Though few aesthetic experiences are as necessarily social and participatory as concert-going, when live music is captured in that other communal art form known as cinema it is difficult for it to feel anything but awkwardly isolating. Sitting in the darkness of the theater, watching others experiencing the performance at some previous time, the concert-film viewer is always stuck on the outside, unsure whether to clap, stomp, or sing along or just watch reverently. A successful product of the genre, like 2006’s Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, can reduce our awareness of this chasm between ourselves and the onscreen stage, inviting us to bask in the good vibes. Or, like Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young: Heart of Gold (also released in 2006) and its new follow-up Neil Young Trunk Show, it can ignore the live audience altogether and emphasize its own meticulously designed theatricality. Read Andrew Chan’s review of Neil Young Trunk Show.
Dispatch from SXSW 2010: Kick-Ass, Cold Weather, and Cyrus
While the South by Southwest festival may remain the uniquely good time that industry and locals alike have come to cherish, there have been a few hiccups this year as the festival staff has tried to wrap their minds around how to logistically deal with a 25% increase in ticket sales. To wit: a line three blocks in length for opening night film, Kick-Ass, which, to be fair, was probably just as much a result of cult status of the Mark Millar comic book from which it was adapted as festival planning. Kick-Ass’s unconsidered filmmaking and clunky, self-consciously hip writing laid bare its makers’ lack of ingenuity, and Aaron Johnson, the handsome, broad-shouldered young actor playing Dave Lizewsky and his titular alter-ego also stretched believability as a hapless every-nerd. At least this was true for the film’s first half. By the third act, Kick-Ass evolved into the cheeky fanboy superhero movie it promised, featuring ingenious action sequences and a surprisingly thoughtful meta-critique of aestheticized violence.
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Last year’s programming was such a success that we had to prep a 2010 edition. Sorry for the wait, superfans.
April 1-15: Lifetime Batting Average .167: The Complete Filmography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
April 16-25: Is My Childlike Awe at the World Reflection of Some Inner Perversion?: The Films of Steven Spielberg
April 26-30: Great Dude, Shitty Movies: Let’s Watch Some John Waters
May 1-13: Mikhail Kalatozov: In Soviet Russia, Movie Watches You
May 14-15: I’ll Underwrite Your Drug Habit and I Fuck Teenagers: Larry Clark, Still Not in Prison
May 16-30: A Life In Pictures, Or: How I Inspired the Scream Mask, Won a Pity Oscar, Fathered a Hottie, and Got Brian Grazer Into an American Express Ad. The Achievement of Ron Howard
June 1-30: Till It Hurts: The Films of Tom Shadyac
July 1-8: We’d All Secretly Prefer It Was a Michael Ritchie Retro: But Here’s Some Dreyer!
July 12-21: Maximum Effort, Minimal Impact: Stan Brakhage and the Dawn of the Screensaver
July 22-August 5: The Director’s Best Work Is the Unavailable One That I Have Seen and You Haven’t: A Tour of Cinema with Jonathan Rosenbaum
August 7-29: Art-house George Burns: Manoel de Oliveira Likes Soft Foods
September 1-10: Fair-Trade, All Things Considered, 8.7 on Pitchfork, Obama Tote Bag, Ramin Bahrani, Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck
September 11-22: Audience Members Pointing Out Hitchcock Allusions Will Be Shot on Sight: The Brian De Palma Film Festival
September 24-30: Politics as Usual: Costa-Gavras’s “Wait, the Sixties aren’t over?” Cinema
October 1-3: Some Stephen King Adaptations and Little Else: The World of Frank Darabont
October 4-31: Y’all Know My Motherfuckin Name: Michelangelo Antonioni, Make That Money, Nigga, Str8 Mobbed Out
Special thanks to programmers filmenthusiast2000, seanmcavoy, eshman, mjr, robbiefreeling, bugs meaney, and clarencecarter.
Since we cannot belong to all places and cultures at once, films that open a window onto the outside world will always be invested with a certain degree of documentary value. But in the case of China, the idea of cinema as a candid reflection of real life extends beyond this habitual, often unconscious response. The finest filmmaking to come out of the mainland this decade bears a commitment to updating us on the soul of the nation, and this duty has placed it in a tight bond with that old theorists’ whipping boy: realism. Much of the authority we find in recent Chinese cinema comes from its aesthetic of immersion, that documentary impulse which has been a guiding force in even the country’s apparently fictional films. Through a shared vocabulary of patient observation and extreme duration, today’s vanguard of Chinese directors have been voraciously hoarding away as much reality as they can—as if hyperaware that their landscape has never been more subject to rapid disappearance, and that there has never been greater international demand for stories of those living through this dramatic historical moment. Click here to read the rest of Andrew Chan’s review of Ghost Town.
What will future generations of film folk make of the countless American indies made in the latter half of the twenty-first century’s inaugural decade that follow inarticulate youths as they graze absent-mindedly through overgrown fields of urban anomie? If these films are taken en masse, future sociocultural dissection may yield winning theories about a coddled generation, but on what level will they actually be enjoyed? Every era has its own claim on ennui and spiritual dislocation, especially trendy topics when paired with youthful hesitation and sexual confusion. But often such umbrella terms give unambitious artists license to justify their artistic lethargy on philosophical and aesthetic grounds—if the characters mope, so can the camera; if they’re inarticulate, then why bother writing dialogue? The tenets of realism become a black hole in which one can bury unnecessary details like story, momentum, motivation; staying on the surface equals ambiguity.
So does Bradley Rust Gray’s new Zoe Kazan vehicle The Exploding Girl come across like a story its filmmaker simply had to tell? Does it seem to contain a statement Gray simply had to make or a visual idea he had to express? Or does it just slot a mite too easily into a well-practiced movement currently hypnotizing American filmmakers from Andrew Bujalski to Joe Swanberg to Lynn Shelton and, to a lesser and more intriguing extent, So Yong Kim, Gray’s life partner? Read Michael Koresky’s review of The Exploding Girl.
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