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.

* 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.

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:

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.

December 26th

Early word on There Will Be Blood [added 11.9.07]