David Cronenberg once said that as long as you have good sound, movie audiences can be compelled to watch anything. Zachary Oberzan’s Flooding With Love For the Kid, a one man, one apartment, one DV camera reinterpretation of David Morrell’s novel First Blood, proves Mr. Cronenberg’s axiom true once and for all. Film is a plastic medium, but it’s always easier to suspend our disbelief if the sets and background have some level of authenticity. Yet in Flooding with Love for the Kid, while we know we are not in a jungle but an economy apartment, Mr. Oberzan’s vision—one that is not entirely camp driven but is sustained by careful performances and framing, inventive use of household approximations for the tools of battle, and, most of all, a gloriously constructed soundtrack—truly transports you in a way that few indie films of any budget do.

Oberzan’s version, often harkening back to Morrell’s source material rather than the 1982 Sylvester Stallone vehicle that launched the big-screen Rambo franchise, is not the Reagan era paean to militarism that the film series ultimately evolved into in its sequels (and began to in First Blood’s third act). It is a more delicate character study about a pair of damaged ex-warriors—John Rambo and his nemesis, sheriff Will Teasle, an emasculated Korean war vet—who refuse to yield. Oberzan inhabits every frame of this take on Morrell’s post-Vietnam narrative about a drifting Vet who, while wandering through a small town in the pacific northwest to visit a fellow comrade in arms, is tormented by some sadistic redneck cops who mistake him, with his longish hair, for a hippie. When he escapes and begins doing great bodily harm to any law enforcement officer who stands in his way, only his former commander, Colonel Sam Trautman, can talk him down.

The low-fi approach here goes beyond the tongue-in-cheek, pop culture campiness of Be Kind Rewind’s “sweded” scenes from ‘80s actioners. Oberzan crafts compelling individuals without even seeming to try very hard; a fake moustache here, a quivering jaw and arcane delivery there, but these performances, which the director/star first worked out in his off-off-Broadway one man show Rambo Solo, sing with visceral moments that, given the circumstances, shouldn’t have such truthful gravitas. One gets to thinking, especially during its droning passages of exposition, that there’s no way this is actually going to work over the course of a feature length film, but as its narrative encounters those action scenes that one could assume would be most hampered by the scarcity of Mr. Oberzan’s resources, the film really picks up steam on the back of his absolutely enthralling characterizations and wily use of household items, reinforced by all too imaginative sound, as props.

You have to respect Zachary Oberzan’s ingenuity. I could be wrong, but I don’t think anyone who dreams as a child of becoming a filmmaker sets out to make their feature film debut for $100. Or adapt it from a novel for which they do not hold an ancillary rights option of any kind and which has already spawned a popular, 30-year-old film. Did Mr. Oberzan, who plays every character in his unauthorized adaptation of Morrell’s novel, have a profound lapse in sanity before taking on this project? I don’t know, but I can say, having glimpsed his unbelievably entertaining film, one that he shot in his apartment with toasters for radios and Christmas tree parts for jungle foliage, that he made the right choice.

— Brandon Harris

(Distributed by Focus Features, A Serious Man is now available on DVD or Blu-ray. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.)

While it’s often treacherous to throw around the term personal when discussing work in a medium as collaborative as narrative film, the Coen Brothers’ most recent masterpiece, A Serious Man, does little to dispel the impression that it means more to them than much of their recent work. At the height of their powers and popularity, unleashing their technical and syntactical virtuosity on an intimate story with no movie stars is rather ballsy in its own right, but to do so with such clearly self-revelatory material encompasses another level of courageousness entirely.

A Serious Man meditates on the Job-like misfortune of one Larry Gopnik (an excellent Michael Stuhlbarg, who can also be seen in Afterschool this weekend), middle aged academic, devoted if somewhat remote Jewish father and family man, wannabe mensch, who lives in an unnamed Minneapolis suburb circa 1967. That is to say, A Serious Man meditates on the life and milieu of someone who well could have been this brave and endlessly inventive duo’s father (who happened to be a Minnesotan, an Academic and a Jew).

After a brief prologue detailing a fake Yiddish folk tale in an unnamed 19^th century polish shtetl, we are thrust into Larry’s seemingly idyllic suburban existence. This is an American movie however, so something ugly is surely lurking below the sleek suburban façade. Despite the petite bourgeois trappings of his fairly mundane but generally satisfying family life, life is suddenly very hard for Larry. From all appearances, God is no longer looking out for this chosen one.

Larry’s wife wants to leave him for his more “serious” (i.e. golf playing, wine drinking, affected speech using) friend Sy Abelman, while his high school aged kids steal money from him for marijuana/Jefferson Airplane albums (the boy) and a clandestine nose job (the girl). They share little to no affection for each other. His unemployable, neck cyst draining brother Arthur is sleeping on his couch, perpetually in the bathroom, and may be a (shush…) homosexual. Larry is up for tenure at his University job, but an anonymous author is writing letters to the tenure committee suggesting that his “moral turpitude” should prevent him from getting the promotion. A wealthy Korean student who has recently failed his physics class tries his best to bribe Larry. His neighbor, a tough looking, dusty blond haired Goy whose American Manhood is cemented in the brusque way he plays a game of catch or prepares to go hunting with his son (you just know he was in Korea from the way he looks at a Korean student’s father when he visits Gopnik—“Is this man bothering you?”, the solidarity presented by the new Jewish whiteness slowly becoming manifest), keeps mowing the lawn just a little past the property line. Oh yeah, and he’s got to take these X-rays…

A Serious Man suggests a suburban Jewish community of cookie cutter houses and manicured lawns that is largely cloistered from the fallout of the 1960s, although not immune to the “new freedoms” as one pot smoking, sex symbol masquerading as a housewife puts it to the recently estranged and horny but to0 passive to do anything about it Mr. Gopnik. This is a place seemingly untouched by the Civil Rights Movement and the Six Days War, contemporaneous events that indirectly but rather permanently changed the Jewish people’s place in the American lexicon. Trying to blend in with the mainstream of American society while maintaining their own ethno-religious communal identity far from the Jewish cultural centers on the coasts, it paints a portrait of a community grappling with its impending inclusion into the comforts and privileges of American Whiteness, even as the stark shadow of persistent persecution looms in their psyches, perpetually spoiling the joy. As darkly funny as the tandem’s most broadly comedic work, while remaining as thematically resonant concerning the pitfalls of an overmatched man in a changing America as No Country for Old Men, the treasures of A Serious Man are universal. Here’s hoping that it doesn’t seem too parochial for the masses.

— Brandon Harris

Afterschool is a movie not unlike so many punky, fishnet wearing, Sartre reading high school students; the type you don’t often encounter in this kind of picture. Like that tired cliché for transitory and defensive teenage identity, Afterschool doesn’t much want to be loved and bites you for trying. It’s a film that sees, with alarming precision and clear-eyed, long-take candor, the emotional atrophy that an entire generation of children and young adults has been subjected to; interpersonal relationships which have become dominated and mediated by digital modes of communication, coupled with the abdication of responsibility on the part of the generations preceding them. Any film with this much to say about modern life, especially when said in such a rigorous and austere fashion, will certainly have its naysayers, of which Afterschool has gathered a minor cult.

Cocky. Remote. Derivative. These are some of the pejoratives lobbed at this astounding feature debut by 25-year-old writer/director/editor Antonio Campos, the youngest winner ever of Cannes’ short film prize for his NYU undergrad Buy It Now three years ago. Campos returned to Cannes this year—in the Un Certain Regard section—with this canon bomb of a movie that left many feeling assaulted and talked down to. But don’t confuse its measured self-assuredness for narcissism, its brute force for a visual beatdown; pretension and a heavily indebted aesthetic are two very different things.

While watching Afterschool, which unhurriedly shares the tale of Robert (Ezra Miller), a prep schooler whose predilection for uncontextualized internet video—be it Saddam Hussein’s hanging, cats who can miraculously play the piano, and, most especially, degrading amateur porn—informs his all too reductive and unduly sexualized view of community and femininity, one can’t help but feel the hovering specter of Michael Haneke. This all comes to a startling head when Robert, while shooting his own video for a class project, happens upon a pair of popular blonde twins, mid-overdose, outside of the girl’s bathroom.

You could throw in Bela Tarr’s tableau style as another influence, or Gus Van Sant’s maximum glide aesthetic in Elephant, but nothing to date matches the audacity and sheer visceral jolt of Afterschool’s most troubling and fascinating passages, which, when taken to their logical thematic conclusion, suggest just how easy it has been for us to forget the obscene amount of uncut sexual exploitation many young people can digest with just a three clicks of a button, and how quickly these new modes of consumption are shaping their sexual selves.

While our not-so-sympathetic protagonist witnesses many terrible things, some simulated, some not, he comes to be emblematic of many in his generation, coming of age at a time when the internet—that great level playing field of high culture and smut, the useful and the disposable—is shaping the sexual and moral identity of young people in incalculable ways. An indispensable film, clinical and chilling (thanks largely to Jody Lee Lipes’ bravura camerawork), Afterschool signals the arrival of an important new voice in American Cinema.

— Brandon Harris

(Unmade Beds opens at the IFC Center on Wednesday, September 2, 2009. Visit director Alexis Dos Santos’ MySpace page to learn more.)

Expanding on the clear promise of his 2006 debut feature Glue, Argentine Alexis Dos Santos cements his place as one cinema’s most intriguing new autuers with Unmade Beds, a startlingly energetic film whose HD visual elegance and studied grammatical anarchy give its old hat tale of youthful ennui amongst London hipsters a new life.

Working in an autobiographical vein is something few narrative filmmakers own up to and even fewer are able to do successfully. Dos Santos, who spent much time in London during his formative years as a filmmaker, gives us a pair of protagonists, including a scruffy-headed young man of Spanish origins who seeks a father he’s never truly known while squatting in a giant Artist space. Wonder where he got that idea from? Both characters seem to rest comfortably in the realm of author surrogates. The experiences of the two squatters, who often float past each other, unawares of their common longings (or address), represent with eloquence and never a drop of sentimentality the trials of being young and lost in a big, foreign city.

Although they don’t meet until the final reel, both dressed in animal costumes after a music video shoot turns into a loft party, the Spaniard Axel and the Frenchwoman Vera share a loft with probably a half dozen others. She works at a bookstore, but spends the days in distraction and reverie, thinking about a broken love left in Paris and the fleeting nature of mutual interconnection. He plays at looking for an apartment under an assumed name, if only to spy on the realtor, who he’s deduced is the father who left him twenty years before.

A narrative thread that in lesser hands may have been played for melodrama is given a little weight but a large dose of comedic playfulness. It keeps the forward progress of the story tethered to some tension and some desire to find out, in the David Mamet sense of the phrase, “what happens next”, but still allows the film heady leaps into lateral stylistics. Dos Santos ultimately pays off the thread with panache, honestly displaying the way a young man bathed in a world of zero authenticity would actually respond to the dismaying revelation that his father is an average man in an average time who never thought to say goodbye not out of malice, but out of simple respect for the meaninglessness no one can seem to escape from these days.

Memory is a strong factor in this film. Axel ends every night drunk, often finding himself in the bed of a woman (or man, or both), the circumstances under which these events occurred escaping him the next morning. Vera can’t seem to escape her own, so much so that she threatens the prospect of a new relationship with a Londoner whose name she can never seem to remember. If this is all seeming a bit Gondry, it is.

Yet the film’s delicate formal touches, which include still sequences as flashbacks, the use of disruptive sound flourishes and saturated Super 8mm as an indicator of intensified experience, first person narration (in Spanish or French depending on the thinker, who may also slip into omniscience at the storyteller’s playful discretion), recalls not just the French New Wave, but more recent work by filmmakers as varied as Lynne Ramsay and Arnaud Desplechin, Andrea Arnold and Olivier Assayas, but without the sometimes overwhelming—although never less than beautiful—melancholy you find in three of those four filmmakers work (I’ll let you guess which one I’d exclude). Claire Denis might deserve a shout out too (although if you talk to the Rotterdam press staff, I hear she does plenty of shouting on her own), but what makes Dos Santos stand out is just how much he makes these techniques his own and the milieu he shows us, which can seem so stale in lesser hands, but seems fresh and alive in his.

— Brandon Harris

According to Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose films are currently playing in a retrospective at BAM accompanying the US theatrical release of Still Walking, the Japanese are not prone to belief in the existence of an omnipotent God who looks down upon us in judgment; they have their ancestors, their family, their dearly departed, to pick up the slack. Still Walking, for him, stands as evidence of the hold that the dead have on the Japanese living—especially the old, the family driven, the people for whom the past is as alive as the present. A post mortem gift to his mother, it is a relentless and emotionally brutal film, containing as well executed an ensemble of performances as I’ll likely see all year, observed with the keen eye of a burgeoning master reaching full maturity.

A young, failed painter has taken a wife. It’s a second marriage for her. She has a child from the previous relationship. The young man takes her and the child to his out of the way seaside hometown to visit his parents on the thirteenth anniversary of his older, more adored brother’s heroic death trying to save a young, overweight child who couldn’t swim. His passing hangs over the family like a never-ending rain cloud.

The patriarch, a physician whose practice was naturally to be handed down to his deceased son, lives on in quiet, angry scrutiny of nearly every thing and one around him, including his barely breadwinning, aspirant artist son. The matriarch, an amiable, forever cooking mystic, always meddling in everyone else’s affairs, contains her anger in more cruel and devastating ways. She refuses to let her sole daughter move back into the house with her dimwit husband and young children, even as infirmity approaches; they must keep their oldest son’s room intact, as a shrine of sorts to him, but perhaps also to their youth that will never return.

Beaconing a past that can never to be regained and picturing a future that is without promise in the late autumn of life is dealt with in such exacting and concise detail, but it never becomes the raison d’etre—the film has just as much to say about the alienation of the young man and his wife, or about the way in which his relatively happy go lucky sister and her doofus husband keep smiling. This is a film that speaks volumes without putting up much of a fuss. It’s quiet, effective filmmaking that deals with the most essential of themes: how do we find some existential solace in family or community?

Still Walking reminds me most of Phil Morrison’s masterful Junebug, a film that also involves a young man bringing home his new bride for the first time. The cultural differences between child and family hang on the fringes of both narratives, although they become more central to Morrison’s film. Unfolding in long, but not overly patient takes over the course of a single melancholy day, Still Walking contains passages that can’t help but evoke Ozu’s Tokyo Story and oeuvre in general, but it has an expansive tenderness and eloquent sadness all its own. Kore-eda is clearly in thrall at the essential frailty of human beings, our natural entropy toward bitterness, hysteria, sadism, but also to the smaller emotions that fill us during the dead times, feelings that might be called boredom by the lazy, but are surely a mix of the much harder to describe factors that make up a life in full. This is my favorite film of the year.

— Brandon Harris

The Hurt Locker is being distributed by Summit Entertainment. It is now available on DVD or Blu-ray

The notion that war changes men for the worse is not a new one and it has been explored in cinema more times than any reasonable person should be able to recall. That said, I’ve yet to see a film dramatize that premise with such intelligence, veracity, paranoia and sheer aesthetic pleasure (and pain) than Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. This is the type of product that the American movie industry—a series of interlocking private ideological enterprises in a country that is fighting two wars and was, until recently, hankering for a third—has a moral responsibility to make. No wonder it was financed with European money.

I know a few casualties of the Iraqi war. Not many, but a few. People I know. People I like. Although I only know one man that has died—Specialist Anthony Kaladeen, my freshman year RA at Purchase College, killed in an ambush on August 8th, 2005 while serving his second tour of duty)—I know several other men who, despite having returned home from Iraq, are still fighting in a war that takes place in their head. This is a war that will never end. The physical realities of bombs and guns, the desire to find purpose in the actions one takes with such tools, the culpability for ending another man’s life, the rage and sorrow of watching your friends prematurely expire, these are circumstances that once arrived at can be nearly impossible to shake, that can be fatal for the soul.

One of these men I know, a skinny kid with an insidious intelligence who loved video games and Civil War reenactments, one who saw the fissures in the pervading conservative ideology of our youth (yes, there were high school kids who thought Bush/Cheney 2000 was a good idea) but could never quite articulate them for himself in a way that broke them in his own head, one who shall remain nameless, he’s back in Iraq. Civilian Security Contractor (Mercenary). It’s where he belongs now. He wants to kill people. Or at least to have the chance. Without it, he no longer knows who he is.

In Ms. Bigelow’s film, we watch as a charming young Explosive Ordnance Disposal tech (Jeremy Renner, outstanding) slowly loses his shit. Intense. Searing. Visceral. None of these words get at what it’s like for a man to strap on a head to toe Kevlar suit in one hundred and ten degree heat and walk down a desert street in small town six thousand miles from home and defuse an improvised explosive device that’s hidden under a trash bag while suspicious Iraqis, people who will never trust us after the tragic folly of the past six years, watch him with anger in there eyes, any single one of them a possible remote trigger man.

This is a film that casually kills off Hollywood movie stars (Guy Pearce in a virtuoso opening sequence, Ralph Fiennes in the film’s only shootout) and could care less about making political points via dialogue and contrivance. The politics are all right there in front of you. You extend a hand in friendship, you occupier, and watch yourself get blown to bits. Toughen up. Freedom for these people is the objective and we achieve it through sitting here with tanks we never use, driving around in Humvees, occasionally rebuilding a road, occasionally shooting a Hajj in the face, scared shitless the whole time. To what end, who knows? The personal is political and for men who become so addicted to war that they can’t help but go back, even as it tears them apart, the political lie (this war is necessary) has led to a personal truth (I am nothing without war).

Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty and some guy who looks like Billy Crudup but isn’t all do terrific work in the film, but this is Ms. Bigelow’s show. Muscular, virile, all those lame-o masculinist adjectives, they find a true home in Ms. Bigelow’s oeuvre. There is not a single aspect of the aesthetic construction of motion pictures that Ms. Bigelow does not excel in. Long known as the best female director of action movies who ever lived, she is, as Manohla Dargis so eloquently pointed out last Sunday, simply a great director. An ace genre deconstructor, Bigelow has made a tricked out vampire western (Near Dark), a heist movie (Point Break), a revenge thriller (Blue Steel, my favorite. RIP Ron Silver) and in her vastly overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, a film that borrows from sci-fi, noir and the unrest of post-Rodney King Los Angeles. It is still one of the definitive treasures of mid ’90s mainstream filmmaking (that was a bad summer for speculative Sci-fi—anybody remember Brett Leonard’s Virtuosity?). With The Hurt Locker, she has finally delivered her masterpiece, a movie that contains thrills that rival any of the focus-grouped studio tentpoles that have and will continue to roll out all summer, but which actually has a reason to exist in this troubled world other than to make the rich and glamorous even more so.

— Brandon Harris

A firm, authentic and not altogether unappealing slice of Negro Miserabalism is a tough thing to find in the cinema—it’s not like American blacks have ever had their Mike Leigh. Hard, honest black-themed dramas, ones that couldn’t care less about fetishizing the physical spectre of white racism, as well as the broad, stereotype-fueled hijinks of holiday or workplace comedies, are a dying species, but that assertion assumes that at one point they weren’t. In fact, this has always been a malady-ridden but resilient sub-genre of Black American Cinema, these movies about corners of a rarely represented black experience that are more about human need and desire than ideology and “identity.” The ones that do surface in the studio system are non-existent and those that emerge from the major indies usually star Don Cheadle as some almost historically significant figure, or have the easy-to-swallow, “sisters looking out for sisters against their no good men” coda of Terry McMillan novels.

So it is with great pleasure that one gets the chance, via Tina Mabry’s revelatory Slamdance 09’ competition entry Mississippi Damned, to experience a rundown, backwards Mississippi community filled with unrepresented but omnipresent racism, misogyny, alcoholism, intra-communal homophobia, man-on-boy and boy-on-younger-girl sexual abuse, diet-related illnesses, and many other manifestations of malaise engendered by dead-end, working class, southern black life just above the poverty line. That this is also a place where one will find great acts of love and sacrifice, glimpses of beauty and tenderness, moments of ribald humor and hard luck smiles, is an obvious truism and shouldn’t be surprising. Unlike some recently lauded depictions of humorless, victimized southern blacks on the Mississippi Delta, the characters in Mississippi Damned feel like fully realized individuals capable of all the facets of the human character and more than willing to yuck it up as tragedy sits perched all around them. This is a story that, from its performances to its art direction, from its elegantly lit, color-saturated cinematography to its keen ear for Southern Negro dialect, immerses its audience in a credible and stirring depiction of the type of place most American moviegoers are probably more familiar with than they think, but rarely get to see on screen.

Mississippi Damned is a narrative of great complexity, one that takes places over two time periods (the mid ’80s and the late ’90s) with over a dozen intimately intertwined characters involved in key relationships; it’s the type of low key ensemble drama that doesn’t often get made in any milieu these days, but it’s also fairly recap proof, at least in the pop criticism format. I’ll spare you the details beyond sharing that it recounts the story of five couples, their progeny and extended families, and meditates on the attempts of the younger generation to escape and transcend the prejudices and failings of their families and their own victimization, not at the hands of the racist straw men but of those who are sworn to love and protect them. While it is not an easy pill to swallow and it also contains some elements that just narrowly avoid cliché—such as the second half’s tension relying primarily on whether the attractive young yellow girl will escape to college (salvation! I feel the whole “some birds aren’t meant to be caged” Maya Angelou thing coming on already)—it’s hard to miss just how primal and keenly felt the entire enterprise is. This is a story someone desperately had to tell.

That someone—Tupelo native Mabry—making her feature-length debut, has ostensibly based her film on a story that in fact may be the narrative of her own path out of this particular dead-end corner of Mississippi. With the help of ace DP Bradford Young, whose reputation is on the rise thanks to his stunning work here, Mabry has created a first of its kind depiction of black semi-rural, semi-suburban working class life in all its myriad amusements and ambiguities, gazing upon a community of middle-aged characters and their young, soon-to-be baggage-ridden children with a keen sense of each character’s interrelation to the whole.

I’m sure for the Sundance programmers, tokenism being what it is, it was a near impossibility to program two downer African-American movies in the same year (oh, Precious, which I’ve yet to see) and two set in Mississippi in consecutive years. But, in this humble reviewer’s opinion, at least in the latter case, they chose the wrong one. While everyone ballyhooed about Ballast last year, the only thing that rung true for me in that film was the director’s belief in his own talent, but just about everything else had my bullshit detector going off. Ballast is a closed system, its long take, diagetic sound only style, borrowed from any number of films on the European fest circuit. That style isn’t so ill-suited to black stories; it’s just that it feels unnaturally imposed on those particular people, who find themselves in a situation so grim that the film doesn’t know how to treat it other than with a stiff upper lip while ignoring the comedic resilience blacks from across the diaspora have often drawn strength from. Just like Lance Hammer’s script, it has a style that’s better at suggesting meaning than actually finding it.

With Hollywood’s brain-numbing, well-financed products dominating American cinema and smothering specialty films that represent common black themes (not to mention the specialty distributors’ ignorance about how to reach them), Mississippi Damned will be hard pressed to find an audience among the folks it depicts, but here’s hoping that it does.

— Brandon Harris

Not that you’ll be seeing the film the director intended, the one that shocked and stirred audiences at Sundance (itself altered) before dropping off the face of the earth for a couple of years. As the very young and prolific Bhala Lough has learned the hard way, having helmed three features in his 20s that have all been suppressed in one way or another, it can be as hard to be uncompromising on a low(ish) budget as on a studio film. I caught up with him recently, and while he was not at liberty to discuss the controversy or legal proceeding surrounding his Lil’ Wayne doc The Carter, now the subject of a lawsuit, he was more than happy to discuss the long, bumpy road Weapons took to become available.

H2N: You made a film that is unlike any other treatment of urban working class violence and its consequences that I’ve come across. What were some of your aesthetic influences? There are times when the film feels like Bela Tarr directing Boyz n the Hood. How did you go about conceiving the look and style of the movie and is that married to what the film is about?

ABL: When we first started out, the idea was that we would shoot most of the film without doing any traditional coverage. The idea was like, “Can we cover it like a documentary,” where we’re shooting at all angles and we don’t have to light for close ups, we can light a scene with practical lighting only and be able to move entirely around the room. Even though we had a normal size crew, when we were actually shooting there would only be like three people in the room and me so that we could move and run around, chasing the camera and trying to stay out of the shot. That’s what gave it that feel you’re talking about.

The first and last scenes were shot on 35mm, but most of the film was shot on 16mm. The scenes Paul Dano shot are on a PD150. So initially that was how we wanted to cover it for a number of reasons. We were on a super low budget. It was around $500,000. We were shooting in 18 days and practically speaking there wasn’t going to be time to do traditional coverage. I was more interested in doing something aesthetically that lent itself to this type of run-and-gun style. The cinematographer Manuel Claro had done a film called Reconstruction and much of that movie was shot in the same way. I had seen his movie and met his agent and once I realized she rep’d him, I was like, “I want this guy.” It’s a Danish film, he’s from Denmark, so the financier flew him out to LA to meet with me. A lot of the aesthetic is based on his style as a cinematographer blending with my style as a director and the practical nature of how to shoot a feature film in 18 days.

H2N: One thing that the style is able to capture in this specific environment is the boredom and tedium of these characters’ lives and their routines, which are glimpsed in an offhand manner, routines that the violence breaks up. What made you pick this specific environment of exurban, working class suburbs that could be many places in America. What was the impetus for that?

ABL: The environment, the locale, where it was based, that is all specifically linked to where I grew up in Virginia. I wanted it to have that feel. Where I grew up there wasn’t much going on, there wasn’t much to do. So a lot of times, with my friends in high school, the interesting thing that would break up the day, that would just be something to do, would be to go get into a fight or go jump somebody, some act of violence, generally not as serious as portrayed in the movie. However, sometimes in high school these events could go from being something stupid to something super serious. They could escalate.

We weren’t intending to shoot in that area of Los Angeles. I never wanted this movie to be an LA movie. We were originally going to shoot it in New Orleans, Louisiana, in this outer area called St. Bernard Parish that reminded me of certain areas I had lived in Virginia. Katrina happened when we were in pre-production. Quickly, we had to change our plans. When we moved to California, and specifically Los Angeles, I was looking for a part of town that didn’t look too specifically LA. I didn’t want to shoot in Compton or East LA or any of those places, I wanted to shoot in a off the beaten path sort of place. That’s how we ended up in Irwindale, which is about one hour away from of the city. What I needed were certain things to be in the environment such as a sprawling eight-lane highway, 7/11s, Wal-Mart, various run down strip malls and industrial zones. There were a lot of shots in the original cut of the movie that played into the environment more. There were more long, lingering scenes of the environment. There were tracking shots of 7/11s, Wal-Marts and strip malls. There were longer shots of the highway. When Mark Webber is biking over the highway, that sort of bookends the film.

Many of those shots were pulled out by the producers. They felt the film was moving too slow. Their concern was how can we speed this thing up; my concern was that I didn’t really care if it moved slow, because the point was that it should move slow when there wasn’t this extreme violence happening. The violence would break up the slow monotony of the day and I wanted to really linger on those shots and push it even further to another realm. After the head explosion scene, when Mark Webber is biking around his neighborhood, that scene was three to five times longer than it is now, it was really drawn out. I wanted to go from that extreme violence to lulling the viewer into the monotony of this area to the point where you’re starting to question why you’re watching this, what is this that you’re watching.

H2N: Forcing the viewers to confront their spectatorship, alienating them…

ABL: I think that makes you pay attention a little more. When I see a shot that lasts a little longer than it should, it makes me look deeper into the shot. So a lot of that got taken out of the film, but I hope there are at least some remnants left in it so that you get a feel for that environment because that is what it was meant to be, this generic America.

H2N: How did the editing evolve both before and after the Sundance premiere? You said there are these slower scenes that were cut out before Sundance, but the DVD version that Lionsgate recently put out is different than the Sundance version in several ways, correct?

ABL: The original director’s cut of the film was five to seven minutes longer than the version that screened at Sundance. The original version had these scenes and shots that I just spoke of, but it also had other scenes taken out. There was a lot of repetition in the earlier version, scenes would repeat, specifically in the party sequence entire scenes would play out again, but from different angles. That was something that I was really interested in experimenting with, how a moment in time can be seen in different ways, from different vantage points. That was something that the producer(s) felt just wasn’t working for them. Those were some of the first things that got pulled out.

The second thing that got chopped down was the Paul Dano section, where he’s shooting with the video camera. It was actually Paul Dano shooting it at that point—it’s not an assistant camera man and Paul’s just standing there behind the camera man talking, he’s actually operating the camera. I wanted it to feel totally amateurish. They also hated that section so much. They couldn’t believe that I had actually given Paul the camera and had him shoot it. They thought that what we were going to do was have the DP shoot it with the 16mm camera and put a matte over the camera that says record with a red button on it so it would look like it was being shot with a video camera. So when they saw what I had done, it was like a 20 minute sequence with Paul and there was so much more to it, they hated it so much and they thought that people were going to get up and walk out of the theatre because it just went on and on and on with this amateurish footage.

There are scenes where he’s just driving down the road and he turns the video camera on and he starts taping out the window of this horrible environment that he’s living in before pulling to the side of the road and giving this monologue. There were multiple monologues, he has that one that’s still in the film thankfully about how Sean’s coming home tomorrow and he was his best friend and everything is going to be okay tomorrow. There were other monologues where he talks about his relationship with Jason. I had originally stressed to Paul that I wanted it be a homoerotic relationship. The scenes that got cut out make you lose touch with that; it wasn’t as much in the movie anymore. I think some people still got it. So that was the second thing that got cut out before the Sundance screening, this twenty-minute chunk where Paul Dano’s character just takes over the film entirely, which is what I was super excited about experimenting with when I went to make this movie, the idea that the character would just take over the movie from the filmmaker.

The third thing that got chopped off before the premiere of the movie were the car mount scenes, these slow motion shots with some screwed music. Those were trimmed down in half. Those were played out like music videos, where they’d go on for at least another minute. It would be a two-minute scene…

H2N: In a single take.

ABL: In one single take. Once again the producers felt it was unnecessarily long and slowing down the pace of the film. They thought people would be scratching their heads. So all of that came out before the Sundance screening.

H2N: Had you described the sensibility of the film to them? How do you get to a point that late in the game where the producers realize what the filmmaker is after and ultimately the filmmaker isn’t providing them with what they want?

ABL: I’m not sure what happened there. I put specific notes in the script saying, “This scene is to be shot in one take with no edits.” There was some concern definitely, they were like, “How are you going to do this in one take?” Or, “Why would you want to do this like this?” They were definitely concerned that I wasn’t covering the movie traditionally. Maybe there was some confusion over what was going on. Maybe they thought it could all be fixed in the editing room. I think that’s a lot of producers’ process.

H2N: But you deny them that choice to a certain extent by relying on these winding single take masters.

ABL: Shooting this type of documentary-style coverage lended itself to realism and it helped generate better performances out of the actors, especially Nick Cannon. The funny thing is, he’d never shot that way before and he had to make a specific effort to not be aware of where the camera was all the time. Every director he’d worked with in television and film was always trying to tell him to play to the camera. We were like, “You’re not going to know where the camera is,” and it caused him to change his whole style up and I think it helped us get some authenticity. If an actor has to go from the beginning of a scene to the end and really encounter the breaks in the dialogue, sometimes their performances improve.

In terms of the editing, we had two different ideas of the movie that was going to be made. If I hadn’t gotten into Sundance, this movie would have been a completely different movie. The movie that was screened for Sundance that they accepted was the original director’s cut. So there was no choice to continue on that path and with that vision. If it hadn’t gone to Sundance, then this movie would have been chopped the fuck up completely. We wouldn’t be even having this conversation. Sundance kind of saved it in a way. Once we got into Sundance, there was no more question of whose vision the film was going to be, the question then became, “Adam, you realize we have to sell this movie for a lot of money and make our money back, so you have to cave in and make some edits because no distributor is going to want to buy this long, slow, boring movie.” So that’s when things had to be chopped up even more, which resulted in the version that played at Sundance, which is different than the version Lionsgate just released on DVD.

H2N: What were the responses like from distributors at Sundance? How did the producers’ assumption about the reception of the film hold up?

ABL: I don’t know. I can’t say because who knows how the distributors would have reacted to the director’s cut of the film. They could’ve hated it. People could’ve walked out. The original version might have been the type of film that only a super small indie distributor like Zeitgeist would have picked up. Who knows.

H2N: After Dark picked up the film but ultimately chose not to release it?

ABL: After Dark purchased the film at the festival for a reported 1.1 million dollars with the idea that it would be released in theaters. I was told that the release would be at least seven or eight cities and could approach 200 theaters. That was the plan. They do their DVDs through Lionsgate. There were some issues with certain things behind the scenes that I wasn’t privy to, money-wise. Still, I was excited about the sale. I was living in New York at the time and After Dark people were coming to meet with me the week after the Sundance Film Festival. Then mysteriously, the meeting was cancelled at the last second. This was in January. I didn’t hear from them again until November of that year. I had been told it was going to open wide in September. Of course, everybody’s asking me when’s the movie dropping, when’s it coming out, what’s the deal, because everyone had heard about it, but I had no clue, no one would talk to me.

So finally, I met with the head of the company, Courtney Solomon, and he seemed psyched about the movie and said to me that he wanted to shoot more scenes. He was going to give me a budget of $100,000 to go and shoot more. He wanted more hardcore violence and gory scenes. I was like, “Well, okay, if you’re excited about it and this will help you open the movie wider, put more of your sweat equity and hard cash behind the movie, then I’m more than happy to do that,” so I went home and I wrote a couple scenes to enhance the film. I sent them in and I never heard anything back from him.

Then I got a call. I can equate it to getting jumped by eleven dudes. (he laughs) You’re in high school and you get jumped ten-on-one. It was ten people from their company and the producers all on the same call. They said in the most polite way possible that we’re totally re-cutting your film, you will have nothing to do with it, we’ve already rented an editing room in Los Angeles, it’s set up and there is a new editor hired, you will not be allowed in the room, don’t bother coming to LA. Thank you for your time. That was it. That was the call.

Obviously, I’m just like, “What can I do?” There is nothing I can do. Maybe time will tell. I still have the original director’s cut of the film and maybe time is on my side and that’s the best I can hope for. This is in December, over the holidays, and the idea now was that the movie would be released in the springtime.

The holidays pass and around February, I get a DVD in the mail of the new, new, new cut of the film. They had changed every single scene in the movie. Every shot. They’d gone back to the drawing board. They’d literally gone back to the dailies and re-cut everything. They sped the whole movie up; they tried to make it look like there was coverage and different angles by chopping things up and using, for lack of a better term, an MTV-style editing approach. It was atrocious. It was just so bad that it made me laugh, because I knew no one would ever release this. They just shot themselves in the foot. This is ridiculous. Whoever they hired to edit this thing must have had a good sense of humor. It was hilarious. So that version was squashed, they shut down the edit room and they decided not to release the movie in theaters.

The problem with that is that they have a contract with the producers where they are contractually obligated to release it in theaters, so they’re in breach of contract. So the producers sued them. So then the movie got backed up in lawsuits. If you’re in a lawsuit your movie can sit on the shelf a long time. That’s what ended up happening. After Dark gave up on the movie. They didn’t want to put the amount of money necessary to open the movie wide because they didn’t understand, in my opinion, how to market this movie. I also heard that even if they wanted to put the movie in theaters they couldn’t because the company was going bankrupt. I’m not sure if that’s true or not. I don’t want to slander anybody, I don’t know if their company was going bankrupt, but that was what I was being told.

So then the movie fell into a void, into purgatory, nobody knew what was going to happen to it. At some point Lionsgate finds out that this movie is just sitting on the shelf and that there are some great actors involved in it and maybe they could make a couple bucks on it if they released it on DVD. Someone at Lionsgate was like, “Give us this fucking movie, we’re going to put this thing out.” Thankfully I got a phone call that Lionsgate wants it and that they’re going to put it out ASAP and they did. From the time I got a call that they were intending to release it to the time that they did was just a matter of four months. One caveat was that they wanted to edit a couple scenes in order to get an R rating. They wanted to trim some stuff off of the rape scene. They wanted to cut the scene out where Paul Dano’s character Chris pisses on the kid’s face in the bathroom. You might not have even noticed that it was missing on the DVD version, but that scene was gone. They also wanted to do one edit that was really touchy to me and to everyone who was behind the movie, like the original editor Jay Rabinowitz.

Originally in the Sundance version of the film, the rape scene in which you learn that the character who perpetrates this is Chris and not Jason was in Chris’ sequence. In the original cut his sequence was meant to come across as this descent into hell. It starts at one point, he’s sort of fucking around with people, he’s getting high, you see him at the party, things are sort of escalating and it just gets worse and worse and worse until you’re saying to yourself, “What else can this kid possibly do?” All in one twenty-minute chunk and all photographed by the Dano character.

H2N: And the rape was at the end of that sequence. Only later did we see how she ended up in that car with Dano and why she was convinced to lie about it.

ABL: Exactly. That was original vision. That’s what it was meant to be. Their idea was, well, we want to save it and reveal it later, maybe it will be a third act reveal that the Chris character perpetrated this crime against this girl and set all these things in motion. When I say it’s touchy, I say that because now you’re trying to manipulate the audience in a way I had never intended to. It was not my style. Ultimately I had no choice over it. They thought that it could help carry the movie. They wanted some type of big reveal in the third act. Some people just expect that, but that was not the intent.

It was the biggest change that was made between the two versions, with the exception of the stuff I just mentioned that got cut out for ratings purposes. That’s why I was shocked when the movie came out and it was unrated. I thought if we’re cutting this shit out, why not try to get the R rating, so we can get the movie in Wal-Mart. You can’t put the movie on the shelf in Wal-Mart because it’s unrated. So I don’t know what happened there. I don’t know why it ended up being unrated when the made the changes to get an R rating.

H2N: What’s been the biggest lesson you’ve taken from this experience?

ABL: I’d like to say that the lesson here is to always demand final cut, but if you’re at the point I was at, a 25-year-old filmmaker with one picture under his belt who was trying to get a movie made and financed over the course of several years, you’re not really in the position to do that. Not every young independent filmmaker is Jim Jarmusch. Not everyone can walk into a room and say, “This is my script and if you want to get down with me that’s great, but I have to have final cut of the film and there’s really nothing you can say about that.” So I don’t know what the lesson is. You have to get your movies made somehow.

— Brandon Harris

In the case of the Tribeca Film Festival, less is most certainly more. Slimmed down considerably from its mid-decade girth, it’s a much easier to navigate experience than in the days when it might take three subway connections or an exorbitantly priced taxi ride to get to consecutive screenings at venues that stretched from Lower Manhattan to Kip’s Bay. Gone are the days of 18-dollar ticket prices and interchangeable Edward Burns movies. After having gone to the festival for five years, the last couple as a journalist, I’m all too aware of its programming peaks and pitfalls. Yet David Kwok and his team, amidst the pre-festival departure of Peter Scarlet (amid rumors of long time acrimony between him and co-founder Jane Rosenthal) and shocking addition of former Sundance chief Geoff Gilmore, have avoided most of them this year.

While a few clunkers surely found their way into the program of 80 or so features and just over 60 shorts, I didn’t see any. Even a film like Jake Goldberger’s Don McKay or The Polish Brothers’ Stay Cool, unseen by yours truly because they seemingly exhibited everything that has been wrong with the archetypal “Tribeca” film (tepid “indie” comedy with a cast of fading stars by a workmanlike, but uninspiring indie “auteur” that probably got rejected by Sundance), had a few lukewarm supporters among festival attendees. Regardless, the festival built on a solid ‘08 edition and one hopes they continue in this vain.

I saw about a quarter of what was on display this year and I’m happy to report that the jury, in many cases, got it right—Iranian Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly, which emerged as the World Narrative Competition winner, was easily the most visceral and thought provoking of the narratives I saw across all of the festival’s various sections. A riff on L’Avventura of sorts, it presents us with a trio of upwardly mobile Iranian couples, each with a child in tow, who retreat to a broken down yet exclusive villa on the country’s northern shores. A friend of the three couples, the handsome Ahmad, has returned from Germany. The bossy and childish Sepide, who arranged the getaway, is determined to set him up with the title character, who teachers her child in nursery school. Once they arrive however, its clear that Elly has a number of other secrets as well.

To say much more would be to effectively ruin what is a fascinating and morally challenging experience, but like Mr. Antonioni’s film, someone who is deeply unhappy disappears, foisting tragedy on those who remain, mostly because of their own inability to confront the truth of their circumstances, defer to the desire of others and/or face culpability for their dubious actions.

Emerging Narrative Filmmaker winner North, by Norwegian Rune Langlo, is a pretty satisfying if derivative spin on the “road movie,” or the “loner, seemingly past his prime, must journey to reclaim something he lost/never knew he had” narrative. This timeless, mythic, episodic mode of storytelling is one filmmakers never seem to grow weary of and often find novel ways of reinventing, as anyone who’s appreciated Paris, Texas, Broken Flowers or The Straight Story, let alone The Odyssey or Alice in Wonderland, can attest to. Besides smart writing, the genre almost always depends on a strong protagonist to carry us past its hoariest clichés and Langlo has certainly found one in Anders Christensen, a burly, blonde actor of great skill who is sort of a younger, fatter Philip Seymour Hoffman type. He really makes us care about his self-medicating ski lift operator who, five years after an injury that ruined his promising skiing career, learns he has a son in Norway’s northern provinces. Langlo shows off a lean comedic style in his visuals that, despite their narrative pragmatism, make room for moments of great visual poetry in the snowy Norwegian mountains.

Damien Chazelle’s Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench is a fun, DIY mumblemusical that, despite its rough hewn 16mm B&W aesthetic, is very much a movie of this time and moment. It concerns a relatively young, black and talented trumpet player’s pseudo-romance with a white woman he has a brief encounter with on a park bench. They spend most of the movie in the company of others—Guy takes up with a pushy girl named Elena, who pronounces herself Guy’s girlfriend at some unarticulated point, while Madeline considers moving to New York, where she has an older, persistent suitor. Never less than charming and just short enough to allow its paper-thin conceit not to feel overlong, it’s a whimsical experience, my favorite film of its kind in some time, and not just because, like the protagonists’ favorite song, “I Left My Heart in Cincinnati.”

Tribeca had some pretty lame-o midnight movie action last year (anybody remember The Objective? I thought not), but as many across the blogosphere have been more than happy to report, The House of the Devil is good fun. I have perhaps slightly less affection than Tully does for Ti West’s ’80s horror trope revue, but it’s effective in all the ways movies like this ought to be and perfectly renders the look of the period’s horror films, down to the grainy texture of its images. Scott Sanders’ blaxploitation romp Black Dynamite should have been more in my wheelhouse, but a week after seeing it and finding it often quite funny, I’m still wondering why it was made. I’m sure Sony will make a killing off of it this summer though.

Hirakazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking is a masterpiece, perhaps the only one on display at Tribeca, but you’ll get to hear more about that in August.

On the doc side, the two strongest pieces I saw were Cropsey, which I wrote about last week, and Transcendent Man, which I covered over on the Filmmaker Blog. The most fun I had, however, was certainly the Thursday night screening of Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s Soul Power. Using footage of the 1974 Kinshasa concert that was initially shot for Leon Gast’s Rumble in the Jungle documentary When We Were Kings, Soul Power shows in great detail and brisk humor how the concert, which couldn’t be postponed after the delay of the legendary Ali/Forman fight, was a central gathering of some of America’s most luminous musical and cultural figures, including The Greatest. This is a sparkling concert doc, immediately thrust up there with the all-time greats like Stop Making Sense and Gimme Shelter, and a wonderful companion piece to the late Gast’s Oscar winner.

Although I preferred Nicole Opper’s Off and Running (read my take at Cinema Echo Chamber), her wistful and touching portrait of the rocky coming-of-age that a black teen, raised by white Jewish lesbians, suffers and triumphs over in Brooklyn, Best New York Documentary winner Partly Private, by Danae Elon, which concerns one couple’s struggle with the ethical implications of having two boys circumcised, was a worthy recipient. Elon, a relatively secular person who nonetheless identifies as culturally Jewish, travels the world investigating the ancient practice in the midst of her back-to-back pregnancies, finding more and more to make her skeptical and alarmed by her more traditional husband’s desires to have their children’s foreskins removed.

Lastly, Tribeca has garnered a reputation as a great place for experimental docs and shorts; this year was no disappointment. Although a projector malfunction caused me to miss most of the Human Landscapes shorts block, which featured new work by Avant-Garde greats like Ken Jacobs and Paula Gaitan, I did catch Gustav Deutsch’s feature-length found footage film FILM IST. A girl & a gun and was largely enthralled by this erotic, color tinted reconstruction. Using large swaths of silent films (the director claims he viewed 2500 different movies in order to find material for the picture) and dozens of archived sex films from the Kinsey Institute, most from the early years of the 20^th century, Deutsch repurposes them into a dreamy, hypnotic narrative involving nuclear annihilation and many peculiar forms of titillation.

— Brandon Harris

(Able Danger is now available exclusively, in a new color presentation, through Amazon VOD.)

A fast paced, HD-hard noir that leaps headlong into a maze of genre moves, Paul Krik’s post-9/11 paranoiac narrative Able Danger is named for the classified military planning effort that was charged with developing operational procedure against transnational (read Islamic) terrorists. In a cruelly ironic twist of fate, the small group of elite military personnel involved with the program were accused after Bush’s midterm reelection of identifying Mohammad Atta and his terrorist cell before 9/11 and doing nothing to stop them by Representative Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican, only to be ordered not to testify in front of Senate Judiciary Committee chairman and fellow keystone stater Arlen Specter’s hearing about the facts surrounding Atta and Able Danger by the Department of Defense. Getting skeptical yet?

In Krik’s resourceful if didactic movie, shot in a high contrast black-and-white that milks maximum atmospheric effect out of its wide, busy compositions and chiaroscuro lighting, Adam Nee plays Thomas Flynn, skinny and nebbish, a lefty bookstore owner and author of 9/11 conspiracy books. One of these books leads him into a situation of increasingly deadly intrigue involving a mysterious Eastern-European woman named Kasia (Elina Lowensohn), who comes to his store one day claiming to have information verifying Mohammad Atta’s involvement with the US Government. After she waltzes into his Brooklyn bookstore Vox Pop and claims to have answers to his many questions, they set off together on a trip down the noir paradigm of secrets and lies, betrayals and cover ups.

As people associated with Kasia and her brief interlude in Atta’s Venice, Florida flight training circle begin turning up dead, Flynn begins to trust and protect Kasia. He is soon harassed, followed, questioned and mugged by unsavory and technologically advanced boogeymen. Not long after that, his own friends begin turning up dead and he’s accused of the murder of his roommate and fellow skeptic Mikey, at which point he’s promptly chased around Brooklyn by police, government operatives, German madmen and elliptical women, all of whom seek a hard drive Kasia and he have hidden with proof of Atta’s patsy status. Flynn, despite his Brooklyn hipster exterior, proves to be a resilient protagonist, although one is never in doubt that he’ll be unable to survive his findings.

The cynicism this movie taps into is as old as Watergate and as new as Sarah Palin, but so too are the stylistic influences Kirk draws on to fashion this rather straightforward conspiracy tale. While he’s primarily drawing on the the aesthetic qualities of post-war B-cinema, he also owes a significant debt to the Darren Aronofsky of Pi here, with his harsh, low-budget black-and-white New York being traversed by an increasingly unhinged, physically threatened outlaw intellectual (although Krik’s film is more stylistically restless and ideologically engaged in its particular moment than Aronofsky’s). Able Danger bursts with wild flourishes of montage, unsubtle musical cues that verge on camp and a visual style that oscillates often violently between noir influences. The Conversation-esque long lens surveillance camera footage and apocalyptic CGI images are but a projection of Flynn’s grandiose self-importance and his all too real dreams of imminent destruction, both personal and societal. Krik’s thriller is clearly a product of our unsettled age.

— Brandon Harris

(Able Danger opens in four cities today, September 11th, including The Pioneer in New York City. Visit the film’s official website to watch a trailer and learn more.)