David Thomson opens an essay on the Red Riding trilogy by stating: “Red Riding is better than The Godfather.” I’m not sure if this is true, because I’ve never seen The Godfather. According to every guy I’ve ever dated, this renders me ineligible for making films or even discussing them. But I know myself, for better or worse, and mafia narratives (be they tragic, comic, starring a Pacino, a De Niro, or even my beloved Hugh Grant) leave me utterly cold. I guess I’m generally nonplussed by a complex web of crime. For instance, I cannot get into The Wire and refuse to be sorry, or to “hang on until season two.”

Here are some things I do like: serial killers (especially ones that prey on prostitutes, behavior I do not condone but enjoy seeing investigated by hard-nosed police detectives); the filthy, funny-sad realism of Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Lynne Ramsay; and the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC is the home of all things delicious: sitcoms like Ab Fab and Gavin and Stacy, bodice-ripping miniseries, and Prime Suspect, a procedural drama starring Helen Mirren as hot-bitch Vice Squad detective Jane Tennyson. It’s the only cop show ever to get me going.

Despite the fact that it’s a crime serial about long-buried secrets and flaming vendettas, Red Riding also appealed to all my aforementioned passions. It promised to explore the misdeeds of a menace called the Yorkshire Ripper while examining the cultural angst of Thatcherite England. Red Riding is also a fascinating filmmaking model: three different directors (Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, and Anand Tucker) all helming scripts by one writer (Tony Grisoni) based on a series of pulp novels by David Peace. This omnibus originally aired on the BBC, but IFC is presenting the trilogy in a “roadshow” format—five hours, two intermissions, and free popcorn with your ticket stub. A true event, like a Rocky Horror singalong! Upon entrance to Red Riding, you are also handed a fat program, which diagrams the web of characters and the directors’ various working methods, and contains the aforementioned essay by Thomson—an excellent piece that provides much-needed cultural context for the films.

The evening started off with Red Riding: 1974, a stunning sonata of brutal violence, alleviated only by scenes of very sad people fucking. Julian Jarrold’s smoky, autumnal 16mm film centers on Eddie Dunford, a cub-reporter nicknamed “Scoop” who is researching the disappearance of a young Yorkshire girl and stumbles upon a terrifying web of deceit and corruption that will set the series in motion. Andrew Garfield shines as Eddie, a bony hardhead desperate to prove his worth—but who’s in way over his head. Manohla Dargis felt Garfield was “not up to the leading-man task” but I beg to differ. That could have been because I am really attracted to him, but there are plenty of guys I want to smooch who I can’t watch act for two hours (Casper Van Dien, I’m talking to you.) James Marsh is in charge of Red Riding: 1980, a claustrophobic noir that follows Paddy Considine’s terrifying descent into the mysterious hole Eddie opened. Marsh is most known for his doc Man On Wire, but his little-seen narrative The King proved him as a skilled psychological terrorist. Red Riding: 1983 is the work of Anand Tucker, a self-proclaimed “softie” who “always goes for cheap tears.” Indeed, his contribution is the most heavy-handed, but it also delivers the most genuine chills, thrills, and the only laugh-out-loud moments of the series.

The Red Riding films are beautifully shot, meticulously cast (with just the right buck-toothed chubsters and pale beauties) and more complex than anything American television audiences are used to. The directors are an all-star band, as Julian Jarrold lathers the viewer into a terrible frenzy, James Marsh solidifies our suspicion that something is rotten in Yorkshire, and Anand Tucker delivers a soaring conclusion that raises more questions than it answers. And, although I’m proud to have powered through this iron man film-going event, I might recommend checking it out On Demand. I almost gauged my eyes out during certain scenes of torture. Such unremitting bleakness would be well-tempered by a remote control and a lack of surround sound. I, for one, am still anxious.

But then again, the true test of a film’s power is how much its concerns permeate life post-viewing. After my first time watching Center Stage I walked around en pointe for several days. Post-Red Riding, I was frozen with fear in the IFC Center bathroom, highly suspicious of my cab driver, and couldn’t decide whether I was more likely to be assaulted taking the elevator or the stairs up to my apartment. Unable to get comfortable in my own bed, I crawled into my sister’s. There, I dreamed I was the sexual plaything of a corrupt police officer who swore he’d kill me if I ever told a soul.

— Lena Dunham

The movement to bring Opus Jazz to the screen is led by Ellen Bar and Sean Suozzi, both dancers with the New York City Ballet. (For a glimpse at the motives behind their passion project, as well as the nitty-gritty on the budget, Gia Kourlas’ NY Times piece can’t be beat.) This film version has been in the works for nearly three years, as evidenced by a grand teaser shot on the then-barren Highline in 2007. The film is co-directed by Henry Joost and Jody Lee Lipes, co-produced by Melody Roscher, and shot by Lipes on anamorphic 35mm. Producer Kyle Martin and art director Ariel Schulman are also key players, and it’s these two who greet me at the entrance to the park.

The set is bustling. The production team slaves at laptops set up at picnic tables, a sort of al fresco office. Executive producer Ellen is bundled against the autumn chill, watching dailies on her laptop before she has to dash off to a fundraising meeting. “It never stops,” she says good-naturedly. There has been a processing mistake at the lab and yesterday’s footage has been mismatched with sound from a cop show, but even set to the strains of an NYPD drama, Opus Jazz appears moody, seductive and impressive.

Meanwhile, Jody’s team can be seen across the pool, getting their behemoth of a camera assembled. Things are starting slightly later than planned: a dancer named Amar is stuck in traffic on the West Side Highway, and shooting can’t begin without him. His colleagues warm up nearby. Are they rehearsing? “Nah,” says Kyle. “Just goofing around.” Even their goofiest move is impossibly elegant and… balletic. (For a charming and edifying glimpse into these dancers’ on set experience, go here.)

Kyle begins our tour at the “hot truck,” a catering vehicle that can deliver anything from French toast to quesadillas. If Center Stage is to be believed (future IMDB trivia: one Ellen Bar is heavily featured in that film) then Crafts Services is wasted on ballerinas. “No way,” Kyle says. “They eat way more than you would think.” As I watch the impossibly thin, impossibly graceful cast flit back and forth to the wardrobe tent, I can’t decide if I find this information comforting or not.

Next we hit the makeup and wardrobe tent, then move on to camera, sound (run by an ebullient Micah Bloomberg, who is setting up massive speakers at the pool’s center—party!) and art department—aka, Ariel, who is shuffling around moving bits of glass and trash and assessing his most dramatic contribution to today’s location: the thick white stripes stretching across the expanse of concrete that was once an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Looking to make the biggest visual mark with the least time and money, Ariel devised this plan. He hired several professional parking lot painters. Their paint, he says, was left over from the striping of Giants Stadium.

So how are Jody (accomplished cinematographer of Afterschool and cinematographer/director of the subversive wonder-doc Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same) and Henry (who, along with Ariel, forms uber-creative commercial production house Supermarche) handling tag-team directing? According to Henry, it’s been smooth—he and his partner have organically traded storyboarding duty, and have an natural instinct about when to cede a bit of control to their colleague. Indeed, they’re smiling and laughing when they round a corner at 9:00 a.m., deep in conversation.

So then what’s it like directing dancers, especially when you’re not one? How do you ask for adjustments if you don’t have a technical understanding of the craft? Do you just say, “Do it again, with more emotion this time?”

“We don’t really talk in terms of emotion,” Henry says. “Just tell them to bring it. More fierce. That was fierce, but even fiercer. Or you can say ‘Hey, Guys, this one is for life.’”

Although Kyle had warned me they were making a “real” movie, I was unprepared for the professionalism of it all. Delegation is often an alien concept on low-budget films. (Just yesterday on my own “set” I held a boom in one hand while massaging my DP’s sore knee with the other.) But this is a bustling hive of people who know what their job is and know how to do it. Yet it also retains the distinct “hey, let’s make a movie” feeling of a student enterprise (and I mean that in the best way possible). Perhaps that’s because most of the crew have been hanging tight since their days at New York University in the early oughts. These are, it should be noted, the same guys that brought you Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell and the aforementioned Brock Enright, so their posse has a real monopoly on compelling, unexpected arts docs.

As impressed as I am with the tone of the set and the grace of the dancers, here’s what really gets me: these people have walkie-talkies! Although no one I’m chatting with does, which leads me to believe I’m chatting with the wrong people. (Editor note: No, Lena, that means you’re talking to the ‘right’ people!)

“You want to meet someone with a walkie-talkie?” Kyle asks. “I can make that happen. Where’s Brad Payne?” Brad Payne is Opus Jazz’s Key PA.

“I’ve done some research,” Ariel says, “and it’s unanimous—he’s the person every ballerina would like to be stuck with during an apocalyptic event.” With his firm handshake and well-worn plaid shirt, Brad strikes me as Williamsburg’s solution to Paul Bunyan. He does, indeed, have a walkie-talkie. And he’s using it: “Brad for Chad. Brad for Chad.” I giggle with girlish glee.

Noting my fascination, he offers to let me don a headset. On channel one, a panicked voice: “Amar is 100 and flying. Copy?”

Clutching my walkie-talkie, I follow Kyle to the top of an archway where Jody, Henry and the camera team are assembled and prepping for the first shot of the day. On the monitor the dancers can be seen removing their sweat suits to reveal denim cut-offs and body-conscious tank tops in primary colors. They form a tight, shivering cluster. But suddenly, it’s action—no more evidence of the chill in their bones. They scatter, leap, fall to the ground, animated bodies filling the static frame. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius! Like the best scenes in West Side Story, what they’re doing projects joy and foreboding simultaneously, striking awe in the heart of this earth-bound viewer. But Henry and Jody, seemingly immune to the wonder, are ready to go again. Bring it! Extra fierce! This one’s for life.

— Lena Dunham

(Photos by Joe Anderson)

Eleonore Hendricks, on the other hand, is the best Video Store Girl ever. She embodies all the aforementioned qualities, and she’s committed to the cause. For almost two years, Eleonore (who you may recognize from her diverse and dynamic acting resume, most notably The Pleasure of Being Robbed) has manned the register at Cinema Nolita. Cinema Nolita is an independent video shop located at 178 Mulberry Street. In its seven year history, Cinema Nolita has had some very good Video Store Girls, including filmmakers Jessica Oreck (Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo) and Sara Rossein. Also, some good Video Store Boys. More on that later. In addition to its great taste in employees, Cinema Nolita boasts a comprehensive collection of independent and foreign titles, and has played host to homegrown events, including the Hammer To Nail Screening Series.

But now, Cinema Nolita needs our help. Despite its loyal following, times are tough and the shop owes eight grand in back rent. It seemed, for a time, that owner Michael Mosley would be forced to sell his collection off piece by piece in order to pay back the debt. But Eleonore wasn’t having it, and neither was the neighborhood, so this coming weekend is a veritable San Gennaro fair of aid events. “Really, our first idea was to just make sure that we didn’t have to sell the collection off individually, to make back the money we had lost by not being able to pay the rent,” says Eleonore. “The goal is to make the 8,000 dollars so we can pay our back rent so we don’t have to use the videos as collateral. Once we have that back rent, we have various ideas about how to keep Cinema Nolita as a neighborhood presence.”

It all kicks off Saturday, August 15th at 10pm, when Nolita resident (and Cinema Nolita member) Abel Ferrara will appear in person at Anthology Film Archives to screen his demented classic Bad Lieutenant. It’s a great time to revisit the film, considering Werner Herzog is about to unleash his reimagining. All proceeds from the $15 dollar ticket will go toward the cause: Save Cinema Nolita!

Sunday, August 16th, Ferrara will be back at Anthology at 10 pm, screening a 35mm print of 2007’s little-seen Go Go Tales, starring Willem Defoe, Matthew Modine and Asia Argento. Also $15 dollars, and also benefiting Cinema Nolita.

***UPDATE: In typical Abel fashion, it turns out that the Go Go Tales screening might not be happening after all. Trying to keep up with this unfolding drama might make us think we’ve been teleported into our own horror film called Being Abel Ferrara, so for sanity’s sake we’ll simply try to post a definitive yay or nay closer to Sunday night or when we find out for sure. Thanks for playing, everyone!***

“Abel uses the video store as his library,” says Eleonore. “He’s been such an advocate of saving the shop, and he said, ‘Anything I can do to help in any way. We’ve gotta save this shop, you know, man, we’ve gotta save it.’” She admits Ferrara has been known to keep films out well past their due date, but “by doing these screenings he’s essentially paying his late fees.”

Monday, August 17th, Santos Party House opens its doors for a musical fundraiser that will feature performances by The Virgins, The Beets, and a special DJ set by Animal Collective. The $20 dollar cover charge seems a pittance for so much sonic goodness, and guess what? It all benefits Cinema Nolita.

So how did Eleonore secure such a lineup? “[Virgins frontman] Donald worked at the shop a long time ago,” says Eleonore. “He’d get yelled at for having friends around. I think he was fired three times. But it was only natural that with his new place as a rock star in this world he could somehow help us out and he was more than willing to play a free show.”

Meanwhile, Animal Collective’s Avey Tare (aka David Portner) “is a regular member at the video shop and I sort of snooped around the computer and called him up and he was cool about it too. No questions asked, of course.”

Be Kind Rewind was a charming flick, but Eleonore’s efforts to save the shop seem much more practical than sweding, and more fun than Jack Black in a dress. “It’s definitely a needed amenity for the community,” she says. “It’s not big. It’s not Kim’s. Its little and it’s a microcosm of this neighborhood.”

— Lena Dunham

In a recent interview in The Believer, John Sayles described John Cassavetes as “the poet of inarticulate people. What the characters are trying to say is oftentimes very simple, but they’re really bad at saying it.” Andrew Bujalski, he of the muffled 16mm talkies, has been consistently compared to Cassavetes by critics unable to pinpoint his exact brand of cinema. This association has its merits, but to my mind Bujalski has taken his predecessor’s agenda in a subtly different direction, by becoming the poet of inarticulate people who honestly believe themselves to be articulate.

Bujalski’s first films were anxious character studies of youth in transition. Funny Ha Ha—a spotty, spliced, handmade look at Marnie, a recent college grad with a dead end job and a dubious crush on an unavailable target. Her breathless, cerebral charm does little to mask the fact that she is floundering. Next came Mutual Appreciation, a more visually formal (black-and-white) portrait of Alan—a sloe-eyed musician in the process of relocating to the city that never sleeps. Indeed, Alan’s nonchalance runs counter to the spirit of his new home and New York tries its best to force a mighty struggle out of him. Desperate attempts to cling to the leg of time (it just keeps marching on) were the subject of Bujalski’s first works, and we watched his characters get dragged across the dirty ground in the process, somewhere at the nexus of sad and funny.

But Bujalski’s new film, Beeswax, is about something different. For starters, it has two female leads. Jeannie and Lauren are sisters, twins, incredibly connected yet decidedly distinct. They share a colorful house in Austin, Texas. The Slacker capital, although ironically this is Bujalski’s first film that doesn’t focus on a willful underachiever. Lauren (Maggie Hatcher) is recently single and experiencing one of the many mini-fluxes that characterize adult life without a steady partner or a steady job. Unsure about her next movie, she is seriously considering a change of career that would take her to Africa. Meanwhile Jeannie (Maggie’s real life twin Tilly) is preparing herself for a legal battle with the co-owner of Storyville, her whimsically appointed vintage clothing store. What had begun as a fruitful partnership has turned ugly, and Jeannie moves around her own shop suspiciously, looking for hints of a potential coup. When she calls in her soon-to-be lawyer ex-boyfriend Merrill (Alex Karpovsky) for backup, their romantic past tries to remake itself as a romantic present. The elegantly handled elephant in the room is that Jeannie is a paraplegic, the fact of which is never directly acknowledged even as it creates a fascinating language of dependence and independence between the sisters.

If Bujalski’s first two films were focused on characters staring into the precipice of adulthood (a metaphor that Garden State made all too literal), then the denizens of Beeswax are inside the sinkhole staring back. As Bujalski’s budgets get bigger, his characters’ stakes get higher. The sisters have established professional lives and understand the true terror these obligations can bring (you have to show up? Every day?). While the bonds of blood are essentially unbreakable, the professional relationships we form are terrifyingly tenuous—and Bujalski has created an entire character to embody the walking-on-eggshells fear a work environment inspires. Corinne Meltzer (Katy O’Conner) is Jeannie’s employee, deliciously ditzy and constantly on edge. Her nervous and oddly chipper hostility brings to mind some of the great TV secretaries of the past and reminds us all why self-employment is ideal.

Bujalski has, perhaps somewhat facetiously, described Beeswax as a legal thriller. Indeed the plot, however small in scope, surprises us with its tight construction. Clues are planted, so casual they seem like remnants of an improv session, but they later prove essential to our understanding of the situation in Jeannie’s store (and in her sister’s unmoored headspace.) It’s no Pelican Brief, but Beeswax does use the conventions of litigation-tinged mystery to frame an altogether more personal story. In Q&A’s, Bujalski is often asked whether or not his work is scripted. The sneaky/steady build of this surprisingly plot-driven film should give us our answer.

— Lena Dunham

Trust Us, This Is All Made Up is, at first glance, a concert film, one that focuses on a little-understood art form considered by many laypeople to be the provenance of liberal-arts school freshman and/or failed class clowns. The first straight-up documentary by mockumentarian Alex Karpovsky (Woodpecker, The Hole Story), Trust Us is indeed a cinematic record of an essentially fleeting experience: an improvisational performance by legendary duo David Pasquesi and TJ Jagodowski. TJ & Dave, as they are known to their fans, are Gods of their misunderstood medium, seasoned players who create long form sketches that resemble Pinter plays more closely than they do drama club warm ups. Once a month, the team hits the stage at New York’s Barrow Street Theater to hypnotize audiences with these shockingly cohesive exercises in immediacy. Karpovsky records one such performance from start to finish.

Upon further inspection, Trust Us reveals itself to be something far more ambitious and complex than its concert film label would imply. Maybe it’s a result of Karpovsky’s cunning direction and creative editing, which utilizes a split screen to formally mimic the way that TJ and Dave separate and merge, the unknowable but pre-ordained cellular activity of their partnership. Karpovsky’s energetic work from behind the camera gives aesthetic life and structure to what might otherwise seem like a second-rate way of seeing a first-rate feat of mental agility.

The film starts with a brief history of TJ and Dave, both as individuals and partners. Pasquesi is a notable character actor, particularly memorable for his work as Stew the sleazy meat man on Strangers With Candy. Jagodowski, like his partner, is an established member of Chicago’s Second City improv theater, He was a longtime fan of Pasquesi’s before he got the guts to try and wife the guy. Good thing he did, as their partnership feels Fred-and-Ginger fated. In Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent pop-psychology best-seller, Outliers, the New Yorker writer examines a phenomenon known as the “Ten Thousand Hour Rule,” positing the theory that exceptional artists, musicians and athletes create the work that catapults them to the next level after at least ten thousand hours of practice. I can’t give you an exact figure for TJ and Dave, but they make it clear that they have spent a great deal of time getting comfortable with each other and with their process—and they’ve reached an understanding that allows them to up the ante each night on stage. Skeptical audiences can’t believe the guys aren’t practicing their jokes in front of the mirror, but Jagodowski assures us “this is all made up.”

How they do it, and why they do it, form the central, and unanswerable, questions of the film. There is something decidedly New Agey about the nebulous magic that descends upon TJ and Dave when it’s time to perform. The way they describe their mystical connection to each other, and to a catalogue of invented characters, is more like listening to a guided meditation than hearing an artist bloviating about process. They live at the center of a mandala, finding security and satisfaction in the act of not knowing.

Filmmakers are, as a rule, a neurotic bunch. We’re also constantly at the mercy of earthly powers beyond our control as we attempt to turn an idea into a reality. TJ and Dave’s remarkable give-and-take serves as a healthy reminder of the true immediacy of creativity. So does Karpovsky’s tricky, transcendent little movie.

— Lena Dunham

Hooray, Criterion! The Last Days of Disco is once again available on home video. Buy the DVD at Amazon. Or e

This winter, a friend called to invite me to an impromptu party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Although a Native New Yorker, I have rarely ventured above 14th street, a fact of which I am proud and ashamed in equal measures. When I reached my destination, I waited on a marble bench in the mirrored lobby of an apartment building, the kind of pre-war brick number that has its name in cursive on the awning. A few laughing collegiates with loosened ties finally arrived and ushered me upstairs, where a group played trivial pursuit, their vodka tonics resting on the rug beside them. I felt déjà vu so powerful I was sure I had been here before, until I realized: I had just recently watched Metropolitan. My sense memory was simply the result of full immersion into Whit Stillman’s 1990 film, which lays bare a WASPy debutante season that has more self-imposed rules than Survivor. My first viewing of Metropolitan left me convinced there was a New York I’d never known, would never know, up and across town, where a party was a series of cleverness contests and no one walked the dog in sweats. The event I had stumbled upon wasn’t quite right (for starters, there were Jews present) but it was a reminder of the evocative power of cinema.

Metropolitan (Stillman’s first feature) introduced viewers to the intellectually charged and oddly puritan decadence of the UHBs—Urban Haute Bourgeoisie—a particular sub-genre of moneyed city mouse. The quippy confection of a screenplay, for which Stillman received an Oscar nomination, made it clear that the director was the UHB’s historian, archivist and court poet. Stillman’s cinematic voice is deeply specific, and deeply felt in the work it has inspired, from small films like Tadpole to unstoppable pop culture forces like Gossip Girl.

Stillman followed up Metropolitan, a polite teen romp where adults were hardly seen (a la Muppet Babies), with Barcelona, which tells the tale of Ted and Fred, a pair of UHBs let loose in one of the world’s sexiest cities, unable to use their knowledge of obscure political theory and silk neckties to advance their case with exotic women. Stillman’s first two films work best when thought of as sociological studies performed by a skilled, and thoroughly embedded, anthropologist: Metropolitan introduced us to UHBs in their natural habitat, while Barcelona showed us what happens when you release these creatures into a foreign climate.

Metropolitan and Barcelona have remained available on DVD, with Metropolitan receiving the distinguished Criterion treatment. But for some reason, Stillman’s third—and arguably best—film, The Last Days of Disco, is now out of print and frustratingly hard to find. Much to my delight, however, Disco recently popped up streaming free on hulu.com. What an ironic way to view a film in which the characters struggle to make copies on clunky new Xerox machines.

The Last Days of Disco is the third installment in Stillman’s “Doomed Bourgeois In Love” trilogy. Unlike Metropolitan and Barcelona, which take place “not so long ago,” Disco belongs to a definite time, “the very early ‘80s.” This specificity strips Disco of the fairytale quality of its predecessors, but lends it a pair of sharp teeth. The film centers on Charlotte and Alice (Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny, both at their all-time best), recent graduates of New England institutions of higher learning. Assistant editors at a publishing house, they climb the career ladder by day and the social ladder by night as they maneuver their way into the city’s most elite disco nightspot. Tensions rise when the women, sharing an apartment much smaller than what they’re used to, zero in on the same potential suitor. Meanwhile, a financial scam threatens to shutter the club and put the last nail in the coffin of disco.

If Metropolitan remains chaste, fully-clothed, and Barcelona strips down to its swimming trunks, then Disco, the most bawdy member of the troika, straight-up takes off its pants. Characters discuss cocaine and STDs with a frankness they once applied only to conversations about Jane Austen. Stillman has moved the party downtown and the decadence no longer takes the form of afternoon tea and copious cabs. Instead, we see sequins, exposed navels and Jaid Barrymore as a cougar in an alarming catsuit. (There is also a cameo from Igby Goes Down director Burr Steers, thus confirming my theory that a tweedy elk’s lodge exists somewhere above 75th street where the men who preserve “uptown” life on celluloid can be found palling around.) Characters from Metropolitan reappear, older now, and generations mingle as a fresh-faced Sevigny dances seductively with a (comparatively) graying Stillman-standard Chris Eigeman. The times, they are a-changing as the UHBs adjust to the fast money and loose morals of ‘80s New York, factors that will level the playing field and render their species almost obsolete.

Stillman sticks with a reliable stable of actors to portray his upwardly (and downwardly) mobile schemers, cartographers of the social landscape that would make Oscar Wilde proud. Stillman’s propensity for writing verbose characters that deal in pithy quotes has occasionally made him a victim of the Dawson’s Creek critique—aka, “Who actually talks like this?” (One girlfriend chatting casually to another: “The guys you like tend to be on the more ethereal side.”) Stillman’s scripts are written in what amounts to his own iambic pentameter. And, as with Shakespeare, it demands an actor learn a new cadence. The result: stilted, stripped-down performances that straddle the line between school play and British comedy in the best possible way. The impossible garrulousness of it all makes the moments of pure emotion, when characters are at a loss for words, that much more powerful.

Stillman’s trilogy is the cinematic equivalent of the Sinatra tune “It Was A Very Good Year,” an ode to luxuries lost and wisdom gained. In Kicking and Screaming, Noah Baumbach’s Stillman-esque movie about sedentary post-grads, Chris Eigeman’s Max proclaims, “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now.” Stillman characters, too self-aware for their own good, are deeply nostalgic for a time that has not yet ended. In Disco’s last scene, a worked-up UHB declares, “Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something like this, that was this big, and this important, and this great, will never die.” The fellow then boards a subway for the surreal credits sequence, a group dance-a-thon to the disco classic “Love Train.” Indeed, it is not yet dead.

— Lena Dunham

***Watch The Last Days of Disco for free right here while you can***

Zach Clark’s Modern Love is Automatic is a genre-bending, color-coordinated dram-com with a flair for the absurd and a heart of gold. Clark cites John Waters as his primary influence and the Baltimore shock icon’s stamp is clear on this, Clark’s freshman feature. But it also establishes Clark as a young director with a vision that is informed equally by cult film, punk rock, ‘80s nostalgia, and taboo sexual behavior. In short, Modern Love is totally Clark’s own.

Modern Love tells the tale of a lonely, dead-eyed nurse named Lorraine (Melodie Sisk). She lives in an everytown and dates an everyman, but her style has a timeless edginess that evokes both Betty Boop and Debbie Harry. At work, she doesn’t relate to her gossipy colleagues and she ignores the advances of the resident Dr. McSteamy. At home, in bed, she’s a cold fish who smoothes out all the creases in her sheets. When she finds her boyfriend naked with another woman, she is forced to solicit a roommate. What she gets is Adrian (Maggie Ross), an aspiring model with delusions of grandeur that are even more extreme than her chipper attitude. As Adrian comes to terms with the difficulties of establishing a career in the mall-store modeling world, Lorraine develops an interest in bondage and embarks on a nighttime career as a mistress of punishment.

The performances Clark elicits from Sisk and Ross are effortlessly charming and comic. Their interactions have the feeling of two little girls gleefully role-playing, grabbing costumes from a trunk and ferociously inhabiting characters they have constructed based on their own ideas about adult femininity. The rest of the cast has the affectless acting style found in early Hal Hartley: they say their lines and leave room for the women at the film’s center to brood and flame.

Clark’s previous involvement with SXSW was as the editor of Aaron Katz’s Dance Party USA, but his film couldn’t be any further from the pseudo-genre Katz helped to define (the only common thread is a low-budget). Clark’s film focuses on the aimless twenty-somethings favored by SXSW filmmakers in recent years, but his take on the Gen-Y is something altogether more stylized, closer to characters in a Christopher Guest mockumentary than to anyone we’ve met on a mumblecore screen. At the center is Lorraine, a ballsy heroine who will break your heart with her final, off-key swan song of tentative emotion.

Clark is, indeed, an exceptional editor. He cuts to the beat of harsh jokes and punk music, using video static and candy colored interstitial titles to enhance the jagged contradictions in Lorraine’s life. As a writer and director he has a soft but sure touch, creating highly structured tableau and neatly choreographed conversations but allowing his non-actors to speak freely and imbue their roles with a “we’re makin’ a movie!” glee that is infectious.

With it’s angry score and bondage content it would tempting to call the film aggressive, but Modern Love is Automatic slides down easy as a melted jolly rancher. Because at its heart this stylized fairytale is a character study about a woman for whom love is not automatic. Rather she, and the characters around her, both have to work hard to shed their costumes and achieve something more like intimacy.

— Lena Dunham

When asked to picture a producer, the first image that springs to mind is a Bruckheimer-inspired Hollywood wheeler and dealer, talking on his blackberry, floating in the pool or demanding a very specific mocha beverage from his assistant. In reality, the best indie producer is a persistent yet gentle problem solver, someone with that unique combo of common sense and outlandish dreams. Something altogether more… maternal. Indeed, some of the most standout indie producers working today are females. Dia Sokol is one of these. Her name has been attached to some of my favorite truly independent projects of the past half-decade, most notably, Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation and much anticipated Beeswax. She was also instrumental in bringing both Alex Karpovsky’s Woodpecker and Joe Swanberg’s Nights and Weekends to the screen. It seems only just, then, that Sokol should have the chance to write her own punchline to the lost-twenty-something-walks-into-a-bar joke that critics refer to as Mumblecore.

Sokol has finally made this film, and the result could easily become a well-worn favorite in the DVD library of Gen-Yers of both sexes. The film tells the deceptively simple tale of Kira and Max, two San Francisco quarter-lifers whose paths intertwine uncomfortably after a drunken, vaguely sweet one night stand. Kira has just left a long term relationship, while Max is still very much a part of one (his girlfriend, Sara, is pretty, funny, and infinitely patient.) But both have been stuck too long in jobs they hate and are unable to tap into the vibrancy of their multi-culti Mission neighborhood. Our two anti-heroes lie to themselves, and each other, as they attempt to articulate their own next steps.

Kira is winningly played by first-time actress Kenya Miles, but its Wiley Wiggins as Max who turns in the films most compelling performance. As tortured freshman Mitch Kramer in Dazed and Confused, Wiggins was the straight man, a reserved adolescent who spoke with his eyes. But Max is not Mitch a decade later. Chatty, aggressive, and in love with his own twee ramblings, Max is something more like Larry David, an egomaniac with a faulty moral compass (his maddeningly sharp sense of humor keeps him from drifting into the realm of total intolerability). Wiggins still employs those expressive peepers, most notably in a scene where he stares down the orange cat he has just adopted in an effort to be a better person. Frankly, he says, he thought it would be cuter. With a bumbling male like Wiggins at her film’s center (along with a superbly caustic supporting performance by Bujalski as his incredulous best friend) Sokol has not attempted to feminize Mumblecore. Rather, she has commercialized it—and that’s not a bad thing.

Sorry, Thanks has all the pleasures of the “genre”: wince-worthy awkwardness; a loving eye cast on the mundane and aimless; freckled, chubby people you could easily know. But the film avoids the pitfalls that make films like Funny Ha Ha and Kissing on the Mouth obtuse to the average cinema-goer. Someone whose tastes don’t lean toward the indie can clearly recognize Sorry, Thanks as a real live movie: the sound is clear, the image is steady and the plot is tight. One can’t help but think Sokol’s history as a producer has something to do with the solidity of her first directorial offering—this lady clearly knows how to get things done.

Sokol’s script (co-written with producer Lauren Veloski) is as seamless as any studio rom-com—if studio rom-coms had astute, nuanced dialogue and a skilled cast of filmmakers to offer improvisational touches. Sorry, Thanks has just enough plot to keep it interesting, while still allowing the shapelessness of real life to inform it’s forward(ish) motion.

— Lena Dunham

David Holzman is an uptown boy with European tastes and a chip on his shoulder. He admires the works of Truffaut and Godard and is frustrated by his fashion-model girlfriend, Penny, who looks pretty but is actually “a slob… with a ring of dirt on her chin.” The film opens with David (played with impish charm and insufferable insolence by L.M. Kit Carson, who also wrote the screenplay) seated in his bedroom, talking directly to his Bolex, nicknamed “Éclair”, about the mission he is about on embark on. He plans to record his day-to-day existence, verite. “It’s time to stop, bring your life into focus, and expose yourself. This is July 14th, 1967. This is serious.” Like his role model Godard, David believes “film is truth 24 times a second” (the repeated, subtle bungling of this quote is representative of his earnest ignorance, and of the tiny atrocities soon to be committed in the name of art).

David spends aimless days following friends, neighbors, and strangers in an attempt to reveal this aforementioned truth. No job (probably bankrolled by tolerant parents), he has just received his draft card, a fact he addresses with cool nonchalance. He moves down the street, capturing the curious faces of the Upper West Side in slow pans that feel like Diane Arbus set in motion. A child of Hitchcock, David watches his neighbors, revealing the menace inherent in a pair of parted curtains. A “street goddess” in a car attempts to pick him up. When he refuses, she asks if he’s asexual. “No,” he responds. “I’m a voyeur.”

David’s desire to record his meandering routine quickly turns detached and destructive. His best friend is entirely un-amused by the presence of “Éclair” and can’t seem to just “be himself” on camera. (My father, himself a child of the sixties, attempted to explain this reaction to me, Miss Facebook Photo. “A movie camera was a far weirder, more invasive object back then.”) A neighbor that David watches nightly threatens to call the police. Penny rips the camera from his hands and promptly leaves him after he films her sleeping, a long, oddly scientific pan of her nude body at rest. Good riddance. “I can get back to real stuff now. Like masturbation.”

Indeed, there is no redemption, no great life lesson waiting for David. The film ends, just as abruptly as it began, with David still in the throes of art-making. His project is collapsing before him, but like all Cecil B. Demented’s, he keeps the faith and avoids the blame. “You have made me do things!” he screams at the audience, shutting the camera off. After a blip of black he is back, calmer. He wants and needs to live on camera. It gives his life substance. After all, if a guy smokes a cigarette in a studio apartment and no one was there to see it, did he really smoke at all? David isn’t ready to give up the fight, so he knows he can’t burn his most important bridge. “I’m sorry, Éclair.”

— Lena Dunham

(David Holzman’s Diary screens Wednesday, February 4th, at the Walter Reade as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series “Mavericks and Outsiders: Positif Celebrates American Culture.” Or if you are unable to catch it on the big screen, buy a Region 2 DVD at Amazon.)

(Horsefingers 3: Starfucker is screening at the Slamdance Film Festival on Monday, January 19th at 8:30pm, and Thursday, January 22nd at 12:30pm. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.)

Kirsten Kearse has displayed a remarkably singular focus in her short films, the third of which—Horsefingers 3: Starfucker—will play at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival. As its title indicates, Horsefingers 3: Starfucker is the third installment in the Horsefingers trilogy, a darkly whimsical and surprisingly diverse group of narratives about a woman named Emma who has hooves. For fun? For real? It’s never quite clear, but this refusal to answer some of the most basic questions of nature is surely a part of the trilogy’s charm.

The original Horsefingers, shot in 2002 on black-and-white Super 16mm, stars Daniel London (of Old Joy fame) as Theodore Horsefingers, a working stiff who dons a pair of the titular mitts. The film opens as his office, a veritable Noah’s Arc of white-collar animals, is hurriedly evacuated. A big-brother voice drones “the animal crackers are out of the box. The animal crackers are out of the box.” The creatures take to the woods, where they must fight for survival and maintain their autonomy in a struggle reminiscent of high school English classic The Most Dangerous Game. As Theodore hides from the powers that be, he searches for Emma, a pretty officemate with a porcupine’s back who uses her facile human hands to sew his torn coat for him.

Horsefingers 2, a looping video work that chronicles a day-in-the-life of a female Horsefingers, currently remains unfinished. But a trailer for the project indicates that it will be less plot heavy than its companions, instead focusing on the minutiae of life as a hooved person. And this hooved person is Emma, whose back is no longer decorated with quills. Now she has assumed the burden of Theodore’s equine hands.

But what exactly is a Horsefingers? A person heavy into furry fandom? Or a piece of modern mythology invented by Kirsten Kearse? The writer/director’s treatment of her subject doesn’t imply delayed development, sexual deviance, or comedic distance. Rather, The Horsefingers appears to be an isolated urban anomaly, the MySpace generation’s answer to the Pegasus.

Horsefingers 3: Starfucker is the most accessible installment in the trilogy. Shot on glorious color Super 16mm, it boasts an ultra-catchy synth soundtrack and a candy-bright palate that welcomes some high-camp to the proceedings. Such a treatment befits this Horsefingers, which finally acknowledges the vulgarity and vague embarrassment of seeing a human decked out in animal gear. Starfucker centers again on Emma, this time embodied by Maria Thayer. The film opens on the image of Emma, now a Horsefingers, as she waits sadly in a bar for someone who will never come. She rests her face in her hooves. Suddenly she spots an actor she worked with many years ago on an ill-fated film project—she’s a script supervisor, which is, coincidentally, how Kearse makes her living. (But the reader will be comforted to know that an in-person meeting with the director revealed no animal accoutrement, just a friendly demeanor and a striped sweater.) Emma approaches Lem (Adam Rothenberg), a cocky Matthew McConaughey type who smirks as she recounts their shared history. He eyes her hooves with a mix of lust and disdain, then asks whether she might like to get dinner. He is vaguely menacing, a little mean, but what follows is one of the most disconcerting predator-becomes-prey change-ups since Polanski’s Bitter Moon. The sweet, eager-to-please Emma discovers domineering Lem’s secret and, suffice it to say, his reasons for wanting an anthropomorphic conquest become all too clear.

The appeal of the Horsefingers films lies in their specificity: Kearse has created a slightly skewed universe with strict rules of engagement and visual tropes that link disparate scenarios. But the Horsefingers have broader implications. When viewed as a trio these slim dramedies are suddenly a searing indictment of the professional rat race, sheep-like belief in authority, and any other animal analogy for corporate uniformity that you care to employ. Like the magic pelt that hides Catherine Deneuve from her lecherous father in Jaques Demi’s Donkey Skin, a Horsefinger’s hooves are a symbol of defiance, an anarchic battle cry, existing in the gray area between point of pride and mark of shame.

— Lena Dunham