Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Displaying the past 12 log entries

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Aglow

IFFB 2012 - “The myth about the muse visiting you is just that - a myth,” artist Paul Chojnowski says in Aglow, a short documentary about his work. Indeed, while I’ve seen a number of films about visual artists throughout the years at IFFB, Aglow offers perhaps the most practical view of the art world. Chojnowski is very much aware of his professional profile and the potential markets for his art, which influence the subject matter and even the size of some pieces. Director Howard Libov takes us inside meetings with art dealers, and Chojnowski voices his desire to “negotiate a poster deal.”

Yet while the above might sound cynical, it’s also an underrepresented reality for many artists. Libov also doesn’t focus strictly on business, capturing Chojnowski at work in his studio, where he creates cityscapes and small narratives using his signature ingredient: fire. The careful planning that goes into each piece is evident, reflecting the methodical attitude that Chojnowski brings to his business dealings. By focusing on all aspects of Chojnowski’s working life, Libov gives us a unique glimpse at art as a profession.

By Victoria Large on 15 May, 2012, 4:38 PM   Submit Comment

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The Love Competition

IFFB 2012 - The subject matter of director Brent Hoff’s entertaining short documentary The Love Competition is in itself intriguing: researchers at Stanford ask their human subjects to “love” as much as they can while in an MRI machine. The researchers than study the results to see who has produced the most love - neurologically speaking. The varied choices of love objects on the part of the contestants is fascinating. People think of spouses and significant others, certainly, but there’s also a ten-year-old contestant who chooses to focus on his baby cousin, a young man who opts to think of “the first eight months” of his relationship with his ex, and a twenty-four-year-old woman who plans to meditate on love itself. The results are surprising, and offer viewers a chance to reflect on their own definitions of love.

By Victoria Large on 15 May, 2012, 4:17 PM   Submit Comment

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Behind the Eyes are the Ears

BALAGAN - Screening at the Brattle Theatre as part of this month’s Balagan film series, Nancy Andrews’ experimental short Behind the Eyes are the Ears offers a dreamlike mix of images, blending found footage with animation and live action, with each frame tinted a single color, like a silent film. Andrews’ images of part-human, part-insect creatures (there are insects with human heads and humans with insect eyes, recalling creatures out of monster movie classics like The Fly) have the power to stay on one’s mind, and the short has a hypnotic quality as well as a sense of humor.

“I’ve not gotten much support from my work from the mainstream scientific community,” Dr. Sheri Myes, the film’s ostensible lead character, says of her work as her animated profile grows distorted - she sprouts eyes and spider legs from her head. It’s a particularly idiosyncratic tale of transformation, blending our B-movie heritage with the avant-garde.

By Victoria Large on 04 May, 2012, 6:38 PM   Submit Comment

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It’s Such a Beautiful Day

IFFB 2012 - The most high-profile of the animated shorts playing at this year’s IFFB, It’s Such a Beautiful Day is the third and final film in the trilogy that animator Don Hertzfeldt began with 2006’s Everything Will Be Okay. Like the previous films in the trilogy, It’s Such a Beautiful Day hurls viewers into the troubled mind of its main character, Bill, who is struggling with his memory and faced with his own mortality. Hertzfeldt makes striking use of mixed media images and overlapping audio to let us into Bill’s tenuous state, all the while retaining his signature style of stick figure drawings and mordant humor. The result is an impressionistic film that is as funny as it is sad, and a must for anyone who loves animation.

By Victoria Large on 04 May, 2012, 12:51 PM   Submit Comment

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Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise

IFFB 2012 - Kelly Sears’ animated short, composed entirely of images from 1970s yearbooks, tells the eerie story of a horrific event unfolding at typical high school. It’s an admirably creative effort that unfolds with a wry, satiric sting.

By Victoria Large on 04 May, 2012, 12:36 PM   Submit Comment

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The Maker

IFFB 2012 - Christopher Kezelos’ wordless, splendid-looking stop motion short about an odd creature (who looks something like a rabbit in a Halloween mask) on a mission is enigmatic yet engaging, like a tiny dispatch from another world. To say much more about it would risk spoiling its lovely sense of discovery.

By Victoria Large on 04 May, 2012, 12:25 PM   Submit Comment

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Blanche Fraise

IFFB 2012 - This impressively realized animated short, which won Best Narrative Short Film at the 2011 Ottawa International Animation Festival, is unremittingly bleak. The stop motion film follows the lives of two anthropomorphic starving rabbits who do not speak, but make soft crinkling noises as they move. Their world is almost entirely white and gray, and their lives are full of pain and horror. And yet - the technical artistry of the animation itself is undeniable, and the atmosphere that the film conjures is almost tangible. As I watched it, I caught myself feeling grateful that IFFB consistently gives left-of-center films like this one a home in Boston.

By Victoria Large on 04 May, 2012, 12:15 PM   Submit Comment

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Birdboy

IFFB 2012 - Alberto Vazquez and Pedro Rivero’s animated short Birdboy is so Hello Kitty-cute in its opening frames that one can’t help but mistrust it. (There is a twist, and it’s both jaw-dropping and perversely funny.) Yet whether it teems with specious adorableness or drips with Goth-y doom, Birdboy is a kick to watch, reminiscent of Tim Burton’s freakier animated efforts (think The World of Stainboy) without feeling derivative.

By Victoria Large on 04 May, 2012, 11:59 AM   Submit Comment

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Song of the Spindle

IFFB 2012 - Drew Christie’s four minute animated short, in which a man and a sperm whale discuss whose species is more intelligent, could easily have felt preachy (the whale points out that humans have more wars, for instance). But owing in large part to Christie’s charming visual style, which is evocative of clean and simple pen-and-paper drawing, Song of the Spindle is a brief but enjoyable, and memorable, little film.

By Victoria Large on 04 May, 2012, 11:49 AM   Submit Comment

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Is it just me, or has Brad Pitt had the most interesting last five years of any A-list Hollywood actor? The six live-action films in which he’s appeared since the fall of 2007:

      The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

      Burn After Reading

      The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

      Inglorious Basterds

      The Tree of Life

      Moneyball

By my count he’s batting 1.000 over this period, not to mention helping produce and draw attention to some pretty heavy art-house fare. Here, as both backwards-aging protagonist and wistful narrator, he’s something of a phantom. His appearance constantly changing, he accepts his lot in a manner that makes him as unknowable to us as he is to his loved ones. There are nonetheless some awkward structural elements to contend with: a present-day framing device, voiceover from what sounds to be the midpoint of Benjamin’s life, a prologue and coda that break somewhat from the main narrative (though both are more than strikingly filmed - and touching - enough to justify their inclusion). Occasional ungainliness aside, Benjamin Button is nothing less than a life lived - all the faces, voices, and memories - and a tender one at that; its contrivances are many, but its execution is often quite beautiful.

Continue: This thread contains 2 additional log entries

By Michael Nordine on 03 May, 2012, 12:41 PM   Submit Comment

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Here

The story is still asleep. It dreams.

Here is a road film that travels far but doesn’t really go anywhere. The immediate urge is therefore to say that it favors journey to destination, but that isn’t quite true either. A more accurate way of describing it would be to say that the film grapples with the very idea of wanderlust—how it can push and pull a person without leading him to any one place—and eventually comes to look at it as being both a state of grace and an appealing delusion. “I wanted to see how far I could go without getting lost,” says a cartographer named Will; that he is a mapmaker is telling. His attraction to the tucked-away corners of the world (rural Armenia, in this case) speaks to a certain restlessness, a need to uproot himself in search of something that’s probably intangible, and yet upon arriving to these spots he arranges them in an orderly fashion that extinguishes their spark. It’s a cyclical, even self-defeating affair that distracts him from something he already knows: contentment in the moment is impossible if he treats these places as a means rather than an end.

The main action of the film is interspersed with montages of film stock, polaroids, and other images divorced from the narrative. The narration that accompanies these sequences is sometimes lyrical, sometimes overwrought, and always superfluous: Here is so visually arresting at times that I find myself wishing it had no dialogue at all. It can nevertheless be quite effective in its moody portrayal of two people floating toward and then away from one another, neither of them all too concerned with what happens next.

By Michael Nordine on 27 Apr, 2012, 5:28 PM   Submit Comment

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Return

Return has an abiding interest in the the subtle power of trauma to alter our view of the world, to make the familiar seem strange. For recently-returned vet Kelli, this comes not in the form of any one thing she did or even witnessed while deployed but rather the long, drawn-out process of simply being “there.” Her non-combat position in the National Guard has instilled in her a general unease that’s initially imperceptible but becomes more and more pervasive as time goes on—like the frog slowly brought to a boil in a pot of once-cold water. Were these aftereffects to hit her all at once, Kelli might know how best to react; because they’re so gradual, she’s never able to fully resist their slow hold on her. “There’s weird shit there” is as specific as she tends to get when asked about the war, whether by her husband, friends, or coworkers; it’s the slow accumulation of small details that are either different or somehow “off” that gets to her.

Such is Kelli’s struggle, and she finds no easy answers. Writer-director Liza Johnson takes a measured approach to all this that’s both a saving grace and, at times, a detriment. Her evenhandedness as a filmmaker is to be commended, but it sometimes gets in the way of actual drama—compelling things happen, mind, but the characters almost always under-react to them and then simply move on. Too little resonates as much as it could or should, leaving us not with a series of ups and downs to make sense of but instead with a constant environment of detachment and restraint in which it’s difficult to become fully involved. Even so, the path so stringently avoided by Return—a deep dark secret from the soldier’s deployment, troubling flashbacks played out as nightmares, PTSD-induced breakdowns—is so well-trod that its absence here is ultimately refreshing. This is a story unique for how normal it is, and laudable for its humbleness.

Where Return most comes into its own is in Kelli’s dealings with fellow veteran Bud. An off-the-grid Alcoholics Anonymous attendee with issues of his own, he injects much-needed personality into a film that’s occasionally too unassuming for its own good. There’s a momentum and openness to these scenes that briefly reinvigorates the film, even if the stakes still aren’t raised as high as one might hope. Johnson’s quasi-documentary technique imbues the story with an uninterrupted air of realism, reminding us how common stories like Kelli’s really are. It’s the plainness of this fact, as well as how unspoken it is, that makes the film quite stark in in its own way: to embellish it would be both disingenuous and unnecessary. This is daily life for a great many people, and it needn’t be sensationalized in order to affect us.

There’s nary a political thread to be found here, but there is undoubtedly a humanist bent. In its own way the film is a snapshot of working-class Ohio, a semi-rural area that isn’t quite depressed but could certainly be doing better. Johnson smartly chooses not to linger over dilapidated homes and abandoned factories (though they’re certainly there) as a means of conveying this, instead letting the sense of place evoked by long walks down country roads speak for itself. It’s telling that, though Return never specifies exactly where Kelli has been during her year-long deployment—we may presume it’s Iraq or Afghanistan, but never with any certainty—her re-entry into the normal world is very much site-specific. In the end it isn’t what happened “there” that most affects her, but rather how it negatively shapes her perception of home.

By Michael Nordine on 29 Feb, 2012, 11:37 PM   Submit Comment