independent

Lovers of Hate

by James McNally on October 3, 2010 · 1 comment

in Netflix

Lovers of Hate

Lovers of Hate (Director: Bryan Poyser): I’m happy to use this review to intro­duce a new cat­egory on the blog. Late last month, Netflix finally brought their streaming movie ser­vice to Canada. Sure there have been the expected com­plaints that the very latest block­busters are not avail­able, or that the selec­tion at launch wasn’t large enough, but luckily I ignored all that. There is plenty of great stuff to watch, and hope­fully, I’ll be able to point you to some hidden gems.

Lovers of Hate played at Sundance last January, and was on my radar because it also screened at Austin’s South by Southwest Film Festival in March. I was actu­ally at the fest­ival, and was even at a party with the dir­ector, but didn’t have time to catch the screening itself. Such a small inde­pendent film had a very slim chance of get­ting a decent the­at­rical release in the US, never mind in Canada, so I was very happy to see it turn up on Netflix. I sus­pect I’ll find more over­looked indie treas­ures there in the months to come.

Filmed in Austin and Park City, fit­tingly, Poyser’s second fea­ture (after 2004’s Dear Pillow) is a love tri­angle involving two brothers, a woman and one very large house. We meet mis­an­thropic sad sack Rudy after his wife has thrown him out of the house. The first ten minutes of the film hil­ari­ously cap­ture his attempts to bathe, first at a car wash and then in a stranger’s house. Clearly he doesn’t have much of a social safety net. When his brother Paul, a writer of pop­ular young adult fic­tion, calls to tell him he’s in town for a reading, he con­vinces his estranged wife Diana to pre­tend everything’s fine so they can have a meal together, but the ruse doesn’t work for long. Paul has already let Rudy and Diana know that he’s staying in a huge house in Park City, Utah for the next month to work on his new book, and before long, each of them has shown up.

Rudy needs a place to live and shows up unan­nounced, only to find his brother not at home. After making him­self com­fort­able, he hears Paul returning with someone. The gig­gling woman turns out to be Diana, who’s har­boured feel­ings for Paul all along. Rudy scrambles to hide as Paul and Diana throw off their coats, and then their clothes, to con­sum­mate their long attrac­tion. For the rest of the film, Rudy is resigned to hiding in one of the house’s many rooms, trying (and failing) not to listen to the new couple’s love­making and cri­ti­cisms of him. It’s darkly funny, and each char­acter car­ries enough bag­gage to make the whole thing feel sleazy while not painting any one char­acter as a true vil­lain. Rudy is not the only one hiding. The layers of decep­tion and guilt and regret build, and when Paul finally fig­ures out that Rudy is in the house, he pur­posely chooses not to tell Diana. The camera tells most of the story in the second half of the film, as it prowls around with Rudy, trying both to see and to not be seen.

The film­making is eco­nom­ical in every sense of the word. The single loc­a­tion, spare but effective dia­logue, and shaded per­form­ances of the three leads all add up to a wry take on sib­ling rivalry, romantic decep­tion and the meaning of suc­cess. The excel­lent poop jokes are just an added bonus.

Official site of the film

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: #sundance10, #sxsw10, austin, independent

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Woodpecker

by James McNally on November 19, 2009

in DVD

Woodpecker
Woodpecker is avail­able on DVD from Carnivalesque Films. You can buy the film dir­ectly from their web site.

Woodpecker (Director: Alex Karpovsky): Hope, Emily Dickinson taught us, is the thing with feathers:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chil­liest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

— Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Perhaps it’s fit­ting, then, that the sub­ject of Johnny Neander’s quest is a bird: the legendary Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, last spotted in the 1940s. A rash of recent sight­ings near the town of Brinkley, Arkansas bring part-time house painter and ama­teur poet Johnny and his silent pal Wesley to town, where they will attempt to be the first people to obtain doc­u­mentary proof of the woodpecker’s return. Making a comeback when you seem to be gone forever turns out to be a central theme of this unusual film. Shooting in a documentary-fiction hybrid, Karpovsky gradu­ally moves from one to the other as we learn more about our central char­acter. When the film begins, Johnny is just one among a number of bird­watchers and locals talking about the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. We hear from local people, many of whom are delighted that the atten­tion has brought tour­ists and busi­ness back to their dying town, but a few who resent the res­ulting pro­tec­tion of the bird’s hab­itat, denying them the right to hunt ducks there. Within a few weeks, how­ever, it seems like most of the searchers have given up and gone home. Well, except for Johnny and Wes.

We soon learn that this is much more than a bird­watching exped­i­tion for Johnny. It becomes a quest for per­sonal redemp­tion, and as he trudges through the bayou with the hap­less Wes in tow, we are treated to his incessant philo­soph­ical chat­tering and poetry read­ings. While they are indeed hil­arious, as the days go by, we begin to sense the des­per­a­tion and sad­ness in the men’s quest. Though Wes is strictly a sidekick, we learn that he’s there due to his own per­sonal tragedy. Johnny just doesn’t want to be a loser any­more, and his dis­com­fort with his own life makes him yearn for the freedom that birds seem to enjoy.

The clever thing is that the wood­pecker can so easily stand in for almost any other elu­sive thing that humans search for. Karpovsky could easily have set the film in, say, Roswell, New Mexico and had his prot­ag­onist searching for aliens. But that would have been going for easy laughs at his character’s expense. Instead, the film offers many poignant moments that allow us to identify with Johnny. By the second half of the film, we’re almost in Waiting for Godot ter­ritory, where the absurdity is tightly wrapped up with the over­whelming longing for tran­scend­ence that many of us feel. In fact, it’s no sur­prise at all that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker’s nick­name is “Lord God Bird.” The mix­ture of comedy and mel­an­choly works better in my mind, in fact, than the hybrid of doc­u­mentary and fic­tion, which begins to feel a bit unwieldy as soon as we’ve formed an emo­tional attach­ment to Johnny and Wes.

Perhaps fit­tingly, Johnny is played by an actor (Jon e. Hyrns) whom Karpovsky dis­covered in a doc­u­mentary (Johnny Berlin) made about his career as a porter on a 1930s Pullman railway car. Hyrns, who co-wrote the script, is not sur­pris­ingly also a nov­elist, and his storytelling gifts serve the film well.

One of the script’s greatest achieve­ments, in my mind, is in the pitch-perfect poetry that Johnny writes about birds. Of course, the poems are hil­arious, but at the same time they pos­sess a heart­felt hon­esty that, while not on a level with Emily Dickinson, man­ages to convey the pain that Johnny is so des­perate to escape. The entire film is a suc­cessful blending of comedy and pathos that lets us cel­eb­rate hope, no matter how crazy.

Official site of the film

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: birdwatching, hope, independent, obsession

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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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Funny Ha Ha

by James McNally on June 21, 2008

in Film Festivals

Funny Ha Ha

Funny Ha Ha (2002, Director: Andrew Bujalski): Perhaps the first of the films later lumped together as “mumble­core,” Funny Ha Ha was written and dir­ected by 27-year-old Harvard film graduate Andrew Bujalski. Made on a shoes­tring budget with non-professional actors, it toured film fest­ivals for almost three years before get­ting a lim­ited the­at­rical release in 2005. I believe this is the first time the film has screened the­at­ric­ally in Toronto.

Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer) is a recent col­lege graduate still living in the stu­dent ghetto near her school. Though she’s no longer a stu­dent, she seems unable to move on to the next phase of her life. She still hangs around with her col­lege friends, partying and working temp jobs. Her obses­sion with her friend Alex is obvious to everyone, des­pite the fact that he’s already in a ser­ious rela­tion­ship. Nonetheless, when she hears Alex has broken up with his girl­friend, she’s reluctant to make her feel­ings known, des­pite the urgings of all her friends, including Alex’s sister. She meets another guy, Mitchell (Bujalski), at her temping job and he awk­wardly asks her out. Then her friend Rachel’s boy­friend Dave kisses her drunk­enly after a party. None of these rela­tion­ships are going the way she wants. She quits the temping job and finds a better one as a research assistant. Alex begins hanging out with her and flirting ambigu­ously. Then sud­denly she finds out he and his girl­friend have not only reunited, but eloped and gotten mar­ried. But he still shows up drunk late on the night of her birthday. “Marriage is com­plic­ated,” he says.

With pro­spects like these, Marnie clearly needs to get away from these people and maybe even this town, and by the end, we get an ink­ling that that’s what is going to happen. But for about 90% of the film’s run­ning time, we float through Marnie’s life just the way she has. What saves it from being com­pletely tedious is Dollenmayer’s open and pretty face, and her gradu­ally increasing determ­in­a­tion to move on with her life.

Funny Ha Ha is extremely prim­itive, with no music and no external lighting. As my col­league Bob Turnbull expressed, it’s almost a Dogme 95 film. But there’s plenty of humour, of both the goof­ball and the cringe­worthy vari­eties, and a sym­path­etic prot­ag­onist. When the film ends rather abruptly, I wanted to know what was going to happen to Marnie, and that means that Bujalski has hooked me.

NOTE: I was delighted to find out that Kate Dollenmayer is actu­ally an anim­ator whose credits include work on Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001).

Official site of the film

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: generationdiy, independent, mumblecore

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Nights and Weekends

by James McNally on June 19, 2008

in Film Festivals

Nights and Weekends

Nights and Weekends (2008, Directors: Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig): A fit­ting opening night film for the Toronto leg of the Generation DIY mini-fest, Nights and Weekends is co-director Joe Swanberg’s fourth fea­ture film in four years (in addi­tion to two series of online shorts), and he’s still just 26. Perhaps no other dir­ector better exem­pli­fies the DIY spirit right now. This par­tic­ular film grew out of a close col­lab­or­a­tion with Greta Gerwig, who has acted in most of Swanberg’s pre­vious films. Their real-life friend­ship informs and adds some ten­sion to this story of a long-distance relationship.

James lives in Chicago while his girl­friend Mattie lives in New York. We eaves­drop on their hur­ried love­making and awk­ward con­ver­sa­tions in both cities and then quickly it’s a year later and they’ve broken up. The last half of the film deals with their unre­solved feel­ings as they both want to make it work but know that it can’t. For anyone who’s ever been involved in a long-distance romance, much of this will ring true. Physical dis­tance cre­ates both intense longing and emo­tional blind spots. The film begins with them tearing each other’s clothes off at the begin­ning of a rare weekend together. But once that’s done, they spend the rest of the time trying not to deal with their impending sep­ar­a­tion. Though they promise to come up with a plan to be together, it never takes shape. The film is full of awk­ward silences and glances, as these inar­tic­u­late char­ac­ters struggle to hold onto what they have. There is a ten­sion throughout the film that gradu­ally slackens into sad­ness, and in another sex scene near the end of the film that bookends the opening scene, both char­ac­ters can’t keep their fatalism at bay long enough to con­sum­mate their desire. It’s an emo­tion­ally affecting scene, even in the absence of any par­tic­u­larly well-written dialogue.

According to Swanberg and Gerwig, a lot of the dia­logue was impro­vised, and credit must be given to the skillful editing (also by Swanberg) for shaping this into a film with an emo­tional arc. Of all the “mumble­core” dir­ectors, I think Swanberg is the least con­cerned with film­making “flour­ishes”. His films are the least “arty” in my opinion. Instead he seems to aim for emo­tional authen­ti­city and in this case, he has the per­fect col­lab­or­ator. Gerwig is the better actor (some­thing Swanberg freely admits), and her mood changes effect­ively com­mu­nicate her con­fu­sion and frus­tra­tion in every scene. It doesn’t hurt that the camera adores her. Even the harsh­ness of digital video cannot dim her nat­ural beauty.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t men­tion the intensely intimate sex scenes in the film. Though we never see James and Mattie actu­ally having sex, there is plenty of nudity and fore­play on screen. When Hollywood films show people in sexual situ­ations, you’re keenly aware that these are actors who prob­ably don’t know each other very well, but here we have two real-life friends, co-writers and co-directors of the film, not only emo­tion­ally but phys­ic­ally naked in front of each other and the audi­ence. It’s raw and brave and awk­ward all at the same time. I couldn’t help but wonder what Swanberg’s wife thought of all of this, though he’s fea­tured this sort of matter-of-fact sexu­ality in all of his films.

In my review of his film LOL, I wondered (per­haps a little unfairly) what it would be like for Swanberg to work with “real” actors, but I think Gerwig is the real thing. Still, I’d like to see him stay behind the camera (prefer­ably a 35mm film camera) and work with a fully-formed script next time. That being said, and although this film feels unpol­ished and slightly unfin­ished, Nights and Weekends con­tains moments of genuine emo­tional power.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ectors Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig from after the screening (and that’s Canada AM’s film critic Richard Crouse asking the first few questions) :

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Duration: 25:49

Official site of the film

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: generationdiy, independent, mumblecore

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