Authors — Brandon Harris
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Critic’s Notebook: Slamdance 2013, Part Two
The Dirties may very well be some kind of terribly depressing cautionary tale or it may just be that the joke is on us, but this debut film from Matt Johnson, who also stars and co-wrote, couldn’t be more topical. It’s bound to cause much discussion should it find larger audiences, and perhaps even if it doesn’t, as the spectre of school shootings hangs heavy in many hearts this winter.The most talked about film at this year’s Slamdance even before winning the festival’s Grand Jury Prize at a ceremony last night at Park City’s Treasure Mountain Inn, Johnson’s film is […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 25, 2013 -
Daniel Schechter, Supporting Characters
A genuine meditation on male friendship, the absurdities of indie moviedom and many different kinds of loyalty, Daniel Schechter’s Supporting Characters, a surprise hit at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, sneaks up on you, its seeming limitations becoming its strengths over the course of its easy-going 87 minutes. Despite being shot in a fashion that recalls a comedy you might find on FX, Supporting Characters maintains an old-fashioned, craftsman-like quality about it; it’s written with feeling and humor that rings with truth, offering us characters whose lives are as complicated and full of ambiguity as our own. Alex Karpovsky and newcomer Tarik Lowe have […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 23, 2013 -
Critic’s Notebook: Slamdance 2013, Part One
It’s a tough thing, being a Slamdancer. One participant in this year’s 19th edition, an actor who headlines one of the dramatic competition entries, described it as the “little brother” festival, and that is clearly true. Still, Slamdance is a place for discovery each year. From Mark Ruffalo to Lena Dunham, Christopher Nolan to Josh Safdie, Slamdance offers a first taste of Park City to many significant voices whose initial works fall off of Sundance’s radar or are simply defeated by the daunting math of 12,000 submissions for 200 short and feature slots. Despite the perpetually dissatisfying screening venue of […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 22, 2013 -
Tom O’Brien, Fairhaven
Three thirtysomething buddies reunite for a funeral in a sleepy Massachusetts fishing hamlet in Tom O’Brien’s finely tuned Fairhaven. They beat about the shores of this southeastern Massachusetts town in the dead of brutal winter, one which ace DP Peter Simonite photographs in such a way as to chill the bones of attentive audience members–even ones who don’t find themselves, or this movie, which debuts today both theatrically and on VOD, in a typically over air-conditioned modern movie house. Close knit and working class, the milieu of O’Brien’s movie is at once confining and comforting for its three leads. Jon […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 11, 2013 -
My Year in Film: A Memoir of Sorts
It was 2012 and there was an election on and it was getting hotter everyday and I didn’t know how much time we had left and it was the end of film (if not the end of cinema) and I knew not what to do, so I did what I always do in situations like this: I went to the movies. Usually for free, at the behest of some publicist or festival. About half the time I went because I had nothing better to do. Often I went alone for no discernible reason other than that I had no one […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 1, 2013 -
Michael Connors, Allegiance
An intelligently written and genuinely felt Iraq War drama, Allegiance is perhaps the first film about the way the conflict shaped the lives of those who prepare to go to battle that has been written, produced, directed and mostly financed by veterans themselves. The directorial debut of Michael Connors, the picture has an unforced verisimilitude few films about military life can match. Allegiance portrays an insular community with its own moral logic, in this case an American military regiment of New York National Guardsmen being called up to active duty in Iraq on the eve of the Sadr City/Fallujah nightmare of 2004. What […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 12, 2012 -
The Neverending Story of Self-Distributing The Upsetter
Indefatigable in their desire to find larger and larger audiences for their film, Adam Bhala Lough (Bomb the System, Weapons) and and his co-director Ethan Higbee have been self-distributing The Upsetter: The Life & Music of Lee “Scratch” Perry for what feels like an eternity. The film had its world premiere at SXSW in 2008 and bounced around the festival circuit for the next year and a half, picking up Benicio Del Toro as an executive producer and narrator along the way, while winning generally positive notices in most of its stops. When Lough (one of 2003’s “25 New Faces of Independent […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 7, 2012 -
War Witch Wins Top Prize at 20th Plus Camerimage
Concluding its latest edition on yet another rainy late fall afternoon in Bydgoszcz, Plus Camerimage awarded its top prize, the Golden Frog, to War Witch, the celebrated story of a sub-Saharan female child-soldier. The film, also a prize winner at Berlin and Tribeca, beat out a list of fest circuit heavyweights such as The Master, Cloud Atlas, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Argo, Laurence Always, Hyde Park on Hudson and Holy Motors, which won the runner up Silver Frog from Joel Schumacher’s main competition jury. Fifteen prizes were handed out at the closing ceremony at Bydgoszcz’s Opera Nova, a 56-year-old modernist opera house which […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 3, 2012 -
David Lynch’s Lithographs at Plus Camerimage
David Lynch is a very popular director the world over, but perhaps no place more than Poland. His work is greeted with the same fanfare as the latest disposable, multiplex-bound spectacle in this central European country, his rock star status never more in evidence than at the 20th annual Plus Camerimage. The international film world’s most significant festival focusing mainly on the work of cinematographers (they headline the competition here and are the subjects of press conferences, interviews, workshops, tributes), it moved two years ago from its former host city of Lodz (pronounced “Wod-ge”), home of the national film school […]
by Brandon Harris on Nov 28, 2012 -
Susan Youssef, Habibi
Nearly 10 years in the making, Habibi is the semi-autobiographical first feature from 2010 “25 New Face” Susan Youssef, a tale of forbidden love between two Palestinian students who find it impossible for their affection to overcome the rigid conventions of class in Palestinian life and Israel’s ironclad security regime. With Israelis and Palestinians again in actively violent conflict, the film couldn’t be more newsworthy, but Youssef’s low-budget aesthetic ingenuity (she couldn’t shoot in Gaza, but faked it admirably) and a remarkable performance from Maisa Abd Elhadi, as the young woman at the center of multiple circles of conflict (family […]
by Brandon Harris on Nov 16, 2012
