What gets me most excited, cinematically speaking, is not just the experience of seeing something new, but engaging with a story or character in a way that is unique to the medium of cinema. I think a few decades ago, when the act of making a film was an achievement in and of itself, the group of young filmmakers currently lumped together as mumblecore would have instead gone into playwriting. Before El Mariachi, it actually was cheaper to stage a play in a small off-off-Broadway basement theater than try to get the money for a film camera and crew. For example, Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax and Lynn Shelton’s Humpday both have interesting dialogue but the naturalistic camera does absolutely nothing to draw out the subtext buried in the language. They could just as well be stage plays since, for most of these filmmakers, image is an afterthought. In The Exploding Girl, however, our viewing experience is controlled through writer/director Bradley Rust Gray’s framing, lighting, sound design, and editing. Rather than solely through dialogue and acting, it’s the moments between the mumble and chatter where the drama of The Exploding Girl is located. Unlike most mumblecore films, this is a visual experience, conveyed through a camera perspective that is similar to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ‘invisible observer’ perspective, which allows the characters’ state of instability to resonate so strongly. The Exploding Girl’s drama is centered in those awkward off-balance moments fully because the filmmaker is confident enough to stretch beyond naturalism and explore the unspoken through oblique camera angles, foregrounded sound design, as well as the skillful, articulate staging of actors.

Zoe Kazan, who powerfully played the one night stand secretary in the tepid Oscar fodder Revolutionary Road, here stars as Ivy, a 20-something college student returned home to Manhattan for spring break. She has to cope with occasional bouts of epilepsy, and a distant, unseen boyfriend who doesn’t seem able to articulate his growing disinterest in their relationship. Meanwhile, her longtime childhood friend Al (a great Mark Rendall) is trying to find the words that will move their friendship into something other than casual. The review in Variety—or, as I prefer to call it, Hollywood Philistine Review Weekly—states, “Almost nothing happens in the first half-hour of The Exploding Girl, and then, suddenly, nothing much else happens.” Unless you are watching the film through utterly simplistic eyes, it would be hard to miss the pain of these young people as they fumble to first off clarify what they are feeling and second off to find the words to capture those feelings, let alone find the courage to say it out loud. Like life, events happen with somewhat random consequences and import. Rarely—except in plots that are contrived in keeping with ancient Shakesperean era dramatic rules—do real life events relate to one another in a logical cause and effect pattern. Life’s moments tend to build in a slow, incremental, often circular rhythm that may be occasionally glimpsed but is rarely fully revealed. The Exploding Girl throws these young people into that actual chaos of life unknown, in a city that is omnipresent. The result is a film in which we experience with them, firsthand, the pains of trying to find your way as a young adult.

The drama of the film is conveyed through the director’s use of cinematic elements to convey these unarticulated feelings of instability. Often scenes are staged in the middle of traffic islands, cars wizzing by on both sides as the long lens captures them while they choose the right moment to dart across an avenue and through traffic cones marking yet another street in the midst of modern New York City’s de/re-construction. The sound design brings the clanging din of the city to the forefront, sometimes blocking the characters from actually hearing one another. The distant observer camera peeks around fire hydrants and bushes in the foreground as our characters attempt to find a few moments of solitude; the long lens perspective echoes the fenced in feeling we get when we inhabit crowded streets in which there is no depth of field beyond the next traffic light. It’s that lack of a distant horizon that makes us urban dwellers often feel so boxed in and it’s the reason why the rooftop is a perfect place for these characters to finally reach a cathartic moment of emotional release. The careful use of staging in this manner is what allows the invisible observer perspective to work so effectively. We feel we are a peeping tom with a somewhat omniscient point-of-view, and yet we don’t feel superior to them.

The Exploding Girl is a completely realistic, as opposed to naturalistic, portrayal of a specific moment in the transition from youth to adulthood. By film’s end, still unable to articulate confused and conflicting emotions, destination unknown, these heroes manage the courage to carry on. To those who have been there, the film will be experienced as a sort of psychic documentary.

— Mike S. Ryan

The Slamdance experience is also way more fun than Sundance. The people at the screenings are real film fans. Since the films are not star driven you get very few of the ski condo cougars and local lookeeloos that fill most Sundance screenings. There is a free happy hour every evening where all badge holders gather and there are also free sponsored snacks. It really felt like a refuge from the non industry hullabaloo this year.

The films that got the most coverage were the Steven Soderbergh’s centerpiece documentary on Spalding Gray, And Everything Is Going Fine, and William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, which really brought the crowds in. They were both solid and I am sure they will see national distribution. But what stirred my pot were the more offbeat docs. Mind of the Demon is the mondo doc about madman Larry Linkogle, the father of freestyle motor cross. Not only was this film about a gonzo outsider, it is told in that same spirit with narration by mush-mouthed Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead fame. This ain’t no PBS Ken Burns yawn yarn, this is fire on film and is not to be missed.

I was also totally captured by the complex portrait of an African American Viet Nam vet soldier of fortune who fights for Muslims wherever he is needed. American Jihadist tells Clevin Holt’s (Isa Abdullah Ali) angry struggle with rage against white capitalists and explores his curious ability to fly into any war torn country with a mini arsenal of weapons and operate with the apparent silent endorsement of the CIA. The film does a good job exploring the attraction of Islam to African Americans but it falls a bit short in exploring the relationship between Islam and radical fundamentalism. Director Mark Claywell tries to draw a comparison between Isa’s motives to kill (just pure simple rage) and the motives of your typical suicide bomber. American Jihadist goes a bit soft here because there really is no connection. Isa is a very typical soldier of Fortune, he just happens to also be a reasoned non fundamentalist Muslim. Nevertheless, this is an open, honest portrait of a very unique Soldier of Fortune, a breed that is usually very cagey about appearing on camera or talking about their lifestyle.

I mentioned in an earlier post that one of my favorite films of both festivals was Robert Persons’s General Orders No. 9. Less a documentary than a lyrical poetic meditation on the geographical history of Georgia, this film continues to haunt me weeks after I first saw it. Catch it at a festival near you because I think it’s way to oblique for IFC but I am sure it will turn up at Anthology or MOMA at some point.

I was lucky enough to catch a couple of great Slamdance shorts. Horsefingers 2: But I Am The Tiger by Kirsten Kearse is the latest installment from this Slamdance returnee. A lyrical Maya Deren-like mataphorical journey film, it very clearly articulates the subject’s struggle to find her place in the world, all done through imagery. First Day of Peace by Mirko Rucnov takes place in the filmmaker’s remote rural village on the Bosnia border. The film masterfully weaves the beautiful rustic locations, minimal dialogue and actual rural non actors into a Tarkovsky-like tale about the absurdity of war. It won the best short prize.

There were so many features I wanted to see but alas there is only so much time. Audiences raved about the modern Medieval thriller The Wild Hunt. Of the films I did catch, the comedy Drones was my fave narrative feature, which combined Office Space with Mars Attacks!. Written and directed by the team of Adam Busch and Amber Benson, Drones has snappy dialouge and is sharply told. Scenesters starts off promising with a spot on mock trailer of a fake mumblecore film. Unfortunately, the film never rises above its banal who-done-it plot within the ‘making-of’ faux doc structure.

The worst part of my Slamdance experience was the fact that I wasn’t able to see more of the films. This is the festival that really should be taken out on the road. It is so well curated and due in part to its smaller size, as a whole it has a true outsider vibe. With Paranormal Activity being such a massive hit, maybe this road show concept could really work to attract crowds throughout the year. Happy sweet 16 to this essential and ever more important festival. This year, Slamdance was better than ever.

— Mike S. Ryan

Yes, there are lots of issues one can have with Blue Valentine—the uneven Brooklyn accent of Ryan Gosling, the lack of actual Brooklyn locations, the fractured flashback structure that tends to slow the narrative rather than thrust it forward, etc.—but ultimately this has fantastic performances in a realistic story that ends with a breakup rather than a fake Nancy Meyers-like kiss. I do think that it may do well with audiences, not just because of the natural fully exposed performances of the two stars but because it’s actually okay that they break up in the end; some relationships just don’t make it past that first kid. I think most people will agree that if they stayed together it was only going to get worse and, in my own opinion, I didn’t see anything appealing in Michelle Williams’s character, he could do way better so I think it ended positive. I predict it and Winter’s Bone will be the big winners.

I really enjoyed Eric Mendelsohn’s 3 Backyards. Despite its various problems, it is a true ambitious and inventive film that is speaking not only through acting and plot but through its savvy control of music, lensing and pacing. The film’s stylistic choice of ’70s era American New Wave grammar was a joy to behold on the big screen. I can ‘t remember the last time I saw so many lens flares and long slow rack zooms. The score was featured as a major character in the film. It is a 20th century, slightly dissonant flute score which has an inquisitive tone rather than the typical score which declares loudly the emotion you should feel at specific plot points. It’s the element that most audiences have the greatest difficulty absorbing, in part this is due to the high register of the flute being too intense for the Sundance speakers. I heard tales of the first screening being so loud that audience members were holding their ears. But rather than mix or volume issues, the real problem is that audiences have been brainwashed by decades of limp uninspired scores by Hollywood hacks like Carter Burwell so that when they finally hear a score used in an inventive way they are completely flumoxed. It’s not the music they don’t like, it’s that they are uncomfortable watching a film with a score that doesn’t hand them the emotions and themes on a silver platter. Scores like this and Jonny Greenwood’s in There Will Be Blood are designed to get you to interact with and work rather than sit back and get stroked by Vivaldi or Hayden like 19th century European treacle.

The film moved with a pace that reminded me of many American New Wave films that were allowed, for a short time, to explore oblique themes through European Art film grammar. The film that it most reminded me of was Alan Rudolph’s Geraldine Chaplin feature Remember My Name. I also thought about various later Nick Roeg films. In the Q&A Eric denied any Robert Altman influence or any deliberate allusion to Three Women but I doubt he could deny the influence of other films of that period of time. The problem though is that the use of the heavy score combined with the many rack focus zooms during the narrative interludes is so bold it smothers the small answers the little narrative encounters actually provide.

3 Backyards is a collection of small tiny moments in various people’s lives that, when added together, tend to be the true material that constitutes a normal life. It is not the big dramatic moments that mark most people’s lives, it’s the small beats which we often experience alone or go unspoken between two people that make up the true fabric of our days. That is the point of the film but the stylistic choices seem to provoke people in a way that they are then unable to find the meaning in these small beats. They feel that the booming mysterious music is pointing to something even bigger or more dramatic, not smaller. So it’s this disconnect between the grammatical style choices and the theme where I think the film stumbles. But nevertheless, it’s a fantastic film full of great moments and insights that are rarely experienced anymore on the big screen.

Between me and Tully, we have seen all of the NEXT section films. Though Bilal’s Last Stand and The Taqwacores (the Muslim punk rock film) are great for exploring non-white, off-beat characters, they are stylistically very conservative and ultimately limited by their director’s narrow vision of their characters’ and themes’ potential. We are both in agreement that Linas Phillips’s Bass Ackwards was the one film that was most accomplished and demonstrated a true film vision. It is a road movie in the style of such Wim Wenders films as Kings of the Road and Alice in the Cities, films that are not afraid to cover the true slower, awkward moments one experiences on a road trip as opposed to those that are packed full of wacky events and characters. Bass Ackwards is also closest to the true original themes of the road film as a young man’s ‘walkabout’ first articulated in the Goethe novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. The center of the film is Phillips, who is the actor, writer, director and editor. Beautifully lensed by Sean Porter via the RED, Bass Ackwards accurately captures the slow, small rhythms of the cross country trip. Consequently, many viewers felt it ‘dragged’ or lost its way, others were bothered by the coincidental appearance of the Seattle ex- girlfriend in a NYC subway. I didn’t mind either. I like my road movies slow and rambling. Anything else would be false and manipulative.

I saw several great shorts, features and docs at Slamdance, but I want to save that for a separate article. The best New Frontier film, which was another poorly programmed Sundance section this year (where was the Sharon Lockhart type of real non-narrative auteur? Please don’t tell me that you think the garish unsubtle color bursts and wacky whimsical narrative of Peperminta’s Pipilotti Rist is that person) was the Slamdance film General Orders No.9 by first time filmmaker Robert Persons. I am going to write a longer piece on it but it is basically a lyrical tone poem about the geographical history of Georgia and the South. Inspired more by Herzog’s Fata Morgana than a Reggio anti-urban rant, the film is mysterious, lyrical, and completely engaging. It is driven strongly by beautiful landscapes, the poetic trance-like narration and the American equivalent of Popul Vul’s music by Stars of the Lid. It should have been the centerpiece of New Frontier but, alas, it might just be too mysterious and challenging for the Sundance audience. I remember how angry much of the audience got during screenings of Lockhart’s Lunch Break last year. There were some great docs, shorts and features at Slamdance, but General Orders No. 9 was by far one of the best films—alongside the mind-bending Enter the Void—I saw at either Sundance or Slamdance.

— Mike S. Ryan

I don ‘t want to get overly negative over this NEXT section but when you are constantly bombarded with the Sundance Mavericky ‘we are so Rogue’ branding it becomes really frustrating to sit through one film after another in NEXT that is uninspired, banal, generic and as far as possible from a true radical, new vision. The programmers really missed the boat on this section. I hope they all plan to attend SXSW this year so they can see all that they missed. Again, I don’t want to blame anyone, I know there are always politics involved in the Sundance selections and as always most of the limpest films in the festival are Sundance Lab films, but it’s just frustrating watching these same banal films year after year. You want to shake the filmmaker and say, “Why should we care about a couple of boring uninteresting young adults who do nothing special?”

In the case of One Too Many Mornings, a story about a drunk, the characters don’t even abuse themselves with any real energy or originality. Homewrecker follows a locksmith as his day gets screwed up by a wacky broad. I am not sure why it was filmed, it felt like a stage play and had absolutely no visual energy. I think we are starting to see the negative effects of mumblecore’s slack visual aesthetics seep down into generic low budget filmmaking. Despite the fact that many core films like Humpday are visually sloppy, they at least have interesting characters pursuing original, true outsider perspectives. A film like One Too Many Mornings is about boring, dumb 30-somethings who do nothing except drink and watch TV. Why should I care? Why was it at Sundance? Why was it shot in limp black-and-white?

Winter’s Bone, on the other hand, reminded me of old school Sundance, way back in the early days when the Sundance mission was quite specific, not generic mavericky. Back in the early days that mission was to celebrate well made, small scale, character driven American films that sprung organically from a specific American region. Winter’s Bone is also from another time in that the casting is not star driven. Every role in the film, besides the male lead of the character Teardrop, played by an unrecognizable John Hawkes, is filled by a face that we have never seen up on the screen before. The featured extras are weathered real people whose rural struggle is etched in every wrinkle. Kudos to local casting director Heather Laird for this amazing job. The casting, combined with the remote rural Missouri locations, make for a visual experience that has always been American Indie’s strongest attribute. Recent Sundance entries Ballast and Frozen River aspired toward this type of authenticity but we have it in spades in Winter’s Bone. I predict for sure an award, or two. A longer review will follow post festival.

I raved last year about Craig Brewer’s MTV series Five Dollar Cover, a web series in eight-minute segments that entwines real local bands in both mini-scripted dramas and a performance. Brewer’s Memphis episodes blew me away with their tight jam-packed narratives that revealed a specific struggle of the indie rock life. Watching Brewer’s episodes I was utterly shocked that they were only around eight minutes because each one was a rich, mini three act movie. Lynn Shelton only showed two of her episodes but I got no such economy or specificity. In one episode she just cuts back and forth between an African American performance in one space and two rock characters holding hands while a very slow song plays. There is no narrative velocity and nothing new is said about these characters and the scene. In one episode we watch band members drink in a small tiny bar for around five minutes before they play an in-store show. In the Q&A Shelton revealed that the bar was actually a band member’s back garage that he had converted into a bar. An interesting detail, but unfortunately it wasn’t shot in a way that revealed that fact. Brewer would have created a whole story just about that location. I really like the concept of the series: specific regional identities revealed through the local music scene. I’ve heard that there are plans to keep the series moving to other cities. I hope the directors that are picked are up to the difficult challenge of the format because Brewer set the bar pretty high. A good eight-minute drama is a really hard thing to do well. It’s not a format for the slack.

— Mike S. Ryan

Unfortunately rebellion is more than a slogan, or a fist in the air gesture. So far it doesn t seem like the films uphold that message. We will try and see as many of the NEXT films as possible but from what we’ve seen and what we’ve heard about others, it’s the same old unambitous writers lab graduate films. But it’s only day one so we shall see. I saw four films, one of them at Slamdance.

The Red Chapel really gets under your skin (read Pamela Cohn’s full review here), but this is a doc that takes both the filmmakers and the audience by surprise. For me, though I love the intent of the Yes Men films, they’ve always seemed to me as somewhat dramatically rote. The Red Chapel truly feels like a journey that began with one intent and then the situation leads the film into an unexpected confrontation with a reality way fiercer and larger than was first imagined.

Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void had its US premiere in the Spotlight section, which is the Sundance section newly created to show films that first screened at other festivals. Enter the Void is a genre film—the drug trip trance mondo genre—and it is not for everyone. In fact, during this 156-minute version (2o minutes will be cut for its theatrical release) the audience was streaming out once past the hour mark. The normally lightweight non-cinephile Sundance audience (which seems even worse this year with the decline of industry attendance) was completely unprepared for the hardcore visual battering onslaught that is a Noe film. Love it or hate it, as was the case with Antichrist, the pure visual brilliance of this film cannot be denied. Anyone who brushes it off or calls it stupid is an idiot. There are images in Enter the Void that have never been up on the big screen before. Even if you hate the vibe and what those images are you must respect the pure ambitious original energy. The film also goes where no other first person POV film has gone before. It starts where Lady in the Lake left off, the camera is our POV and then it lifts off even above that as the main character starts to levitate above his own body. The only films that come close, in pure visual originality, are Crispin Glover’s What Is It? and It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine!. This is mondo madness at its ballsiest. See it on the big screen but be prepared to go where you have never gone before. It’s a work of such developed visual originality that very little can compete.

Over at Slamdance: Cummings Farm is an orgy film that aspires to be more radical and explicit than Humpday but it’s still just lightweight titillation with no real character depth. Compared to the full frontal, full penetration sex in Enter the Void, it feels like grade school bad boy locker room antics. I expect better from Slamdance.

Back at Sundance, I was very impressed with the restraint and lack of sentimental quirk in Get Low. An old man preparing for his own funeral story that stars Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray, I was expecting the worst but was very pleasantly surprised by Aaron Schneider’s spot on direction. I think this film will be the sleeper hit of this year. Sony Classics made a smart move acquiring this one at Toronto.

— Mike S. Ryan

I saw two Iraq War-themed films at this year’s Sundance, Ross Katz’s Taking Chance and Oren Moverman’s The Messenger. Both were strangely similar in their plot and characters. Both films are about soldiers stationed at home who must deal with the casualties of war stateside. In Taking Chance, Kevin Bacon is a clench-jawed, highly decorated officer who volunteers to escort the body of a fallen soldier to his family in Montana as a way of dealing with his guilt over the level of his commitment to the war effort. In The Messenger, Ben Foster is Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery, a clenched jaw Iraq war vet, who is forced into joining Gulf War vet Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson) in the task of notifying Next of Kin that their child or husband just died in the war. Taking Chance is a solemn, sober look at the pain of losing a loved one, but ultimately it is a comforting film that wants to wrap all of America into a big group hug. The Messenger directly confronts the rage, anger and fear of the Iraq war veteran in an honest, non-manipulative style, and in the end it provides no easy answers. Guess which one I preferred?

Fiction filmmakers who have taken on the Iraq war subject seem to be mostly concerned with finding a non-partisan way to ‘heal’ (NPH for short). Brian De Palma’s Redacted or Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah are rare Iraq-themed films in that they clearly present the point of view that our presence in Iraq is wrong and corrupt and they don’t seem interested at all in the NPH angle. The problem that I have with most Iraq war films is that they are so intent on getting us to heal that they are willing to skip the rage and anger stage. Rage and anger are negative emotions and negative feelings usually don’t lead to big box office sales; since most filmmakers are more focused on entertainment rather than truth-telling, it is understandable why the rage stage would be minimized. But the war is still on-going, we still continue to kill innocent Iraqis and in that process young Americans are still being sent home in body bags. Every American, no matter how Republican, questions the value and the strategy of the Iraqi conflict. It is still an unresolved, constantly evolving issue, we are nowhere near being able to reach the healing stage.

As a country, I feel that we are still in the anger and fear stage, and for this reason I believe Taking Chance is way premature. I myself am nowhere near the healing, group hug stage; I don’t think I can ever get there until we as a country face the fact that the Iraq war was not protection or revenge driven but profit driven. Perhaps after Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell (who could have prevented the war if he hadn’t knowingly lied to the UN) are all prosecuted by a War Crimes Tribunal can I start to get with the ‘healing’ concept. In the meantime, I feel that punching a wall or listening to black-metal at a high volume is a very appropriate and honest reaction. In The Messenger, this is exactly what Ben Foster’s character Montgomery does, when he isn’t pacing back and forth or drinking or chasing bar flooseys or beating up random frat boys with his new partner (Harrelson).

As official US Army representatives, Montgomery and Stone must stick to a carefully worded script when they approach the Next of Kin. There can be no touching, Stone tells Montgomery on his first day. Usually the family members scream when they hear the news, sometimes they spit right in the face of the messenger, sometimes they hit him, but sometimes, as in the case of Olivia Pitterson—the wife played by Samantha Morton—they seem oddly relieved. Stone at first guesses that her reaction is due to the fact that she has already moved onto another man, the way Montgomery’s girlfriend (Jena Malone) moved on from him. Later, as Montgomery starts to stalk the strangely detached wife, he learns that her husband returned once already, yet he returned as another man, angry and haunted, as are so many war vets. For him, volunteering for another tour seemed the only alternative. After he left this last time, she found one of his dirty shirts in the bottom of the closet. She tried cleaning it over and over again, but it still smelled of ‘rage, fear and anger.’ Strangely, it was hanging on the wash line, finally cleansed of the smell, when Montgomery notified her of his death.

This is a pretty complicated dramatic situation. You have a widow who doesn’t really mind that her husband has been killed (his spirit was killed way before his body died) and you have a fellow soldier trying to date her, or ‘exploit her grief’ as Stone sees it. Neither character is able to really announce their true feelings and intentions because they themselves are not that conscious of them; on top of that, guilt or shame prevents them from openly acknowledging those kinds of mixed emotions. By this time in the film we are pretty connected to Foster’s character’s anger and stress, and so we know that he desperately needs some sort of honesty; therefore, it is understandable why he’d be attracted to her slightly disconnected vibe and her quiet sadness. Moverman’s courage to tread in such loaded and complicated dramatic territory pays off because he not only is an amazing dialogue writer, he has really put in his time figuring out how to achieve the equivalent level of honesty with his camera and actors.

In one scene, Montgomery tries to kiss Olivia. She seems to want him but the kiss just doesn’t happen, it doesn’t feel right, she quietly steps away to fix a cup of coffee. It’s an awkward moment and one would assume that the scene would end there. On the page it probably did, but by hanging with Foster, alone in the frame after Morton walks out, we get a deeper sense of Montgomery’s solitude. When he starts to slink and melt toward the fridge, the camera moves with him as he slowly pours himself into a chair. The awkward almost-kiss might have been the climax of the scene on the page, but it is these beats with Montgomery afterwards that really demonstrates Moverman’s ability to enter into these characters’ inner lives. These kinds of cinematic moments, devoid of dialogue or action, are unfortunately rare in American cinema. The American way is to assume your audience is the equivelent of a brain dead, knee-twitching video-game playing 15-year-old , go for the simple clear emotion and shove it down the throat, two or three times. This is what for most people passes as good direction—efficient, fun force feeding—but not here.

In the climax of the film, Montgomery and Stone go on a booze fueled weekend jag with a couple of bar flooseys. While getting drunk in a boat on the lake, they are sprayed by some passing jet skiers hooping it up. Harrelson’s irritable Stone curses them out as they zip by and, in the process, he almost falls into the water. Back on shore while tying up the boat, the jet skiers return to confront the two off-duty soldiers. Despite the fact that the there are three jets skiers, something tells us that Montgomery and Stone kicked some serious ass, but we don’t know because we cut to the next scene before the fight starts. The first shot after Montgomery and Stone approach the menacing jet skiers is Stone casually wiping his bloody nose as they drive down the road. This not only shows amazing restraint on Moverman’s part, but also a dedication to honesty and truth above easy thrills that is truly rare.

Likewise, in the next scene when they walk into Montgomery’s ex-girlfriend’s formal wedding engagement party, there is the set up for a typical grand, table standing, explosive confrontational climax, but instead we get quiet honesty. Montgomery and Stone are drunk, bloody and wearing torn t-shirts from the fight. They may enter with a cocky swagger intending to shock, but once they fail to receive anything more than passing glances by most of the party they start to feel self-conscious and stupid. After the cocktail party we see them slouched at the dinner table and Montgomery has covered up with a sweatshirt. Most directors couldn’t even acknowledge what truly would happen in that scenario, let alone direct it in a manner that respects that deflated reality and resists the Hollywood play book that says one must always raise the stakes and go for the big gestures.

Out of the 23 films I saw at Sundance, The Messenger was head and shoulders above every other film. Moverman’s directorial debut is a clear announcement that not only can he write (I’m Not There, Jesus’ Son, Married Life), he is a director with the equivalently high level of taste and ability. The Messenger may turn out to be the one Iraq war film that finally connects with a country that is still at war and desperate for some honesty.

— Mike S. Ryan

Tonight at the 9pm NYFF premiere of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, about two thirds in, just when it’s getting pretty violent and gruesome, a male voice in the audience starts moaning loudly. At first I thought it was a trick of the Dolby 5.0 surround mix, which earlier von Trier used to particularly effective ends by dropping out the central chanel and keeping Willem Dafoe’s voice only in the rear speakers. But alas it became clear quickly that the moaning voice was real and was in pain, when a loud thud echoed through the theater as he apparently landed on the floor. People next to me said, “Someone just jumped from the balcony,” audience members started to scream for the police and 911, others screamed for the film to be stopped while the ushers all ran for the doors. The film stopped and lots of the audience used the happening as an excuse to bolt the screening. As it turned out it was not a jumper but someone who had some sort of seizure and then was revived and then proceded to casually limp out with the other screening bailers while the cops ran in looking for someone to save or arrest.

The lights soon dimmed and the film resumed. Blame it on the lame design of the new Alice Tully hall (why is there no center isle???) or perhaps just the gruesome graphic violence, but it’s for sure going to help the film’s reputation that mid-screening a viewer was thrown into a seizure. (By the way, regarding the design of the new Alice Tully, can someone please tell the theater manager where the dimmer switch is for the side aisles? If you are unfortunate enough to be seated within five seats of the edge aisle you better take out a long billed visor cap because the spotlights overhead will literally burn your forehead they are dialed up so bright.)

As for the film itself, it is a major work of cinematic art, not a masterpiece but nevertheless it is a very real and deeply felt film. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to have their film credentials seriously examined. Poseur film critics like Cinema Scope’s Mark Peranson—who was duped into praising the empty art poseur festival film El Cant Dels Ocells by Albert Serra by being used as an ‘actor’ in that film—actually called Antichrist stupid in his Cannes report. That article alone almost made me request that my subscription be canceled unless this stupid Bowsley Crowther of art film criticism was fired.

Antichrist is essentialy a dramatisation of the act of viewing a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The film masterfuly replicates the color scheme, mood, tone, and theme of the paintings through the semi-naturalistic depiction of a couple plunged into exisential hell after having their young son fall to his death while they were blissfully making love.

Any critic who writes off this film will be forever stamped as IDIOT FOOL: the acting, the lighting (by Anthony Dod Mantle), the compositions, the angst that drives every frame is real and palatable. If you don’t see this or feel von Trier’s mastery of the medium  (Peranson calls him a minor tv director) then you need to forever limit yourself to only waxing poetic over Seth Rogen and Spike Jonze films.

The film sucks you into its every beat. It’s a painful ride. Like life, I often wanted to leave or check out, but it is quite clear that the director is in control of his medium and that he is sincere in his quest for meaning. One problem I think is that the first section is too naturalistic in direction so that once the infamous fox speaks most viewers are too jolted out of their naturalistic safety zone and never settle into the film’s true ambidextrous stagger through various stylistic voices. He tries to cue the audience early on by fractured reverse angles that cross the line and break the central axis but to audiences raised on herky-jerky bad pseudo-jumpy camera ala CSI and The Office, the naturalistic fourth wall is never pierced until that infamous fox opens his mouth. The bold, balls-to-the-wall performance by Charlotte Gainsbourg is worth the price of admission alone.

Antichrist is a major cinematic event and anyone who thinks otherwise can forever hold their tongue, as far as I am concerned. Long live cinematic ambition!!!!

— Mike S. Ryan

(I Sell the Dead opens theatrically in New York City on August 7th and Los Angeles on August 14th. It premieres On Demand via IFCInTheaters on August 12th. Visit the film’s official website for more detailed information. Note: This review was first published in January, 2009.)

I Sell the Dead was the opening night selection of the 15th Slamdance Film Festival. It’s the first film by writer/director/editor Glenn McQuaid, an established visual effects artist and cohort of prolific director/actor/producer Larry Fessenden (McQuaid coordinated the visual effects for Fessenden’s The Last Winter). I Sell the Dead is a cinematic marvel that is both an homage to classic horror films, as well as an innovative mash-up of several different horror tropes from subsequent generations. It’s all held together by the filmmaker’s true love of these genres, as well as his staggeringly impressive ability to direct tone, actors and special effects toward a singularly unique and innovative genre perspective.

The film stars Ron Perlman (Hellboy 2 and The Last Winter), Dominic Monaghan (Lost), Fessenden, and horror icon Angus Scrimm. Fessenden plays professional grave robber Willie Grimes, while Monaghan is his young trusty partner-in-crime, Arthur Blake. Set in a dark, Olde Dickensian turn-of-the-century England, the film follows this duo as they take to the misty moors to perpetuate their dark deeds after imbibing a few mugs of brew in the cave-like taverns on the city’s edge. Each night they earn their keep by digging up graves and wheeling the remains to the lab of a sinister mad doctor (played by Scrimm).

The pre-credit sequence opens with Willie Grimes being dragged to the gallows in the public square. Right up to the end he jokes and cajoles the crowd as the wood clamps down on his neck. He then stares into the bloody basket and the masked executioner lets the blade drop. Grimes’ decapitated head falls into the basket and stares back at the camera as the image turns to animation, music rises, and a fantastic animated credit sequence sets the tone for the Hammer-era film homage to come.

Monaghan’s character Arthur Blake is next visited in prison by the massive Father Duffy (Perlman) and urged to confess before he too is led to the gallows. Arthur begins the story of the infamous grave robbing duo and we travel with them both as they pass through a strange series of encounters with the undead.

The film moves effortlessly through horror genres—from the beautiful, dark-haired, gossamer nightgown wearing vampires of early Mario Bava, to fog-drenched graveyard ghost hunters in the washed out color films from the mid-1960s, to the evocative bold 1980s Zombie genre circa Evil Dead 2. There is even a hilarious encounter with an undead Spielberg-esque ET! Each sequence employs lighting, camera placement and music that pitch perfectly captures the production value tendencies of that particular horror period. But this is far more than a mere genre mash-up collage; it is all held together by the hilarious buddy banter between a spot-on Fessenden and Monaghan. Not to mention a narrative velocity tied to the initiating story set-up that has Monaghan telling his Death March confession to Perlman like some sort of Dickensian Schezerade. The film moves with a darting confidence and it literally soars via the evocative and aggressive score by Jeff Grace. Cinematographer Richard Lopez expertly allows the Old England yellow-brown patina of the candle-lit village interiors to meld with icy blue fog-drenched moors at night. There are also some wide shot night exterior composites that are truly beautiful in that they are evocative and deliberately period artificial but not wink-wink smarmy fake. This a horror film lover’s wet dream, made by a team of genre lovers who worship this stuff. Unlike films like Black Dynamite, a blaxploitation mock-comedy in the midnight section of Sundance, I Sell the Dead recreates the genre past with respect and fanboy awe.

What is most amazing is that I Sell the Dead was all shot on a micro-budget in actual locations on Staten Island. The basic technical virtuosity of this endeavor, on this budget, is simply astounding. The Hammer-era narrative framework is bulging with McQuaid’s energy, talent and ambition, and where most genre films would rest on the laurels of fantastic evocative monsters and special effects, I Sell the Dead soars because there is a narrative skill that is not often seen in this genre. It’s not just mere recreation that has inspired these filmmakers; it’s the desire to weave a yarn that captures your imagination and leads you down a fog-drenched path into a moor of buried fears and unknown shadows. This narrative impulse is what most clearly distinguishes McQuaid as a major new talent to watch. I Sell the Dead delivers the goods. Let’s hope it gets picked up and finds the mainstream audience that it deserves.

— Mike S. Ryan

Half-Life is now available on DVD

As I’ve written before, there are different types of cinematic ambition. Henry Poole is Here tells a commercial story, designed for a mass audience, in a manner that is visual and deeply respectful of its themes of death and faith. Because it does not attempt to mask its heavy themes behind snappy Juno-like dialogue or ironic comic plot twists, it is ambitious. There were also a few films at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival that were ambitious within the art house film market. Some of them worked better than others. For example, Anywhere USA was really funny and totally inventive and original in its staging, pacing and dramatic action. If it can trim around twenty minutes from its 125-minute length, it may become a great film. A few films like Time Crimes, Sleep Dealer and Reversion all dealt with the future and told stories that moved between alternative time lines, some with more success than others. My favorite film this Sundance, the one that works best for me and which I think displays the most directorial talent and ambition, is Half-Life by Jennifer Phang.

Essentially, in America, any film that attempts to break with the classical narrative tradition, the one established through the 19th Century novel, is ambitious. In the classical narrative tradition everything serves the story. The author’s hand remains unseen and the story unravels as a result of linear causality instigated by character goals, actions and reactions. In this tradition, any kind of hesitation or ambiguity is integrated into the story thrust as a suspense element. As soon as we start to engage the character’s and director’s subjectivity we are entering the land of the post-19th Century art film. Combine this with ambiguity and alienation for its own sake and the general recognition that reality is unknowable, and we then are working within a modern perspective. Though this is a standard description of 20th Century literary fiction, in film that perspective gets illustrated through spatial and temporal strategies. In the classical narrative film tradition, space exists only in relation to the character’s perspective, thus the use of the shot/reverse pattern. Once the camera starts to move without being motivated by a character we are empowering the author’s perspective; likewise, framing and editing that pushes our awareness of the world beyond the character’s perspective makes us aware of the hand of the director. A film that is told within multiple planes of narrative space, yet still maintains a consistent driving emotion is extremely rare. We often see an art film that may leap around in perspective, mostly for rhetorical or comic effect, but it is truly rare to be carried emotionally through a film that tells a multi-perspective story through a seamless integration of naturalistic action, animation and self consciously artificial CGI compositing. Half-Life exists on a whole other, higher level of cinematic ambition than any other film at Sundance this year. It is formally inventive, deeply personal and emotionally compelling, all on a tiny indie budget! This is ambitious indie filmmaking at its best!

In the strange semi-apocalyptic world of Half-Life the sun is getting too hot and all of Asia has flooded, sending flocks of refugee packed Cessna planes into the skies of California. The story description from the guide says it best: “Single mom Saura Wu and her two kids, Pam and Timothy, struggle to rebuild their family in the presence of a sinister, but charming, interloper. Pam seeks refuge in her object of desire, a young hipster named Scott who, in turn, attempts to jar his fundamentalist parents out of their denial of his gay identity. Timothy, meanwhile, stumbles upon a way to develop and hone his paranormal powers that he summons to alter everyone’s reality.”

This plot description doesn’t even start to capture the film’s mood of apocalyptic, global warming induced dread, its adolescent sexual terror and the plot’s domestic parent/child tension. All of these emotional themes are conveyed through a narrative voice that morphs effortlessly between naturalistic action, TV-like children’s show animation and sci-fi CGI scenes. All the while, the director’s voice drives the theme’s emotional thrust through all of these multiple narrative planes without ever losing control of its story velocity and lyrical, moody tone (great use of music). What holds it all together is in part Phang’s fantastic graphic intuitiveness. Compositions of the characters sitting on a couch, or sitting on a grassy hill, seem to perfectly fit into the animated story of a fish monster emerging out of the sea and likewise the color palette of the naturalistic suburban home seems perfectly matched to the CGI news reports that show futuristic apocalyptic events.

The overall effect of the film is one of compelling alienation wrapped up in a sad tragic vision of a world that is slowly eroding. Throughout the film sanity and peace disintegrates as the characters quietly and heroically try to get a toe hold while the world crumbles around them. It is an extremely compelling, visual film and I can’t wait to see it again so that I may better understand the mysteries of its formal magic.

— Mike S. Ryan

At the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, writer/director Craig Brewer (The Poor and Hungry, Hustle and Flow, Black Snake Moan) gave a sneak peak of his upcoming MTV web series down in the curtained basement of New Frontiers. $5 Cover is comprised of thirty eight-minute webisodes that feature a different Memphis musician going through a normal day leading up to the performance of a song. As in all of Brewer’s work, the true reality of living life on the edge of poverty is vividly conveyed and the struggle to make ends meet is inseparable from the struggle to create music.

The bite-size episodes (Brewer calls them ‘tracks’) combine reality-based drama with music performance in a tight compact form that often makes it feel like you are watching a mini-movie. This is due to the fact that the reality episode we witness is often a riff on the lyrics we hear the musician singing in the performance. In that sense each ‘track’ has a dramatic arc, which maximizes every minute with cumulative power as we gain more and more insight into both the artist and their lifestyle. By the time we get to the song performance we know the background of the lyrics because we have just lived through the musician’s life, which inspired the song.

In the first episode (A New Drummer), upright bass player/singer Amy Lavere is shocked to discover her boyfriend/drummer has been sleeping with her roommate Clare Grant (episode 2’s Head Change), forcing her to find a last minute replacement in order to record her latest song about, appropriately enough, wanting to kill the man she loves. In my favorite episode, Skills of the Father, a father tries to get his teenage son, AJ, to understand what a day of hard labor is like, but the son won’t have any of it. AJ wants to be a gangster rapper, which makes his father laugh, since he’s actually the kick-ass rapper Al Kapone. While recording a new jam, he gets his son to add his own verse in order to test his skills.

Though this general premise could result in something painfully akin to The Real World: Memphis, it’s amazing that the series instead feels genuine and extremely engaging. All of that is due in no small part to the fact that Brewer is a real film director and not a cheesy music video hack, and that the subjects of each episode are smart, talented, distinctive individuals and not boring wannabe American Idol stars. In that first episode, which is only eight minutes long, we get a genuine feel for who Amy is: fiercely independent, stubborn, vulnerable, strong, and dedicated singularly to her music. Yet the episode is not really a documentary because Amy and the other players (actual Memphis musicians and scenesters) are acting, and the dramatic situations are shot in reverse angles with a carefully placed camera. So either all of these musicians are also great actors, which may in fact be the case with Amy, or Brewer is just a wizard in getting consistently honest performances from non-pros. Either way, we are treated to a true insider’s view of life in Memphis as a struggling musician.

In $5 Cover, there are countless scenes of actual musicians creating, shaping, and refining their music. If you have ever seen Hustle and Flow, you know how well Brewer can bring the act of making music to life. Whatever you think of that movie, those moments in the studio are some of the most effective and dramatic scenes of creating music ever filmed. We are right there with these artists to hear the track build, fail, and then soar. To the outsider, the process may appear boring, but to someone like Brewer, there is drama in the constant rewriting, refining, replaying, and he knows how to build the drama through the accumulation of these musical layers. He makes the songwriting process the crux of his story.

$5 Cover is also a massive love letter to Memphis, one of this country’s greatest cities. Brewer loves his town and this series allows him to turn the camera on the reality of its many brilliant struggling musicians. It’s regional drama at its finest.

— Mike S. Ryan