Author Archive
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
There isn’t really a press lounge at Slamdance. There’s a Filmmaker Lounge, which is open sometimes, and there’s a Carhartt Lounge, which is open sometimes, and there’s a couple of comfortable chairs in the hallways, which are empty sometimes. Other than that, you’re kind of on your own. But if you can get in the Filmmaker Lounge, it’s probably the best place to get some work done, even though the wifi isn’t very good.
You end up overhearing a lot of interviews this way. Some people like that. I don’t. It’s the worst kind of spoiler. Invariably, you’ll find yourself sitting next to the director of the film you’re about to watch.
All you can do is hope the film is good and try to ignore the spoilers. If you’re lucky, the filmmaker sitting next to you will spare you the spoiler, which is how I was very pleasantly surprised by the third act of Keith Miller’s Welcome to Pine Hill.
Welcome to Pine Hill (which won the Grand Jury Prize) stars Shannon Harper as Shannon Harper, an insurance adjuster in New York City who’s attempting to leave his drug dealing life behind. He’s an intimidating guy, a large black man whom the script suggests has done some very bad things in his past life. But he’s clean now, living the corporate life in Manhattan.
He also has a very rare form of stomach cancer.
Welcome to Pine Hill is a meditative film about dealing with your past, about settling debts and tying up loose ends. At the center is Harper, a non-actor Miller talked into starring in the film, and he’s fantastic. He’s quite literally the film. He’s in every scene, and even though he’s likely playing a version of himself, it’s a measured, consistent performance from beginning to end. I’d call it a breakthrough role, but that assumes he’ll act again. Hopefully he will.
The film has a vérité style, which works for a lot of it, even if it does at times feel too loose and un-composed. The cinematography and sound design could be better. It’s … Read the rest
Friday, January 27th, 2012
One of the trickier things about reviewing movies at a festival is that your identity isn’t exactly a secret. You’ve got a press pass with your name and the name of your outlet on it, so a lot of conversations you have with filmmakers revolve around that very fact. Or you end up in a long conversation at the Kickstarter party with the director of a film you hated. But my philosophy is if you can’t stand face-to-face with someone and defend your opinion of their work, then you have no business telling it to anyone else. Comments and critiques from behind the veil of anonymity are cowardly and childish and harmful. There’s no place for them in the indie film community.
Which brings us to Daniel Martinico’s Ok, Good, essentially a one-man show of struggling actor Hugo Armstrong and his endless string of rejections. We watch Armstrong go through commercial audition after commercial audition, all of them for things like laundry detergent and potting soil and any number of things you don’t necessarily care about.
But Armstrong cares. He cares deeply, spending hours poring over scripts and rehearsing even the simplest things like how he introduces himself to the casting director. He’s meticulous. Maybe too meticulous. He finds a flaw in the duplication of his headshot, and the rectification of that pretty much becomes his life mission for awhile.
It wears on him and we start to see his processes fall apart, little by little. All the while, he’s attending these acting workshops where a bunch of actors pace around a room, screaming at each other and doing some bizarre form of yoga and, well, all sorts of weird shit. It’s all very primal and you half expect them to be getting psyched up for a football game. But I guess that’s what they do.
What’s probably most impressive about Ok, Good is the cinematography. Martinico shot it himself and it looks fantastic, with an attention to detail that dovetails beautifully with Armstrong’s preparations. The audition footage looks appropriately terrible, but everything is well-frame, each shot serving … Read the rest
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
The first 70 minutes or so of Frank Rinaldi’s Sundowning is a fascinating film, a creepy-as-fuck, measured look at some sort of mental breakdown. It’s the kind of film where you sit there for the entire time thinking to yourself, “I have no fucking clue what’s going on in this film, but I’m pretty sure the director does.” And that’s great. You don’t always have to know what’s going on, as long as the audience feels like they’re in capable hands.
Shannon Fitzpatrick stars as Shannon, a woman that’s apparently being kept in an apartment by Susan (Susan Chau), a matronly figure who dictates the events of Shannon’s day, every day for nearly 2 years.
The film is nearly silent as Shannon and Susan goes through their daily routine over and over again, but the longer we go on, the more that starts to fall apart, and the more and more sinister it gets. It becomes clear that Susan is in some way manipulating Shannon, for reasons that are unclear. That’s the creepy part.
There’s an easy comparison here to Giorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, an equally disconcerting film about people in isolation. The framing here is more traditional, but the sound design is more ambitious, going completely silent on occasion and then ramping up enough that you wonder if they’ve blown out the speakers.
It’s incredibly effective and mesmerizing.
And then it all falls apart.
The third act represents a complete tonal shift. The film goes from 16:9 to 4:3 and (I think) from film to video. It’s also completely unnecessary. It’s one of those things where each minute of the 3rd act pulls you father and farther away from what the filmmakers worked so hard to create. It drags on and on, seemingly forever, before returning to the previous style for an explanation of what’s been going on.
A lot of people seemed to love the explanation, one person in the Q&A congratulated the director on the “bold choice” of withholding all of that information until the end. And it is a bold choice. Just not bold enough. I … Read the rest
Monday, January 23rd, 2012
23 January; 1:13am
Probably the best thing I saw all day was a missed FG.
Being from Maine means you’re pretty much going to be a fan of the Patriots, even though they were terrible for my entire childhood. The first thing I put on my schedule was the AFC Championship game and as soon as my first screening ended, I made it goal number 1 to find a TV. Luckily the Carhartt Lounge had TVs running, and chili, and a bar serving bloody mary’s.
Apparently it was a Slamdance/Carhartt staff party, but if you show up before they start checking IDs, you can talk your way into some free drinks. Eventually, I think they gave up, as I ended up watching the game with a bunch of filmmakers from Austin, including Jonny Mars, the second lead in the last film I directed. I had no idea he was even in town.
The first film I saw today was the morning screening of James Stenson’s Kelly, a documentary portrait of transvestite Kelly Van Ryan, a girl who moved to LA from North Carolina to become a star. Of course, she didn’t, instead turning to prostitution and meth.
Kelly is a complicated portrait. The filmmakers clearly have a great affection for her, and she’s a compelling character, prone to rants and exclamations like, “Recession? How does the whole world run out of money?”
She’s full of delusions and contradictions, imagining herself as a star, despite all evidence to the contrary. She gets in a fight with her landlord, claiming she has the money for rent and promising to go down to the office and kick some ass. Of course, she doesn’t and soon after she’s been evicted and is living in a hotel.
Her claims fall away when she goes home to North Carolina and the filmmakers are confronted with a mother and a home life that’s wildly different from Kelly’s descriptions. Her mother refutes Kelly left and right, but the only thing that’s clear is that neither of these people are reliable narrators.
So where exactly is the … Read the rest
Monday, January 23rd, 2012
While on the plane to Salt Lake City, it occurred to me that it might be fun to do Park City coverage as a live blog from the perspective of someone who’s never been there before. I have a press pass for Slamdance, so I’m mostly covering that.
22 January; 2:18am
When I arrived in Park City, all anyone was talking about was how there was a complete lack of snow. Well, today the snow arrived. Man, did it arrive. It snowed pretty much all day. By the time I left to meet Marty Lang for dinner around 5pm, it was getting difficult to walk the sidewalks without getting wet. By later in the evening, people were having trouble commuting to Salt Lake City.
The snow is going pretty much sideways, so you spend a lot of your time with your head down, which is great until someone stops suddenly right in front of you to pick up a glove and you nearly run into them before stepping quickly to the side. Turns out it’s Michael Emerson, which makes him the second cast member of LOST I’ve nearly run over this year.
The third screening of the day is BINDLESTIFFS, a modern re-working of “Catcher in the Rye” (sort of), made by high school students. They’ve been pretty impossible to miss, as there’s about a million of them running around in bright yellow ponchos and handing out lighters.
To the surprise of no one, the show is sold out. After all, they’ve really been working to get people there. The crowd is standing room only and they’re fucking pumped. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been at a screening with that much energy. But first, comes Shaun Parker’s short film Hope. You Like Crap, which he describes as “7 minutes of your life you’ll never get back”. I guess that’s technically true, but I don’t really want it back. It’s really the simplest short you’ll ever see. Parker takes a student film he made 20 years ago and in a voiceover narration, just eviscerates it. He’s … Read the rest
Saturday, January 21st, 2012
While on the plane to Salt Lake City, it occurred to me that it might be fun to do Park City coverage as a live blog from the perspective of someone who’s never been there before. I have a press pass for Slamdance, so I’m mostly covering that.
21 January; 2:36pm
Another screening.
February (Nick Singer): A short about a guy with some plumbing problems. It’s well-shot, but you really get the sense that it’s more an exercise in cinematography than anything resembling a story.
The Sound of Small Things (Peter McLarnan): A film about a marriage in decline, McLarnan’s film depicts a couple that struggles to communicate. The wife is deaf, but can speak, and the husband spends most of his free time in the basement, playing the drums.
The dialogue is improvised, which leads to long, aimless conversations about the minutia of life, including one seemingly endless one about the process of going to the gym to use a sauna. The overall narrative is rambling and disjointed. It doesn’t really go anywhere, nor does it give a cohesive look at what’s going on.
Add to that a “reveal” that’s telegraphed pretty blatantly from the second shot of the film, but never developed or employed, and what you’ve got is 85 minutes of things happening with little apparent reason or direction.
I kind of hated it.
But here’s the beauty of cinema. Sitting next to me was cinematographer Nandan Rao (Green, Bummer Summer). Nandan (who was one of the cinematographers we talked to about potentially shooting my film Up Country) noticed a lot of the same things I did, even finding them crucial to his reaction toward the film. But where I hated those things, he loved them.
It’s one of the things that makes cinema such an amazing art form, how 2 people who more or less see eye-to-eye on the art form can watch the same film in the same screening, yet have such diametric opinions of the work. You can’t beat it.
21 January; 12:02pm
Last night involved a lot of walking … Read the rest
Monday, December 26th, 2011
I wasn’t supposed to go to Europe. You can’t really drive there (unless you’re the Muppets) and flights across the pond are expensive, but when a production comes calling, I listen. This one made it easy, asking would I come to the UK if they covered the plane ticket?
A no-brainer.
Which is how I ended up in Newcastle upon Tyne, a small city near Scotland, serving as gaffer in a country where I have absolutely no idea how the electricity works. And when I ask how much I can put into a circuit, I’m told that, well, that depends on the wiring. In other words, no one knows. My solution? Start plugging stuff in until the circuit trips, unplug the last one, and see how much is left. There’s the answer.
The United Kingdom (England?) is only my second non-US country on A Year Without Rent, but one thing that seems to be evident is that the American DIY mentality, the one that says “fuck y’all, we’re making this movie whether you like it or not”, isn’t nearly as prevalent as it is in the States. Oh sure, it’s there, but it’s on a delay. There’s no Gregory Bayne overseas (hell, there’s only a handful in the U.S.). Or if there is, I haven’t heard about him, which might be all the proof you need.
Follow me on a tangent. I’ll get back to my trip to Europe in a minute. Honest.
It’s been a couple of years since indie filmmakers in the U.S. could rely on studios or the festival system or pretty much anyone to take care of them. Oh sure, Sundance used to create careers more or less out of thin air, but anyone who’s been paying attention knows those days are long gone. Kevin Smith said recently that CLERKS probably wouldn’t get into Sundance if he made it now. I’ll go further: he probably wouldn’t even bother submitting it, and if he did, I doubt it’d get much serious consideration.
Every month, more indie filmmakers come to the conclusion that no one’s going to … Read the rest
Tuesday, September 27th, 2011
If you take a statistics class (or just take your fantasy baseball team really seriously), one of the first things you learn is that trends are largely a myth. When a team like the Red Sox starts the season 2-13, that’s probably nothing more than a few bad breaks strung together. Given enough time, they’ll right the ship. Unless their third starter is John Lackey. Then all bets are off. Our brains are wired to see patterns where none exist, to take statistical noise and turn it into something it isn’t (there’s a joke in there somewhere about movie critics, but I’ll leave it alone).
So when I work two films in a row where the director is also serving as the d.p. and camera operator — does that mean that there’s this great movement brewing on the West Coast? Of course not. Two films out of twenty-something does not make a sea change.
But still, there’s something there, a desire to simplify the wheels of production and make the process leaner and smaller. You see this a lot on productions around the country. Filmmakers either want the crew to be a lot bigger, with all the toys, or a lot smaller. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say how great it is when its just five people wandering around, making a movie. It hearkens back to our fond memories of when we were starting out and too dumb to know any better. Plus, the smaller the production, the less likely the cops will notice you, right?
Well this month, I got to do both.
On the small side, I went to L.A. and worked on Paul Osborne’s second narrative feature Favor. It was your classic DIY set with five lights and four C-stands. Only we had one C-stand and three light stands. Quick and dirty in the indie film tradition.
And then, I drove back up to Seattle to work on Matthew Lillard’s directorial debut Fat Kid Rules the World, complete with a whole grip truck full of all the bells and whistles … Read the rest
Monday, August 1st, 2011
When I was a kid, one of my father’s favorite sayings was, “why don’t you play in the road?” He had two sons close in age who were active and rambunctious and it wasn’t a particularly large house, so any excuse to get us where we could be neither seen nor heard was a good one. And in his defense, it was a pretty quiet country road, so the danger was minimal.
I think of this sometimes when I’m on set and a particularly non-essential person is, to put it nicely, in the way. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call this person a “producer.”
I put it in quotes because across the indie film world there are hundreds of fantastic producers who work their asses off to turn a director’s vision into reality. They’re the first ones to show up and the last ones to leave, and they do things like sending out call sheets from their sister’s wedding reception two time zones away. If you find one of those producers, hang on to them for dear life because someone will try and steal them away from you.
And then there are “producers,” the type of people who argue with the Art Department over the need of a $3 prop, who sit in a walkway playing video games on their iPad, who ask the DP questions like, “are the number of people in the room affecting the light?” and generally just shouldn’t be on set. And I don’t mean “shouldn’t be on set” in the sense that they don’t really serve a purpose. I mean it in the sense that they slow things down. They’re in the way and more or less a destructive force. They should no more be on set than your crazy uncle who will eat all the craft services and make lewd advances toward your actresses…Unless, of course, that crazy uncle is one of your actors, but that’s a different article.
Often the rationale is that said “producer” was pretty valuable behind a desk, organizing things and dealing with paperwork, and that may very well … Read the rest
Monday, June 13th, 2011
Chances are, you’ll never have a reason to drive the long way across Montana. There isn’t much going on up there and, let’s face it, it’s a really long drive. But if you do, make a point to do as much driving as possible during daylight, as the scenery is pretty stunning. You could stop the car every couple of miles, just to take pictures of the view. Before long, you’ll start plotting on how you might be able to embrace your inner Terrence Malick out in the middle of nowhere, shooting only at magic hour. And, hey, there’s a big statue of a dinosaur in Wall, South Dakota you could always use.
But me, I was just passing through as A Year Without Rent transitioned to a West Coast phase, and my little car that could wound up having driven from coast to coast, which isn’t so bad for a 1999 Buick Century with over 110,000 miles on it. Of course, with a car that old comes with occasional, uh, issues.
Sometimes I feel like I’m doing a year-long ad for Buick.
We started this leg of the journey in Minneapolis, where we got really lucky and happened to be in the room when the documentary SMOOCH fundamentally shifted. It was a neat experience, as we’d spent the day doing interviews of varying levels of interest about the subject of forgiveness, only to do just one more at the end of the day that even someone like me, someone who’d only gotten the elevator pitch of the film, knew could re-write an entire act of the movie. Afterward, director (and backer) Dawn Mikkelson and I went to get a drink where we learned that Osama bin Laden had been killed. It was a pretty crazy couple of hours.
From there, it was due west through South Dakota and Montana, all the way to Seattle, where Phil Seneker became the first repeat person on AYWR (somehow, Phil and I ended up judging a Regional High School short film contest). And then again, when I helped him shoot some footage … Read the rest
