This Savage Art

Ever once in a while I write a post to get people to see a film I deem worthy of accolades — take that for what it’s worth. This is one of those posts. I saw Ballast at the recent New Directors/New Films series at Lincoln Center and thought the film was a beautifully grounded look at the lives of a fragmented family living in stressful times on the Mississippi Delta. As part of a new self-distribution model the Thursday night 8:00 screening is part of the IFP’s First Weekend Series. With the purchase of a $25 ticket you get the screening, a Q&A with filmmaker Lance Hammer and an after party with the filmmaker and NYC’s film community. You will truly be supporting a film that deserves it so check it out.

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These are some of the films I will attempt to see this Fall, you know, the film release season that pushes all the crap aside and pulls out all the stops. I’m sure there are others that I will add as the season progresses. Am I missing something?

* denotes must sees.

September

Burn After Reading…9/12

Elite Squad…9/19

Choke…9/26

Miracle at St. Anna…9/26

October

Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist…10/3

Religulous…10/3

W….10/17

*Synecdoche, New York…10/24

Zack and Miri Make a Porno…10/31

November

Milk…11/26  and whatever I didn’t see in September and October.

December

*The Curious Case of Benjamin Button…12/25

Valkyrie…12/25

Note to self: take this number and cut it in half, add the remaining to Netflix queue.

More Fall coverage from New York Magazine.

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If you’re in the city this weekend and want to see what looks like a very inside view of the American male in the midst of an emotional tailspin, check out Momma’s Man from filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, it opened yesterday at the Angelica. Here’s a snippet from Karina Longworth’s review on SpoutBlog:

When a filmmaker casts his own parents as parents––in a film about an adult and his relationship to his parents upon returning to his childhood home, a film which said filmmaker shoots *in* his childhood home––you’d expect (or maybe fear) that the result would be meta-personal to the point of solipsism. But what’s really surprising about Azazel Jacob’s Momma’s Man, which stars his experimental filmmaker father Ken Jacobs and mother Flo Jacobs and was shot in the Manhattan loft in which the family has lived for decades, is that it feels completely universal. The story of a 30-something husband and father of a newborn who extends a stay at his parents’ ramshackle New York apartment indefinitely, it’s an incredible portrait of the final phase of coming of age, the transition from being parented to parenting.

I couldn’t wait to see this when Linda was on the verge of giving birth to the boy because, well, it described everything I was going through at the time in a little capsule. The panic, the responsibly, the desire to crawl back into the womb myself. I’m going to try and check it out next week myself but all of you should give this film a little weekend box office love. Check the trailer:

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Go see Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland this weekend at the IFC Center. It is probably the best representation of the freedom of what was and what is truly missing in the independent film scene now. Relentless and unapologetically pained, its characters and audience are in sync with the same level of discomfort. Frownland has all the makings of a midnight movie – an institution that no longer exists. It’s the antithesis of what typically and theoretically makes a commercial film “work.”

If you believe the film community has lost it’s individual voice for the offbeat, the dangerous or the button-pushing type of filmmaking that some may be hesitant to get behind go to this screening even if just to see what the buzz is all about and while you’re at it, support a true independent vision. It might make you angry, it might give you hope that films this weird and fucked up can still get made with a little persistence. At the least you will take away one simple fact; Juno it ain’t.

Related:

The New Yorker review.

An endorsement from Filmmaker Magazine.

The Village Voice review.

[This Savage Art] review of Frownland.

Jeremiah Kipp [ aka my AD on The Face of the Earth ] interviews Frownland writer/director Ronald Bronstein.

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December 26th

Early word on There Will Be Blood [added 11.9.07]

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There’s a line in the play Hurlyburly, David Rabe’s scolding indictment of Hollywood’s penchant for the vacuous:

They got all these bullshit stories they want to fill the air with, they want to give them some sense of reality, some fucking air of authenticity, don’t they? So they take some guy like you and stick him around the set to make the whole load of shit look real. Don’t you know that? You’re a prop.

Director Michael Corrente’s sentiments about why it took two years to get his film Brooklyn Rules to the screen hit a similar note:

It’s shot anamorphic by a cinematographer who’s the president of the ASC…you’ve got an amazing cast. You’ve got one of the better writers out there writing right now. And it’s a great story, but they will release piece of shit after piece of shit onto 1,000 to 2,000 screens. It’s disgusting. It’s sad…homogenized, rinsed-off, bullshit, formulaic fucking movies.

Well, you got me hooked. No, Corrente is not from New York but screenwriter and Sopranos staffer Terrence Winter is. The Reeler gives a fair and insightful review of what sounds like a solid coming-of-age in the borough crime drama that finally opens today in NYC.

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And in more “you can’t keep me down” news, Queens born James Gray comes out of the gate at Cannes [update 5.19: Columbia pick up at Cannes] with his new NYC crime thriller We Own The Night. I’m a big fan of Little Odessa and it’s great to hear he’s developing new work. Really looking forward to Alphabet City. From Gray:

I’m just not willing to give up on myself. If I’m going to fail, then I want to fail to the limits of my talent.

Gotta love it. Who here wants to go out and make a movie!?! Whose with me!?!

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Joel and Ethan Coen at Apple Soho (with Barry Sonnenfeld)

Hear Oscar-winning filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen talk about their filmmaking experiences, including how they used Final Cut Pro to edit their films Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, and the upcoming No Country for Old Men. 4:00 p.m.

Tribeca Film Festival – Mood Enhancer – Short Film Program

Try a new drug in Onion Underwater, and it’s raining cows and dogs in The Water and the Milk. Every day is a gold-medal game in Heart of Whistler, and the audio diary of an unrequited crush is captured in Lawrence. Two guys sink or swim in Tell it to the Fishes, while two other guys seek celebrity fame in Color Me Olsen. We close the program with I Am Bob, where a strange competition forces an abandoned rock star to sing for his supper.

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I was never aware of the term grindhouse until recently. I just knew the theaters in Times Square were a place where extreme behavior and obsessed people converged in this turbulent center of the world that was forbidden and sleazy. I wrote a little recollection a while back in anticipation of today’s release of Grindhouse.

For good or bad I got to see the end of an era. My memories of the Pre-Giuliani Times Square were of the expected pornographic nature like many of those who can remember back that far. You went to The Deuce to get into trouble, to see what the limits of humanity could endure, yours included. It lived up to the reputation and beyond. The skanky jizz booths. The “snuff” films. The Travis Bickle fantasy. Yeah, Marty got it right. I don’t think you could have been a young man in New York at that time and not have walked through 42nd Street like it was some sort of ring of fire, some sort of rite of passage. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe not. It apparently rubbed off (heh) on Team Tarantino/Rodriguez enough for them to come up with this mega-event movie. I do give them credit, it is a great pop culture concept. Just the first look of the trailer made me nostalgic for my adolescent days drooling over Fangoria and studying the work of Tom Savini. I was a huge devotee of monster/horror/splatter movies. Eli Roth nailed it with his Thanksgiving trailer. I have a feeling I might from time to time revisit those halcyon days so if you see titles in my Netflix queue like Frankenhooker or Basket Case don’t be surprised. There are so many to choose from.

I rarely anticipate a film in the theater thinking it will be fun. Most of what I rent or go see is either because it looks interesting or it will expand my knowledge of film. Mainstream “entertainment” is just too dumbed down (The Reaping? please) for me to even think of parting with my $11 but this is different. It’s like those guys pulled me aside and secretly said to me, “this one is for you buddy, enjoy.” Or maybe I just drank the Kool-Aid. Either way I’ll try to catch Grindhouse this opening weekend, after all it is a film that should be seen with a crowd. Maybe I’ll even smuggle in a six-pack of Rheingold and some bleach and pour it all over the theater the night before.

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