Authors — Brandon Harris
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Tristan Patterson, Dragonslayer
The devastation that the “Great Recession” has wrecked on the California exurbs resonates through the backdrop of Tristan Patterson’s fascinating study of a peculiar California skating subculture in Dragonslayer. Focusing his representation mostly on the drug and alcohol addicted daredevil skater punk Josh Sandoval, nicknamed “Skreech,” Patterson’s doc searches the lives of this talented, troubled young man and his makeshift family of itinerant skaters with tremendous aesthetic grace and ideological empathy; finding great beauty in the suburban wasteland of derelict homes and pools that become their refuge from a largely unforgiving world. With a skating style all his own, Skreech launches […]
by Brandon Harris on Oct 26, 2011 -
AMERICAN INDIE HIDES OUT IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Director Sam Neave and his producer/star Marjan Neshat are both Iranian born, but the films they tend to make together, which include the unfortunately titled 2003’s Sundance entry Cry Funny Happy and their terrific new two shot high-wire act Almost in Love, tend to focus on the romantic travails of upper-middle-class Westerners. As such, they are naturals for the American independent festival scene, where such films usually find their natural constituency, that being other upper-middle-class Westerners. Not so for Almost in Love, their daring second feature collaboration, which had its world premiere this past weekend at the 5th Abu Dhabi […]
by Brandon Harris on Oct 20, 2011 -
Alma Har’el, Bombay Beach
Stunningly shot and formally audacious, Bombay Beach, the first feature of Israeli-born music-video director and cinematographer Alma Har’el, is a rare bird, the type of film that seems to be building its own cinematic language from the ground up. Sure, it embraces some stylistic and thematic similarities with a whole host of filmmaking luminaries, but it is dancing to its very own tune, both literally and figuratively. Har’el, as we discuss below, quickly entered the lives of various people living around the California hamlet of Bombay Beach, a derelict precinct that was once a haven for zealous developers in the ’60s, […]
by Brandon Harris on Oct 12, 2011 -
“CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN” IS ALWAYS A GLASS MOSTLY EMPTY: ON “THE IDES OF MARCH”
Note: the following piece contains spoilers. One time in my fleeting youth, I encountered George Clooney in the Warner Brothers screening room on 53rd Street after a National Board of Review screening of Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German. This is before I had, despite my ongoing poverty and lack of renown, spent ample time around movie stars and the merely sort-of famous at sundry locations, both foreign and domestic, becoming relatively at ease in their strange company. I still often felt not unlike the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, as he follows William Holden through a blustery New Orleans afternoon, sensing some […]
by Brandon Harris on Oct 6, 2011 -
WHEN IN ZURICH, PRINT THE LEGEND: ON “ROMAN POLANSKI: A FILM MEMOIR”
Succumbing to the most numbing of documentary aesthetics, Laurent Bouzereau’s Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir had its “secret” world premiere at the Zurich Film Festival Tuesday night. Aftering being hyped as a groundbreaking work of filmic autobiography, what unspooled in this most expensive of European cities consisted mainly of footage shot by longtime Polanski friend and former producer Andrew Braunsberg, who convinced Polanski to spend 20 hours talking with him in Polanski’s Gstaad estate during his house arrest following his apprehension at Zurich’s ambitious young festival a few years ago. The film’s cumulative effect is rather enervating given its fascinating subject, […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 29, 2011 -
Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive
“Riveting” is an adjective quite frequently used by entertainment journalists when describing crime movies, thrillers, or really anything that might simply offer its fair share of violent and shocking surprises. After seeing Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, however, one must reevaluate this clear over usage. Refn’s film, for which he took home the Cannes Best Director prize, brings fresh meaning to the term as it regards to narrative cinema. I must emphasize: this is an absolutely engrossing entertainment, surely one of the most potent and unforgettably propulsive stories you’ll encounter on a silver screen this year. A simple recap of its […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 14, 2011 -
ANDREI UJICA, “THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF NICOLAE CEAUSESCU”
Romanian émigré and film essayist Andrei Ujica’s acclaimed Videograms of a Revolution trilogy, which includes the 1992 film of that name as well as his profile of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, Out of the Present (1995), finally concludes with The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, his genre-bending final chapter, which he fondly calls part of the “new non-fiction” that is taking the world of cinema by storm. Culling through several decades worth of propaganda films from the Romanian National Television and Film Archives, he takes wildly out of context footage and gently stews it together into a three hour epic rumination on Romania’s mid and late Communist periods […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 9, 2011 -
ROWAN JOFFE, “BRIGHTON ROCK”
Effortlessly gorgeous and consistently engrossing, Rowan Joffe’s feature debut is an update of Brighton Rock, an adaptation of the Graham Greene crime novel first filmed in 1947 by the Boulting Brothers and starring a very young Richard Attenborough in what turned out to be a breakthrough role of sorts. The earlier film, which has developed a minor cult for its odd mixture of lurid noir stylings and depiction of pre-war British coastal life, is set in the late ’30s, with Europe’s headlong leap into war providing the backdrop for the tale of the sociopathic young gangster Pinkie Brown and the ill-fated […]
by Brandon Harris on Aug 24, 2011 -
MALCOLM MURRAY, “BAD POSTURE”
If one had to pick a film that represents regional, micro-budget American filmmaking at its finest, Malcolm Murray’s Albuquerque, New Mexico set Bad Posture would certainly have to be in the conversation. The story a recently unemployed graffiti artist with a bad cigarette habit and a dope dealing roommate, its the type of tale that at first glimpse seem superfluous. Our awkward, unassuming outsider artist, played by Florian Brozek, who also wrote the film, begins to hit on a young woman named Marisa (Tabitha Shaun) in a park but is thwarted when his roommate steals her purse and car while he’s laying […]
by Brandon Harris on Aug 11, 2011 -
HAMMER TO NAIL REVIEW — “BAD POSTURE”
(Malcolm Murray’s Bad Posture, which premiered in Rotterdam, opens tomorrow in New York at Brooklyn’s reRun Gastro Pub theater.) You stay on this beat for long enough and things start to bleed together. One low-budget, poorly lit, competently acted, overhyped, overpriced festival hit after another seem to flood your brain with little sense of lived experience or aesthetic invention. No wonder the underpaid and overstimulated fall so hard for movies that have all of the symptoms of this toxic stew, as long as one seemingly clever gimmick is thrown in. (Oh look, a blonde who also writes! And jeeze Louise, […]
by Brandon Harris on Aug 11, 2011
