Authors — Brandon Harris
-
Terence Nance on An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is such a fine, rare bird: Terence Nance’s Gotham Award-winning debut film is, regardless of its aesthetic pyrotechnics and self-reflexivity (it consists of a series of short experimental films that radically deconstruct Nance’s romantic foibles), wholly, fully, truly accessible to everyone. If Hollis Frampton and Nina Paley had somehow, through the force of magic realism, had a black love child, it would have grown up to direct something like this. It’s altogether unusual strategy for detailing Nance’s obsessive courtship of a young woman named Namik Minter — using reenactments, direct address, doc interviews, stop-motion and traditional animation to […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 24, 2013 -
The Next World
In his breakout 1994 feature Cold Water, Olivier Assayas turned his eye on the adolescent scene in a provincial town not far from Paris in the early ’70s, focusing on a young man named Gilles and his troubled girlfriend, Christine. That film, notable for containing some of the director’s most self-consciously bravura camerawork and a more or less complete absence of the political machinations that defined the era, is a cousin of sorts to the 58-year-old Assayas’ newest work, Something in the Air. Returning to similar environs during the same period, he once again focuses on a young pair named […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 23, 2013 -
Load & Play
Side Effects Open Road – May 21 Perhaps Steven Soderbergh’s swan song as a theatrically distributed director (his Liberace biopic with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon will premiere on HBO this spring), Side Effects is a masterfully made noir thriller, although one that, at least initially, obscures its genre coding by deploying a setup that has “mental illness TV movie of the week” written all over it. Rooney Mara is a depressed, downwardly mobile young woman whose formerly high-rolling financier husband (Channing Tatum) went to jail for insider trading. When she goes on some new antipsychotic for her clinical depression […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 23, 2013 -
Graham Meriwether on American Meat
Even in the heart of the Midwest, where driving past rural pastures dotted with cows is not uncommon, I rarely thought of where my food came from. How often as a child or young adult, chomping on a spicy chicken sandwich from Wendy’s or slurping up Cincinnati-style chili at my mother’s dining room table, was I confronted intellectually with the fragility and inhumanity of our modern food production system, especially when it comes to the most popular proteins in the American diet, beef and chicken? I doubt a meal went by that wouldn’t cause my older self anxiety. It’s almost shameful […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 11, 2013 -
Ron Eyal and Eleanor Burke on Stranger Things
Ron Eyal and Eleanor Burke’s elegant and evocative Stranger Things, which won Slamdance’s Narrative Competition Grand Jury Prize in 2011 is a moody and clear-eyed drama from a pair of our 25 New Faces in Independent Film, as tranquil and refreshing as an autumn afternoon along the rural British coast, where much of its story is set. A young, lonely woman named Oona (Bridget Collins), coping with the recent death of her mother (with whom she was clearly not close) and hoping to sell the house the deceased woman spent her last years making art in, returns to the home’s seaside village to […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 5, 2013 -
Remembering Jamaa Fanaka
Jamaa Fanaka, the eclectic and kind-hearted film director, the most commercially minded of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers and perhaps the most prolific student filmmaker of all time (all three of the features he made as a grad student found distribution), died one year ago today. Although word leaked out about his death a short time after he passed away, likely from complications of diabetes, I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t hear of it until several weeks later, when his obituary finally appeared in the New York Times. Ashamed because in the intervening year since I […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 1, 2013 -
Rebecca Richman Cohen on Code of the West
In Code of the West, director Rebecca Richman Cohen chronicles the legislative machinations surrounding Montana’s endangered medical marijuana law. The debate, which was colored by outrageous, scaremongering claims about increased teen use and demonic possession, revolved around the possibility of an outright repeal of the initial 2004 law, which spawned an industry that became the ire of conservative politicians and family groups. During the vote on a proposed repeal, DEA agents raided 26 ostensibly legal cannabis growing sights across the state and put the state’s biggest caregivers out of operation, including one owned by Tom Daubert, the protagonist of Cohen’s […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 28, 2013 -
Second Sun Valley Fest Wraps a Strong Edition
A place of unbelievable beauty that maintains a rustic, unassuming vibe, Sun Valley, Idaho, has long been a hideaway for the rich and famous, from the Shah of Iran to generations megawatt movie stars. Arnold Schwartznegger and Clint Eastwood have homes there; Bruce Willis and Demi Moore apparently split much of the surrounding area in their divorce. First brought to attention by Ernest Hemingway — who lauded it as prime fall hunting lands in the 30s, long frequenting the place with his buddy Gary Cooper and finishing his legendary For Whom the Bell Tolls in a second story suite in its signature […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 22, 2013 -
Ana Piterbarg on Everybody Has a Plan
A self-assured feature debut from Argentine writer/director Ana Piterbarg, the moody identity-swap thriller Everyone Has a Plan features a remarkable turn by Viggo Mortensen, working in Spanish, as both Agustín, a preternaturally depressed Buenos Aires physician, and Agustín’s identical twin Pedro, a rural beekeeper who suddenly shows up at Agustín’s, dying of cancer and suggesting euthanasia. Seeking a way out of his staid, bourgeoise existence, defined by his unwillingness to adopt a child with his seemingly long-suffering wife, Agustín chooses to take his brother’s place, relocating to the Tigre delta, an evocative and historically rich backwater where Pedro lived. After assuming the dead […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 21, 2013 -
Matteo Garrone on Reality
In the follow-up to his widely acclaimed 2008 international breakthrough Gomorrah, 44- year-old Italian auteur Matteo Garrone tells the partially comic, mostly tragic story of Luciano (Aniello Arena), a Neapolitan fishmonger whose simple life and aspirations are turned upside down when the possibility of instant fame and fortune as a contestant on the Italian iteration of Big Brother goes from mere dream to tangible reality. As his increasingly delusional family cheer him on, he chases the stardom that his friend and former roommate Enzo (Raffaele Ferrante) has already won, but with less than stellar results. As things go from bad to worse […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 15, 2013
