses of ice are unlike anything you’ve seen, creating visions of science fictions horror thrillers and garden variety 50 B monster movies that haunt both our imagination and that of Herzog’s subjects, but what becomes clear as this essential doc wears on, one which puts a human face of the hard science one can find in An Inconvenient Truth, is how fragile our technologically dependent existence is compared to theirs.

Herzog is a world treasure, but he is often pigeonholed as some kind of wild and crazy maverick (fair enough), but in some way, Encounters at the End of the World seems to be a conscious attempt on his part to deconstruct the myth of adventurism that so much early Antarctic exploration (and western expansion in general and well, modern popular cinema) has always thrived on. This man, of all men, doesn’t think of himself as an adventurer – What was left to find in the natural world after Shackleton, Scott, Henson and co. ventured here? He’s always been drawn to men who find themselves on the extremes on human behavior and natural existence, be they Deiter Dengler or Klaus Kinski. Yet here, he finds analogous individuals who are nothing if not professionals charged with bearing witness to extinction, perhaps the most treacherous adventure of all. Now we know all too well that those masses of ice, on which so much of civilization still depends, are not static, but living and, perhaps, like all of us, dying.

Bi-Coastal Fest viewing tips - HBFF/Sundance at BAM/BIFF/NewFest

2008-06-06T12:14:00.003-04:00

It's the beginning of summer and although its been overcast for a few straight days here in New York, the non-addicted are probably not apt to rush to a regional or niche film festival and check out some movie they've never heard of. That said, a slew of interesting events kick off this weekend both here and on the other coast.

In Los Angeles, the Hollywood Black Film Festival is back for a 10th year. The programming is always a mixed bag at HBFF and hopefully there will be more free booze than the token Hennessey pour party attendees were privy to last year, but there are normally a few standouts pictures, such as last year's winner I'm Through With White Girls, which will have its New York premiere next month at BAM as part of the Afro-Punk Festival on July 7th. One title I would surely recommend is Mia Trachinger's Reversion, roundly dismissed by many critics at Sundance, I found it to be a surprising, courageous gem of a low-fi sci-fi in the tradtion of Alphaville or Code 46.

Here in Brooklyn, BAM wraps up its Sundance Insitute visit with some vintage Gregg Araki - his 92' breakthrough The Living End will screen with the director present for a Q&A tonight, followed by a midnight screening of the director's 07' Sundance entry Smiley Face. Stay far far away from Clark Gregg's sterile adapatation of Chuck Palahniuk's sex addiction novel Choke, but do try to catch Sunday's final screenings of grand jury prize winner Frozen River and the lauded Katrina docTrouble The Water. Both, although unseen by yours truly, have garnered incredibly spirited partisans since there Sundance debuts.

Also in Brooklyn, The Brooklyn International Film Festival closes its latest edition this weekend. Titles of note include Tao Ruspoli's much talked about Slamdance competition entry Fix and Purchase grad and XX/XY director Austin Chick's latest, the Josh Hartnett dot com goes bust saga August, which bowed to mixed notices at Sundance. Also on tap are some terrific shorts, including Bill Plympton's Hot Dog and Andrew Betzer's SXSW winner Small Apartment.

Finally, NewFest marks its 20th year this June with another eclectic slate of Queer conscious films. The fest kicked off last night with Stewart Wade's Tru Loved - anything that features Jasmine Guy, Alexandra Paul, Cynda Williams (where have you been since One False Move, my dear? Remember the Bokeem Woodbine starrer Caught Up? Thought not.) and Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols can't be all bad. Other notable include The Universe of Keith Haring, which received strong notices at Tribeca and Pageant, which took a prize at Slamdance. On the short side, Yaniv Debach's Fashion Ho is worth checking out, as are Jonathan Lisecki's Woman in Burka and Import Export director Ulrich Seidl's bizarro 1 minute short Brothers, Let Us Be Marry.

On Savage Grace

2008-05-27T17:19:00.003-04:00

Sizzling hot, swimming in high falutin’ European locales and barely articulating thriller beats that intrigue and puzzle without doing much thrilling, I can’t quite shake Tom Kalin’s bizarro feature Savage Grace. His first in 15 years, the long awaited follow up to his 1992 New Queer Cinema opening salvo Swoon, Savage Grace stays with you and is nothing if not unsettling (and watchable), but that doesn’t mean it's any good.

The entire endeavor is oddly flat, with emotionally unreachable characters and lots of pretty colors and background vistas – it comes across as a bit of a travelogue that must end very badly. Kalin manages to portray a world of decadent, unlikable, cultured people writhing, even in their wealth, with status anxiety and, not surprisingly, overcome by sexual dysfunction, without attempting either to have us understand their malaise or to particularly give a fuck. What I really wanted to do was run from these people – all of them.

Like his earlier film, Kalin has taken a lurid true crime tale as his inspiration, in this case the murder of Barbara Baekeland, a high strung, social climbing, ex-actress (read: monster) who married the bakelite plastics heir Brooks (Stephen Dillane, strong as always), sired him a son, fucked both (literally and metaphorically) and was off’d by the latter with a particularly large kitchen knife following her most brazenly incestuous act. This is dark stuff, but without suggesting much of the inner lives of the troubled Baekeland’s during the decade and a half we follow them as they trot across Europe tearing each other apart slowly and deliberately, the film leaves us in the dark about just how Barbara Baekeland got to the point where she thought it was okay to ride her homosexual son’s penis on the living room couch.

For a film that hinges on this action (it is, as it were, the last straw), Kalin and his screenwriter Howard Rodman seem oddly timid in attempting to unearth the mysteries of Barbara Baekeland – it is her son’s movie after all, his prison bound letter to his estranged father providing the framework for the film’s narrative, but Antony ends up getting the short shrift too. As portrayed by Eddie Redmayne, who is making a career of playing the tortured son of powerful men and neurotic women (see Robert DeNiro’s vastly underrated The Good Shepard or Justin Chadwick's clunky The Other Boleyn Girl), Tony, despite the voiceover he’s given and the way he’s prioritized in the editing, remains an enigma, and not a particularly engrossing one.

Despite the so-called build up (Dad runs off with son’s first attempt at a girlfriend, Mom gets it on with his cute English boyfriend, in the same bed), by the time Barbara is mounting Antony on their sofa, little tension or narrative drive is evident. Of course, no filmmaker (or psychoanalyst) could ever be comfortably certain of what made these folks tic, but we’d expect one with the skill Kalin clearly has (a shame he hasn’t gotten to make more features) to give us a bit more in terms of nuanced characterization.

Instead he steers the normally solid Jullianne Moore, Dillane and Redmayne toward oblique vindictiveness, melancholia and WASPy unaffectedness without giving us hints into their psychology that, given the severity of the subject matter and his fairly standard narrative approach to the material, would have helped make this a more satisfying experience. I wanted the film to engage me in a way that would lend it some tragic ethos or some clear human thread, but the three central players, as portrayed by a talented if misguided cast, are not worth our time, pity or contemplation.