BRETT HALEY, “THE NEW YEAR”

By Brandon Harris

A young woman works at the shoe counter at a Pensacola, Florida bowling alley. Having abandoned the ambitions of her youth, she takes care of her ailing father, who painfully struggles with cancer. With the return of a rival from high school into her long standing social circle, the stillness that has taken over her existence breaks, leaving her to consider the possibility of a new direction, one which seems tantalizingly close and yet ever illusive. This is subject matter than may be right within American Independent Cinema’s wheelhouse, but in thoughtful hands, even the most seemingly pedestrian yarns can contain multitudes. A mid season candidate for low budget wonderkind of the year, Brett Haley’s The New Year is a quietly riveting, old fashioned AmerIndie, a character driven slice of  Florida panhandle life made for four figures that marks the coming out party for Triste Kelly Dunn, who turns in a performance that harkens back to past breakthroughs by girl next door types mired with dead end circumstances amidst sunny, coastal locales: think Ashley Judd in Ruby in Paradise or Lauren Ambrose in Swimming.

Skipped over by Sundance and SXSW only to surface at respected regional fests such as Sarasota and Nashville, the film is a feature directorial debut for Haley, a Pensacola, FL native who financed, produced, directed, co-wrote and co-photographed. He even downloaded the P2 cards. Between takes no less. Despite cutting his teeth as an Assistant to the Director on studio subsidized, highly formal Indiewood projects like The Road and Reservation Road, Haley counts John Cassavetes as his primary aesthetic influence, which goes a long way toward explaining the low-fi immediacy of his film. The New Year opens at the brand new reRun Gastropub Theater in Dumbo, Brooklyn this coming Friday.

Filmmaker: What provided the initial concept and inspiration for the project? Did you always conceive of this film at such a low budget?

Haley: The inspiration came totally out of left field and yet somewhat naturally. I’ve told this story a few times, but its just what happened. I was on a Amtrak train … Read the rest

“BUG”

By Admin

Wunderkind-auteur William Friedkin who stormed the Hollywood gates with The French Connection and The Exorcist in the 1970’s enters the21st century with, Bug, a film that depicts the maddening descent into self-destructive paranoia. Adapted from the stage play of the same name, written by Tracy Letts and starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, Friedkin presents a noirish setting of a socially marginal characters inhabiting the outskirts of middle-America Oklahoma; which in this case is a lesbian bar and ramshackle roadside motel.

Shannon, who also starred in the stage play version, reprises his role as Peter Evans, an AWOL American soldier shows up at the motel run by Agnes White, played by Ashley Judd. Taking advantage of her rocky relationship with her abusive, ex-husband, Jerry (Harry Connick Jr.) and no doubt, the unbearable sense of loneliness in such a remote setting, the deceptively withdrawn, Evans seduces Agnes and convinces her that the American government planted a bug inside of him upon his return from the first Gulf War. What follows is the precipitous fall into psychotic breakdown, as Evans mutilates himself with the gullible connivance of Agnes, in order to purge himself of the “bug” as planted by his former paymaster.

Bug is largely an actor’s piece and the cast has plenty of material to chew on with tour-de-force performances by both leads. Shannon has the seductive guile of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. He appears to be the all too kind, seemingly harmless man willing to listen to the problems of troubled Ashley Judd and only to sink his teeth into her neck and her conscience. The character arcs of the principals however is a springboard for the larger issue of human paranoia and the strain of conspiracy thinking that still have potency well into the 21^st century. Friedkin’s Bug cannot be dismissed as merely the extreme paranoid regurgitations of two crank characters. One need only look at the scene in which Peter sits Agnes down on the bed and carefully explains to her how a group of powerful men, called the “Bilderburgers” decided … Read the rest