After a lifetime of trying, I guess I've figured out that film festivals and I weren't meant for each other. The problem isn't just that there's a relatively scarce amount of films I actually like, but that even those films are seen under less-than-ideal conditions. If I'm going to devote myself to making films as well as I can, attending festivals (at least ones that don't include my own work) no longer seems like part of the equation.
In other news, I'm about to finish putting together a cut of my movie. Feature? More like 34 minutes. I guess the downgrade should bum me out, but given that it calls for cheaper festival submission fees and that I'd very much like to forget about the excised footage, I'm happy with how things are going.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Day 3
PRO:
At the End of Daybreak (Ho Yuhang)
mixed:
Melody for a Street Organ (Kira Muratova)
Only in a Muratova film do characters lie peacefully while screaming, grieve while hiccuping, console with peculiar hollowness. Ostensibly about two ghostlike, chubby kids struggling to find their father, her latest brims with a fetish for loud personalities and the deeply nasty irony that scarcely shows itself yet seems omnipresent. While this is not per se an engaging film, Muratova has a rich, indefatiguable sense of counterpoint: despicable gluttony and exuberant joy of gambling in the same shot; the film takes care to distinguish that a homeless woman’s singing is well-liked and her stench despised. And yet this is all reductive: Muratova’s purely musical direction of actors demands to be experienced, exhausting as it is.
Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe)
con:
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
I walked out 15 minutes early to get to the Ho Yuhang, although Haneke’s latest contains just a few actively bad moments: the doctor scolding his wife, for example, feels like Bergman at his worst, a painful display of cruelty revealing nothing about character. Mostly it’s solemn—sometimes to good effect, when sadism is downplayed—but I don’t think Haneke’s aversion to humor does him any favors. Stilted attempts to show social awkwardness show the director’s clumsy hand with actors, with arbitrary pauses in conversation standing in for rhythm and nuance.
W/O:
All Fall Down (Philip Hoffman)
Hoffman’s home movie-cum-video essay demands its audience’s acceptance of its author’s twisted ethics early on, aligning us with himself against the Man early on by appropriating his own footage after missing out on royalties. I couldn’t take it, and hurried out after about 20 minutes, following the second title displaying the amount of money for which Hoffman just compensated himself by putting his own images onscreen. The guy’s like a disgruntled Jonas Mekas; can't wait for the sequel, As I Was Moving Ahead, I Occasionally Encountered Investors Who Totally Ripped Me Off.
At the End of Daybreak (Ho Yuhang)
mixed:
Melody for a Street Organ (Kira Muratova)
Only in a Muratova film do characters lie peacefully while screaming, grieve while hiccuping, console with peculiar hollowness. Ostensibly about two ghostlike, chubby kids struggling to find their father, her latest brims with a fetish for loud personalities and the deeply nasty irony that scarcely shows itself yet seems omnipresent. While this is not per se an engaging film, Muratova has a rich, indefatiguable sense of counterpoint: despicable gluttony and exuberant joy of gambling in the same shot; the film takes care to distinguish that a homeless woman’s singing is well-liked and her stench despised. And yet this is all reductive: Muratova’s purely musical direction of actors demands to be experienced, exhausting as it is.
Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe)
con:
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
I walked out 15 minutes early to get to the Ho Yuhang, although Haneke’s latest contains just a few actively bad moments: the doctor scolding his wife, for example, feels like Bergman at his worst, a painful display of cruelty revealing nothing about character. Mostly it’s solemn—sometimes to good effect, when sadism is downplayed—but I don’t think Haneke’s aversion to humor does him any favors. Stilted attempts to show social awkwardness show the director’s clumsy hand with actors, with arbitrary pauses in conversation standing in for rhythm and nuance.
W/O:
All Fall Down (Philip Hoffman)
Hoffman’s home movie-cum-video essay demands its audience’s acceptance of its author’s twisted ethics early on, aligning us with himself against the Man early on by appropriating his own footage after missing out on royalties. I couldn’t take it, and hurried out after about 20 minutes, following the second title displaying the amount of money for which Hoffman just compensated himself by putting his own images onscreen. The guy’s like a disgruntled Jonas Mekas; can't wait for the sequel, As I Was Moving Ahead, I Occasionally Encountered Investors Who Totally Ripped Me Off.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Days 1 and 2
pro:
La Pivellina (Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel)
Plays admirably loosely with latent tension for most of its running time, then ends, astonishingly, on exactly the right note. Covi and Frimmel (apparently their own 2-person crew) get one of the most amazingly natural and dynamic child performances I've seen, along with several adult ones to rival it. The "invisible" Dardennes-esque handheld camerawork, never in the wrong place, cements the team as naturals. I'm slightly unsure whether the various character threads pay off structurally, but the feeling upon exit was that they did.
Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo)
Starting to feel as if Hong, as of late, is caring less and less about structure and more about good scenes. Which is fine--much of the first half of his latest is, for this Hong aficionado, hilarious, deriving considerable laughs from awkward sycophantic encounters, and the dream sequence here is his finest yet--but I left with the vague feeling that I wouldn't have trouble indicting Hong for self-plagiarism, and much of the inventiveness of his early/mid-00's work stemmed from the experience of stepping back and looking at the big picture, which is all but non-existent here. Also, what is with the ever-so-slight zooms? For what little they add in precision, is Hong ignorant of or merely indifferent to their strangeness?
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)
Best scene of the festival and perhaps all year is the bar conversation between Yassine and Celine, which is as low-key as it is intensely moving. Few works of art so evocatively straddle the thin line between spiritual and carnal love. However, the Nassir material is nearly all either clumsy or deeply flawed, tainting a rigorous Bresson imitation like a, well, chatty pedagogue. Why does Dumont go out of his way to make Celine appear relatively normal and socialized only to well... y'know? I'm also uncertain that Dumont was wise to begin treating his lead actress like Maria Falconetti. Nevertheless, this picture is front- and back-loaded with beautiful stuff, and speaking of intensely moving, it's nice to see the oft-maligned Dumont be applauded at a TIFF screening for (perhaps) the first time ever.
mixed:
Face (Tsai Ming-Liang)
Most of the pleasure I took away from this movie involves imagining the phone call Tsai gave Mathieu Amalric, explaining the nature of the latter's "cameo," itself a self-contained Warholian short. Otherwise, WTFOMGBBQ.
con:
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Inscrutably pretentious, or pretentiously inscrutable. Either way, forced touches like jump-cutting non-diegetic music, deliberately obscure dialogue, and deliberately obscure camerawork a la Lucrecia Martel add flame to the fire. Can't figure out whether the film's defenders find it absurdly funny or incisive: the humor seemed to me akin to the joke in Period Film X when Character Y remarks that Real Life Event Z would never actually happen, and as far as taking the movie seriously, I found the actors so mysteriously mannered that the audience must either A) invent an unseen Big Brother type or B) diagnose every character as severely autistic in order to grant performance tone meaning.
CON:
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)
Almodovar appears to have replaced any productive irony or distance from melodrama with irritating, tongue-in-cheek asides. The maturity of his late style has apparently molded into smugness. Will he find his way again? I’m tempted not to find out…
L'enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea)
The psychedelic screen tests surely merit a “huh,”; but I’d follow that with a prompt “let’s move on,” which Clouzot fanboy Bromberg heartily delays. As someone who’s just wrapped his first feature, it’s insulting to be fed anecdotes of the director’s borderline-incompetence—Clouzot appeared nervous and evasive, retook and reshot scenes endlessly—along with the implication that these qualities are somehow beneficial. If they are, prove it, rather than relying on the facile notion that madness = genius. The footage we see here, albeit out of context, is certainly less than phenomenal; a single YouTube clip of Josef von Sternberg’s unfinished I, Claudius struck me as more promising than anything here. Attempts to recreate the original L’enfer also ring hollow because Claude Chabrol, whom many cinephiles, including myself, consider superior to Clouzot, has already made it in full.
La Pivellina (Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel)
Plays admirably loosely with latent tension for most of its running time, then ends, astonishingly, on exactly the right note. Covi and Frimmel (apparently their own 2-person crew) get one of the most amazingly natural and dynamic child performances I've seen, along with several adult ones to rival it. The "invisible" Dardennes-esque handheld camerawork, never in the wrong place, cements the team as naturals. I'm slightly unsure whether the various character threads pay off structurally, but the feeling upon exit was that they did.
Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo)
Starting to feel as if Hong, as of late, is caring less and less about structure and more about good scenes. Which is fine--much of the first half of his latest is, for this Hong aficionado, hilarious, deriving considerable laughs from awkward sycophantic encounters, and the dream sequence here is his finest yet--but I left with the vague feeling that I wouldn't have trouble indicting Hong for self-plagiarism, and much of the inventiveness of his early/mid-00's work stemmed from the experience of stepping back and looking at the big picture, which is all but non-existent here. Also, what is with the ever-so-slight zooms? For what little they add in precision, is Hong ignorant of or merely indifferent to their strangeness?
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)
Best scene of the festival and perhaps all year is the bar conversation between Yassine and Celine, which is as low-key as it is intensely moving. Few works of art so evocatively straddle the thin line between spiritual and carnal love. However, the Nassir material is nearly all either clumsy or deeply flawed, tainting a rigorous Bresson imitation like a, well, chatty pedagogue. Why does Dumont go out of his way to make Celine appear relatively normal and socialized only to well... y'know? I'm also uncertain that Dumont was wise to begin treating his lead actress like Maria Falconetti. Nevertheless, this picture is front- and back-loaded with beautiful stuff, and speaking of intensely moving, it's nice to see the oft-maligned Dumont be applauded at a TIFF screening for (perhaps) the first time ever.
mixed:
Face (Tsai Ming-Liang)
Most of the pleasure I took away from this movie involves imagining the phone call Tsai gave Mathieu Amalric, explaining the nature of the latter's "cameo," itself a self-contained Warholian short. Otherwise, WTFOMGBBQ.
con:
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Inscrutably pretentious, or pretentiously inscrutable. Either way, forced touches like jump-cutting non-diegetic music, deliberately obscure dialogue, and deliberately obscure camerawork a la Lucrecia Martel add flame to the fire. Can't figure out whether the film's defenders find it absurdly funny or incisive: the humor seemed to me akin to the joke in Period Film X when Character Y remarks that Real Life Event Z would never actually happen, and as far as taking the movie seriously, I found the actors so mysteriously mannered that the audience must either A) invent an unseen Big Brother type or B) diagnose every character as severely autistic in order to grant performance tone meaning.
CON:
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)
Almodovar appears to have replaced any productive irony or distance from melodrama with irritating, tongue-in-cheek asides. The maturity of his late style has apparently molded into smugness. Will he find his way again? I’m tempted not to find out…
L'enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea)
The psychedelic screen tests surely merit a “huh,”; but I’d follow that with a prompt “let’s move on,” which Clouzot fanboy Bromberg heartily delays. As someone who’s just wrapped his first feature, it’s insulting to be fed anecdotes of the director’s borderline-incompetence—Clouzot appeared nervous and evasive, retook and reshot scenes endlessly—along with the implication that these qualities are somehow beneficial. If they are, prove it, rather than relying on the facile notion that madness = genius. The footage we see here, albeit out of context, is certainly less than phenomenal; a single YouTube clip of Josef von Sternberg’s unfinished I, Claudius struck me as more promising than anything here. Attempts to recreate the original L’enfer also ring hollow because Claude Chabrol, whom many cinephiles, including myself, consider superior to Clouzot, has already made it in full.
Friday, August 28, 2009
TIFF '09 Schedule
Hey all. An update on the movie: I'm a few days away from being wrapped. It's alternately been exhausting, exciting, and maddening, but nothing matters per se until I'm in front of an editing program, putting together the pieces.
That said, my first stop after the shoot will be, as usual, this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Who knows how many of these screenings I'll land, but this is the ticket order I sent:
Thu 10
L'enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea)
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)
Fri 11
Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo)
Face (Tsai Ming-liang)
La Pivellina (Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel)
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Sat 12
Antichrist (Lars von Trier)
Melody for a Street Organ (Kira Muratova)
Irene (Alain Cavalier)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
Kelin (Ermek Tursunov)
Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe)
Sun 13
[La Pere de mes enfants (Mia Hansen-Løve)]
The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov)
At the End of Daybreak (Ho Yuhang)
Independencia (Raya Martin)
Should I Really Do It? (Ismail Necmi)
Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)
Mon 14
A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen)
Survival of the Dead (George A. Romero)
Karaoke (Chris Chong Chan Fui)
Mall Girls (Katarzyna Roslaniec)
The Front Line (Renato De Maria)
Tue 15
Wild Grass (Alain Resnais)
Soul Kitchen (Fatih Akin)
Lebanon (Samuel Maoz)
Between Two Worlds (Vimukthi Jayasundara)
Tales From the Golden Age (Cristian Mungiu et al.)
Wed 16
Partir (Catherine Corsini) [Plan to swap for Leslie My Lame Is Evil (Reginald Harkema)]
Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story (Yousry Nasrallah)
Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz)
Every Day Is a Holiday (Dima El-Horr)
A Brand New Life (Ounie Lecomte)
Thu 17
Ajami (Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani)
Jaffa (Keren Yedaya)
La Donation (Bernard Emond)
The Search (Wan Ma Cai Dan)
The Happiest Girl in the World (Radu Jude)
Fri 18
Vincere (Marco Bellocchio)
Men on the Bridge (Asli Özge)
Huacho (Alejandro Fernández Almendras)
I Killed My Mother (Xavier Dolan)
Spring Fever (Lou Ye)
Nymph (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang)
Sat 19
Adrift (Bui Thac Chuyen)
White Material (Claire Denis)
Eyes Wide Open (Haim Tabakman)
Mother (Bong Joon-ho)
Happy End (Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu)
That said, my first stop after the shoot will be, as usual, this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Who knows how many of these screenings I'll land, but this is the ticket order I sent:
Thu 10
L'enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea)
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)
Fri 11
Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo)
Face (Tsai Ming-liang)
La Pivellina (Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel)
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Sat 12
Antichrist (Lars von Trier)
Melody for a Street Organ (Kira Muratova)
Irene (Alain Cavalier)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
Kelin (Ermek Tursunov)
Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe)
Sun 13
[La Pere de mes enfants (Mia Hansen-Løve)]
The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov)
At the End of Daybreak (Ho Yuhang)
Independencia (Raya Martin)
Should I Really Do It? (Ismail Necmi)
Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)
Mon 14
A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen)
Survival of the Dead (George A. Romero)
Karaoke (Chris Chong Chan Fui)
Mall Girls (Katarzyna Roslaniec)
The Front Line (Renato De Maria)
Tue 15
Wild Grass (Alain Resnais)
Soul Kitchen (Fatih Akin)
Lebanon (Samuel Maoz)
Between Two Worlds (Vimukthi Jayasundara)
Tales From the Golden Age (Cristian Mungiu et al.)
Wed 16
Partir (Catherine Corsini) [Plan to swap for Leslie My Lame Is Evil (Reginald Harkema)]
Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story (Yousry Nasrallah)
Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz)
Every Day Is a Holiday (Dima El-Horr)
A Brand New Life (Ounie Lecomte)
Thu 17
Ajami (Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani)
Jaffa (Keren Yedaya)
La Donation (Bernard Emond)
The Search (Wan Ma Cai Dan)
The Happiest Girl in the World (Radu Jude)
Fri 18
Vincere (Marco Bellocchio)
Men on the Bridge (Asli Özge)
Huacho (Alejandro Fernández Almendras)
I Killed My Mother (Xavier Dolan)
Spring Fever (Lou Ye)
Nymph (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang)
Sat 19
Adrift (Bui Thac Chuyen)
White Material (Claire Denis)
Eyes Wide Open (Haim Tabakman)
Mother (Bong Joon-ho)
Happy End (Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu)
Monday, May 25, 2009
Some notes, and a possible hiatus.
Hey all. Remember that feature I mentioned in the last post? Well, things have changed in the past week and a half and I just might be shooting it in July. Since I'm going to be spending the next month(s) prepping for it, in addition to summer coursework and an internship, there's no feasible way I can regularly manage this thing, but considering how infrequently updated it has been anyway, maybe things won't especially change. I don't know. I probably won't have time to watch much except perhaps, say, the occasional first-tier Rohmer, because I can't think of a better way to flex my filmmaking intuition. I'm approaching the busiest summer of my life, no doubt, and it'd be nice to just get everything I've written recently out there.
PRO:
La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, 1967)
The Champ (King Vidor, 1931)
I’m beginning to get the hang of Vidor’s various good points: pulling the camera back from a group or even having a character turn away from the camera when things get emotional; flat delivery of dialogue written to indicate trust, used here to create one of cinema’s most ambiguous father-son relationships; a character (Linda here, Dora in The Wedding Night) whose affection is undesirable only so far as it’s out of sync with the beloved’s conflicted nature.
The Threepenny Opera (G.W. Pabst, 1931)
One envies the rich set design and array of extras, which allow Pabst to delicately emphasize shadowy peripheral business over the menace of the story. There’s heavily wrought satire about, rendered in really interesting ways: witness, for instance, how Polly sounds most sinister when she talks about transcending petty crime, or when she’s being victimized by her family.
pro:
Gift From Above (Dover Koshashvili, 2003)
An ensemble piece, steeped in cultural traditions I don’t entirely understand, but vibrant, funny and fearless enough to rival Late Marriage. Actually, Koshashvili’s implementation of nudity can feel borderline gratuitous: there’s no special reason, for example, to show budding perv Zaza’s genitalia sightings. But the film is blessedly casual about it.
The Scout’s Exploit (Boris Barnet, 1947)
Platinum Blonde (Frank Capra, 1931)
See entry on The Wedding Night: this device sticks out like a sore thumb when you’re exposed to it multiple times within the course of a week. Romance with Gallagher goes from tenderly repressed to tediously obvious; same with disdain for rich lifestyle. Stew’s self-aggrandizing speech foretells of a later, less restrained Capra. But the elite, armed with both dignity and snappy one-liners, occasionally show Stew up for the cruelty of his wit.
Kameradschaft (G.W. Pabst, 1931)
This looks like propaganda in retrospect, but without turning a blind eye to the dangerous appeal of sentiment. A precursor to today’s correctives (cf. Lost) to war-time xenophobia: Germans come off worse, unduly resenting the French, who are either beautiful or pitiable, and at worst sentimental. Ideologically tedious but very well constructed, often enough that the construction interferes with the tedium.
Bountiful Summer (Boris Barnet, 1950)
Not major Barnet, but never less than pleasant, this musical comedy offers ample drama without once straying from its socialist leanings.
Girls About Town (George Cukor, 1931)
Joel McCrea’s Jim skirts the line between complexity and having it both ways: he’s boring and shy, but also clever and charming. Somehow, although the film never beats you over the head with one quality or the other, the mixture is more muddled than penetrating. Likewise, the Wanda-Marie friendship bears some liking to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—materialism vs. romance = codependence—but in execution, it’s a tad blandly agreeable.
mixed:
Boat People (Ann Hui, 1982)
Utterly conventional, except that Akutagawa is a brutal, sleazy hero, and Hui (just barely) gets some mileage out of emphasizing this when the script doesn’t exactly call for it. The To Minh subplot, on the other hand, is hopeless sensationalism.
Literature:
pro:
The Last Post (Ford Madox Ford, 1928)
Sheer collapse, of Tietjen’s propriety, Sylvia’s mania, Mark’s arrogance. Everyone must concede to Fate. But things feel anything but thematically blunt. Why does Ford turn his back on the core of the series? Audacious but puzzling. It’s hard not to genuflect before Ford’s erudite, tightly woven prose, even when it puzzles me.
Divisadero (Michael Ondaatje, 2007)
No One Belongs Here More Than You (Miranda July, 2007)
PRO:
La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, 1967)
The Champ (King Vidor, 1931)
I’m beginning to get the hang of Vidor’s various good points: pulling the camera back from a group or even having a character turn away from the camera when things get emotional; flat delivery of dialogue written to indicate trust, used here to create one of cinema’s most ambiguous father-son relationships; a character (Linda here, Dora in The Wedding Night) whose affection is undesirable only so far as it’s out of sync with the beloved’s conflicted nature.
The Threepenny Opera (G.W. Pabst, 1931)
One envies the rich set design and array of extras, which allow Pabst to delicately emphasize shadowy peripheral business over the menace of the story. There’s heavily wrought satire about, rendered in really interesting ways: witness, for instance, how Polly sounds most sinister when she talks about transcending petty crime, or when she’s being victimized by her family.
pro:
Gift From Above (Dover Koshashvili, 2003)
An ensemble piece, steeped in cultural traditions I don’t entirely understand, but vibrant, funny and fearless enough to rival Late Marriage. Actually, Koshashvili’s implementation of nudity can feel borderline gratuitous: there’s no special reason, for example, to show budding perv Zaza’s genitalia sightings. But the film is blessedly casual about it.
The Scout’s Exploit (Boris Barnet, 1947)
Platinum Blonde (Frank Capra, 1931)
See entry on The Wedding Night: this device sticks out like a sore thumb when you’re exposed to it multiple times within the course of a week. Romance with Gallagher goes from tenderly repressed to tediously obvious; same with disdain for rich lifestyle. Stew’s self-aggrandizing speech foretells of a later, less restrained Capra. But the elite, armed with both dignity and snappy one-liners, occasionally show Stew up for the cruelty of his wit.
Kameradschaft (G.W. Pabst, 1931)
This looks like propaganda in retrospect, but without turning a blind eye to the dangerous appeal of sentiment. A precursor to today’s correctives (cf. Lost) to war-time xenophobia: Germans come off worse, unduly resenting the French, who are either beautiful or pitiable, and at worst sentimental. Ideologically tedious but very well constructed, often enough that the construction interferes with the tedium.
Bountiful Summer (Boris Barnet, 1950)
Not major Barnet, but never less than pleasant, this musical comedy offers ample drama without once straying from its socialist leanings.
Girls About Town (George Cukor, 1931)
Joel McCrea’s Jim skirts the line between complexity and having it both ways: he’s boring and shy, but also clever and charming. Somehow, although the film never beats you over the head with one quality or the other, the mixture is more muddled than penetrating. Likewise, the Wanda-Marie friendship bears some liking to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—materialism vs. romance = codependence—but in execution, it’s a tad blandly agreeable.
mixed:
Boat People (Ann Hui, 1982)
Utterly conventional, except that Akutagawa is a brutal, sleazy hero, and Hui (just barely) gets some mileage out of emphasizing this when the script doesn’t exactly call for it. The To Minh subplot, on the other hand, is hopeless sensationalism.
Literature:
pro:
The Last Post (Ford Madox Ford, 1928)
Sheer collapse, of Tietjen’s propriety, Sylvia’s mania, Mark’s arrogance. Everyone must concede to Fate. But things feel anything but thematically blunt. Why does Ford turn his back on the core of the series? Audacious but puzzling. It’s hard not to genuflect before Ford’s erudite, tightly woven prose, even when it puzzles me.
Divisadero (Michael Ondaatje, 2007)
No One Belongs Here More Than You (Miranda July, 2007)
Saturday, May 16, 2009
The Zen Master
I shot and edited this short video yesterday. Couldn't have done it without the help of my former roommate Frank Agrama, an accomplished filmmaker in his own right, whose camera was used. (Frank also plays the drummer.) With the project so fresh in my mind, any kind of distance on my part is pretty much impossible, but I basically consider this a quick warm-up before I start to think seriously about making a feature. So, with that in mind, here it is:
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