bentenfilms

The GoodTimesKid

by James McNally on August 6, 2009 · 1 comment

in DVD

The GoodTimesKid

The GoodTimesKid (Director: Azazel Jacobs): Benten Films’ latest release is the second film of Azazel Jacobs, whose most recent film Momma’s Man received acclaim when it played the fest­ival cir­cuit in 2008. Though I haven’t yet seen Momma’s Man, I’m glad that its notices have sparked renewed interest in Jacobs’ earlier films.

There is no indic­a­tion exactly who the “GoodTimesKid” is, nor why the moniker is scrunched together without spaces, but the film itself doesn’t seem to spend much time wor­rying about stuff like that. Instead, we find ourselves in the com­pany of two men (both named Rodolfo Cano) and a woman, the girl­friend of one who over the course of one day and night seem­ingly migrates to the other. The fact that the amount of dia­logue is min­imal doesn’t seem to get in the way of the story. In fact, the min­im­alism and sim­pli­city leave a lasting impression.

Rodolfo I, as played by dir­ector Jacobs, is an angry and self-destructive man who decides to enlist in the army to get away from his girl­friend (Sara Diaz, looking at times uncan­nily like PJ Harvey). But somehow his enlist­ment notice goes instead to Rodolfo II (co-writer Gerardo Naranjo), a mellow guy living on a sail­boat. When both show up at the recruiting office, a series of events is set in motion which will result in Diaz spending the night on Rodolfo II’s sail­boat and pre­paring to leave Rodolfo I. But this is not a typ­ical love tri­angle, or a romantic comedy. All three of the char­ac­ters seem sad and unsat­is­fied with their lives. We know nothing of their fam­ilies or jobs, but they seem of little import­ance. In fact, the film begins on the morning of Rodolfo I’s birthday, and he ends up being pum­melled by red­necks in a bar rather than spending time with his girl­friend and friends at a birthday party she’s planned for him.

Despite the pres­ence of such root­less and, in Rodolfo I’s case, self-destructive char­ac­ters, the mel­an­choly is matched by a cer­tain light-heartedness. Perhaps it’s because of the scarcity of dia­logue, allowing us lingering looks at the actors’ faces. Or maybe it’s the laugh­ably mussed hair on the two Rodolfos. Or for that matter the gangly awk­ward­ness of Diaz. All three also play phys­ical comedy bits which owe a huge debt to the work of Charlie Chaplin. In any case, we end up caring very much about these people and their some­times inar­tic­u­late efforts to con­nect with each other. Even a ridicu­lously lame “fight scene” between the two Rodolfos ends with them falling into step with each other as they walk down a road. The final scene is mem­or­able in its auda­city. My favourite Gang of Four track unwinds its full length on the turntable as we survey the char­ac­ters one last time. Is the song an elegy, an apo­logy, or some­thing else? Does it promise action, or just more noise? It’s a pretty stun­ning finish.

The film’s min­is­cule budget (around $10,000, according to the enter­taining director’s com­mentary) hardly shows, except in one poorly-lit night shot on the beach. In all ways, the film­making is accom­plished and con­fident, and the actors’ com­fort with each other is evident. I also liked that the film was only as long as it needed to be, run­ning a brisk 77 minutes. This may be because, according to the com­mentary, the film was shot on stolen “short ends” of film, and they only had about 4.5 hours of neg­ative in total. It also affected the length of cer­tain shots, and the ability to shoot mul­tiple takes, but hon­estly, if you didn’t know that, you wouldn’t see any­thing in the fin­ished film that didn’t look pur­poseful and necessary.

Based on this tiny gem, which he and a small group of friends and volun­teers shot in two weeks, I’m very excited to catch up with Azazel Jacobs’ Momma’s Man and to see where he goes next.

Official site of the film

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: bentenfilms

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Team Picture

by James McNally on November 6, 2008

in DVD

Team Picture

Team Picture (Director: Kentucker Audley): Number 5 from indie dis­trib­utor Benten Films, Team Picture shares the “mumble­core” lo-fi slacker ethos of pre­vious releases like LOL (review) and Quiet City (review) and the rural working-class set­ting of The Guatemalan Handshake (review). But the film it reminds me of most is Frank V. Ross’ Present Company (review), mostly because of its mad­den­ingly inar­tic­u­late protagonist.

In this case, it’s David, played by dir­ector Andrew Nenninger (Kentucker Audley is a pseud­onym). He’s some­where in his twen­ties, living with his room­mate Eric, a self-described “really tall guy with a great per­son­ality.” It turns out, though, that neither of them have really great per­son­al­ities, or much per­son­ality at all. They spend most of their time just hanging out, drinking beer and loun­ging in a kiddie pool in their front yard. Neither of them seems to think more than five minutes into the future, and when David’s girl­friend breaks up with him near the begin­ning of the film, he seems oddly detached. Both of them aspire to some form of cre­ativity: David is writing songs on the guitar, and Eric hints at poems he’s writing (one of which he hil­ari­ously reads at an “open-mic” night later in the film). But I get the sense that this is just a way to avoid get­ting down to the everyday reality of working for a living. Though David does have a job, he soon quits. He’d been working at a sporting goods store man­aged by his mother’s boy­friend, and it seemed like some­thing she’d arranged for him. Though he’s eager to be free to do what he wants, he really doesn’t have any idea what that might be. As well, he knows that without the indul­gence and cod­dling of his family, he’d be com­pletely lost.

That doesn’t mean he’s close to them. Several excru­ci­ating con­ver­sa­tions show us that no matter what the social situ­ation, David is unable to func­tion. And though Eric is more chatty, he’s just as emo­tion­ally retarded. Though it’s actu­ally very funny in places, it becomes hard to watch these char­ac­ters for very long, and mer­ci­fully, the film clocks in at just 62 minutes. It doesn’t sur­prise me that a kiddie pool is the nexus of these guys’ lives, since it’s obvious they don’t want to leave child­hood behind.

As usual, Benten gives the film the deluxe treat­ment, with a com­mentary from both the dir­ector and actor/cinematographer Timothy Morton, who plays Eric. As well, a new short film, “Ginger Sand” is included as an epi­logue of sorts. In it, Eric and his girl­friend visit David and his girl­friend in Chicago. Though we’re not sure how much time has passed, it’s clear that in this new con­text, Eric’s eccent­ri­city just makes him look like an asshole. This was almost sadder than the ori­ginal film. Not coin­cid­ent­ally, the short was pro­duced by Frank V. Ross and shot by Joe Swanberg.

It’s really a bit dif­fi­cult to cri­ti­cize film­making like this. As I said in my review of Present Company, it feels like watching a doc­u­mentary, so calling the char­ac­ters annoying and infantile seems a bit per­sonal. The real test for Andrew Nenninger (he appar­ently chose the pseud­onym Kentucker Audley to hide the film’s exist­ence from his family!), and by exten­sion for all of the so-called “mumble­core” dir­ectors, will be whether he can climb out of his own char­acter to become a better film­maker and tell stories other than his own. I sin­cerely hope he can.

Buy Team Picture from Amazon.ca
Buy Team Picture from Amazon.com

The film’s MySpace page

6/10(6/10)

Tagged as: bentenfilms, independent, mumblecore

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The Guatemalan Handshake

by James McNally on May 29, 2008 · 1 comment

in DVD

The Guatemalan Handshake

The Guatemalan Handshake (2006, Director: Todd Rohal): The film’s tagline is “A feast for the senses, a chal­lenge for the brain” and that about sums it up. Todd Rohal has cre­ated what must be con­sidered the first “mumble­core” comedy and Benten Films has given it their usual loving and rev­er­en­tial treat­ment in this packed 2-disc DVD release.

Watching a film is usu­ally a dif­ferent type of exper­i­ence than reading a book. Generally, we used to watch films in large semi-public rooms with friends and a crowd of strangers. It was a shared exper­i­ence and the vibe of the audi­ence could influ­ence how we felt about the film later. Reading a book, on the other hand, is a sol­itary pur­suit. We can com­pare exper­i­ences later with others who have read the book, but it usu­ally doesn’t colour our impres­sions too much. Now that we have DVD, watching a film can be more like reading a book. And in the case of The Guatemalan Handshake, that’s a very good thing indeed. I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t watch this with your friends, although I think that is what I’m saying. This is the sort of film you might want to form your own opinion of before sharing it.

A plot sum­mary won’t help much. Donald Turnupseed (Will Oldham) van­ishes after a mys­ter­ious power failure and the rest of the film fol­lows his friends and family around, including his preg­nant girl­friend, his father (who seems to miss his unique orange elec­tric car more than his son), and his best friend, 10-year old Turkeylegs, who serves as our nar­rator. There are ref­er­ences to demoli­tion derby, turtles, boy scouts, roller skating, and lactose intol­er­ance. We meet a man with 18 daugh­ters all from dif­ferent mothers, and a woman who attends her own funeral. It’s all utterly sur­real, often silly, but with a haunting under­tone of mel­an­choly. I laughed a lot, was gobsmacked more than once with abso­lutely gor­geous visuals and music, and have been thinking about this goofy-on-the-surface film for days. It’s no sur­prise that the essay in the DVD booklet was written by David Gordon Green, whose gor­geous and soulful George Washington kept pop­ping into my head as the film progressed.

Director Todd Rohal is worth watching.

Official site of the film
Benten Films DVD
Trailer

Purchase the DVD from Amazon.com
Purchase the DVD from Amazon.ca
Purchase the DVD from the offi­cial site and get a free bonus DVD of Todd Rohal’s short films

8/10(8/10)

UPDATE: Now that I’ve formed my opinion by watching the film alone, I’m looking for­ward to seeing it in a theatre with other people. Generation DIY is bringing it to Toronto on June 22 at pre­cisely 3:15pm, when it will be screening at the Bloor Cinema.

Tagged as: bentenfilms, independent, mumblecore

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Quiet City/Dance Party USA

by James McNally on January 28, 2008 · 4 comments

in DVD

Quiet City/Dance Party USA

In her gen­er­ally neg­ative appraisal of the “mumble­core” move­ment in the November/December 2007 issue of Film Comment, Amy Taubin reserves praise for the two fea­tures written and dir­ected by Aaron Katz, calling him a “breakout talent” and praising both the “lyric beauty” of his cine­ma­to­graphy (although acknow­ledging he used dif­ferent DPs for each film) and his “expressive” sound design. I’d seen the posters for both films, and some stills and the trailer for Quiet City, and was intrigued. Though I’m still a mumble­core novice, I’ve made some assump­tions of my own, and before even seeing Katz’s films, thought he had a much more developed visual sense than some of the others. With pre­con­cep­tions in mind, I sat down to watch both films this weekend, thanks to the gor­geous DVD package from Benten Films, avail­able January 29, 2008. In addi­tion to both films, the DVD package fea­tures dir­ector and cast com­ment­aries on both films, altern­ative and extended scenes, an early short film, footage from Quiet City’s New York premiere, and more. Benten are quickly becoming the Criterion of the indie film world.

Quiet City (2007, Director: Aaron Katz): In its brief 78 minutes, Quiet City was able to accom­plish some­thing quite remark­able. By the end of the film, I was begin­ning to care about a couple of people whom I almost dis­missed at the start. Though the script still feels a bit under­cooked in places, and the sound mix often had me straining to hear what was being said, the editing and acting actu­ally felt nat­ural so that I jour­neyed with the char­ac­ters from awk­ward­ness to curi­osity to empathy to genuine connection.

The story arc is modest, to say the least, and I wouldn’t con­sider my plot sum­mary to be spoiling any­thing, but just in case, con­sider this a spoiler alert and skip to next para­graph if you like. Jamie (Erin Fisher) arrives in Brooklyn toward evening. At the subway stop, she asks stranger Charlie (Cris Lankenau) dir­ec­tions to a diner where she’s sup­posed to meet her friend Samantha. When Samantha fails to show, Charlie and her spend the rest of the evening and the next day together. For the first ten minutes, their twentyso­mething slacker (lack of) vocab­u­lary was driving me nuts, with each “like” hit­ting my eardrums like a sharpened stick. But it’s remark­able how their dia­logue improves as their nervous­ness dis­sip­ates, and before long, they’re teasing each other good-naturedly. There’s a def­inite attrac­tion between them, but each is careful not to spoil it by making a wrong move. The film really catches fire as the two attend a gal­lery event the next evening. At a party after­ward, they sep­arate, Charlie chat­ting ami­ably with strangers about nothing much, and Jamie having a ser­ious con­ver­sa­tion with her friend Robin about Robin’s fear of intimacy. In her friend’s halting speech, com­plete with more adoles­cent “likes,” we see how far Jamie has moved in just a short time. When they leave the party together, it’s as if they were meant to be together, so dif­ferent do they seem from anyone else they’ve encountered. They share a lovely chaste moment of affec­tion on the subway and the film ends.

Katz’s achieve­ment is to accom­plish this in such a short space of time, and with no grand speeches or declar­a­tions of love. The plot sounds very sim­ilar to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, a film I’ve not actu­ally seen, but knowing Linklater, that film is bound to be more lofty and chatty and intel­lec­tual than this one. And per­haps less real for that reason. As a mar­ried man in my 40s, I can cringe at some of the things these char­ac­ters say, but it’s only because they’re acting within their lim­it­a­tions. Their awk­ward­ness and lack of dir­ec­tion are genuine, as is their des­perate desire to hide them beneath a layer of cool.

The cine­ma­to­graphy was gen­er­ally excel­lent, bathing Brooklyn in a warm and golden light. There were a few occa­sions where a tripod would have been wel­come, though, and a few of the camera set ups seemed a little slap­dash, but the feeling of the images was per­fect. As was the music, which was used spar­ingly and to good emo­tional effect.

I’m quite sure that Quiet City will reward repeat view­ings, and I’m looking for­ward to listening to the cast and dir­ector com­ment­aries to see how Katz man­aged to turn my feel­ings around so quickly. It seems a little like magic.

Quiet City poster

7/10(7/10)

Dance Party USA (2006, Director: Aaron Katz): Although released in 2006, this film was actu­ally shot in 2004, and so seeing it after Quiet City, I expected to notice to be a huge leap for­ward in Katz’s devel­op­ment as a dir­ector. Instead, I found myself enjoying the earlier film even more. Similar in struc­ture and even in theme, there is a pretty big dif­fer­ence in tone and in at least one of the char­ac­ters. I found Dance Party USA more direct and the script was much tighter.

Set among a group of high school stu­dents in Portland, the film shares the basic arc of Quiet City. Over the course of a day or two, a male prot­ag­onist reaches out to a some­what mys­ter­ious woman and the film ends with them reaching a sweet and rather tent­ative con­nec­tion. In the case of Dance Party USA, our prot­ag­onist is the teen­aged Lothario Gus, first seen brag­ging about the sexual con­quest of an underage girl to his vacuous friend Bill. Played by Cole Pennsinger, Gus is a guy on the brink of leaving his adoles­cent per­sona behind him. His Beavis and Butthead exchanges with Bill are leaving him unful­filled, and he’s looking for a more real con­nec­tion than the “hook-ups” he seems able to achieve with ease. One night at a Fourth of July house party, he meets Jessica, sit­ting alone out­side. She’s a friend of his ex, and she’s aware of his repu­ta­tion. But he sits down and, almost like he’s in a con­fes­sion booth, he begins to tell her about some­thing he’s done in the recent past, some­thing that was very wrong. Somehow, he feels he can trust her, and after sit­ting silently through his con­fes­sion, she lights two spark­lers and hands him one. “Do you want to go some­where?” she asks. Each sees some­thing in the other that no one else has yet seen, and each wants to be that some­thing more than any­thing else. Gus is actu­ally finding that being a horny teen­ager is get­ting in the way of him finding a real con­nec­tion. Jessica is more of an enigma, but played by the lovely Anna Kavan, she oozes mys­tery, if not depth.

Later in the film, Gus attempts to make things right for his earlier mis­deed, but finds he’s awk­ward and unsure what to do. And his later exchanges with Bill are frankly hil­arious, as he talks about wanting to pursue some­thing cre­ative (pho­to­graphy, painting) and then asks Bill for a hug. There is a lot of dia­logue in this film, com­pared to Quiet City. The exciting thing is to see the drunken sin­cerity of teens at a beerbash devel­oping into the first halting attempts at full-time adult sin­cerity. Pennsinger and Kavan both show their vul­ner­ab­ility in dif­ferent ways. Gus has to escape a per­sona, albeit one that has served him well for some time, while Jessica has just seemed unim­pressed with the quality of the men she’s been around, and is opening her­self up for per­haps the first time. Maybe it’s because I’m more of a dia­logue person than most, but I found these per­form­ances stronger than the ones with fewer words in Quiet City.

All in all, a great pair of films and a great intro­duc­tion to an exciting young director.

Dance Party USA poster

8/10(8/10)

Buy Quiet City/Dance Party USA from Amazon.ca

Buy Quiet City/Dance Party USA from Amazon.com

UPDATE 6/21/08 Both of these films played at the Toronto stop of the Generation DIY mini-festival which is trav­el­ling across Canada in the next few weeks. Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Aaron Katz held after the screening of Dance Party USA. The first loud voice is your humble author asking a ques­tion, the second loud voice belongs to my friend and col­league Bob Turnbull, and that’s Canada AM’s film critic Richard Crouse hosting the session:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 13:10

Tagged as: bentenfilms, generationdiy, independent, mumblecore

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LOL

by James McNally on November 10, 2007

in DVD

LOL

LOL (Director: Joe Swanberg, 2006): With the back­lash against the so-called “mumble­core” move­ment already starting, I thought I’d better review this film now. I’ll admit that this is only the second film I’ve seen that falls within the bounds of the loose grouping of actors and dir­ectors that go by that moniker. The first was The Puffy Chair (review), by the Duplass brothers, which was pretty good. Not great, but good. LOL evoked the same reac­tion from me. Director Joe Swanberg writes and stars with his friends Kevin Bewersdorf (who also com­posed the music) and C. Mason Wells as three college-age guys who are so caught up in their com­mu­nic­a­tion “tech­no­logy” that they don’t do much actual com­mu­nic­ating, espe­cially with the women in their lives. As a con­firmed gadget lover (but, strangely, cell-phone hater), I found a lot of humour in the film, and I could relate just a bit to some of the char­ac­ters’ bad beha­viour. Alex (Bewersdorf) becomes so obsessed with a woman he’s seen naked online that he totally misses a chance for a rela­tion­ship with a real woman (the won­der­fully dorky Tipper Watson). Chris’ sep­ar­a­tion from his girl­friend for the summer leads him to try to con­nect with her through tech­no­logy, but only on his terms. And Tim (Swanberg) can’t seem to tear him­self away from his laptop or his cell­phone long enough to have an actual con­ver­sa­tion, espe­cially with his sorely neg­lected girl­friend Ada (Brigid Reagan). This cast reminded me a bit of Whit Stillman’s ensemble in Metropolitan (1990), one of my favourite indie films. But the writing isn’t nearly as good, nor are the per­form­ances. Still, the situ­ations are real­istic enough, and the char­ac­ters are flawed but like­able. When you realize just how young Swanberg and his pals really are (he’s 26), and how prodi­gious his output has been (he’s aver­aged a fea­ture film a year since 2005’s Kissing On The Mouth, plus dir­ected a series of web­casts for Nerve.com), you have to be at least a little bit impressed.

“Mumblecore” seems to have been as much a cre­ation of the indie film press as any sort of self-conscious “school” of film­making. Swanberg just seems to be canny enough to use his friends as col­lab­or­ators as often as pos­sible. Unfortunately, that has its lim­it­a­tions. Now that he’s estab­lished that he can write and direct, I’d like to see him try working with some pro­fes­sional actors. Watching LOL seemed just a bit too much like watching his home movies. If the back­lash has truly begun, that might be just the cata­lyst that Swanberg and his friends need to make some wider con­nec­tions. I’m looking for­ward to seeing where the mumble­core gang go next.

Official site for the film

7/10(7/10)

P.S. For the record, I found Amy Taubin’s art­icle in Film Comment (the “back­lash” art­icle linked above) to be incred­ibly mean-spirited toward Joe Swanberg. It will be inter­esting to see the fal­lout from what looks to be a per­sonal attack.

Tagged as: bentenfilms, DVD, independent, mumblecore

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