Authors — Brandon Harris
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DUSTIN GUY DEFA’S “BAD FEVER”
Screening Times: Friday March 11th, 8:45pm (Alamo Lamar B), Monday March 14th 4:00pm (Alamo Ritz 2), Thursday March 17th, 3:00pm, (Rollins Theatre) SXSW stalwarts Kentucker Audley and Eleonore Hendricks star in Bad Fever, the debut from Brooklyn-based newcomer Dustin Guy Defa about the wistful, misbegotten almost, but not quite love affair between a couple of drifters, one of whom seems to videotape everything she does with an antiquated video camera. Filmmaker: How did you first conceive of Bad Fever? Defa: I was in the middle of writing a different screenplay and working as a carousel operator. One night this couple […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 11, 2011 -
CHRISTOPHER SMITH, “BLACK DEATH”
Muscular and involving, Christopher Smith’s medieval adventure film Black Death is a satisfying throwback of sorts — a tense, character-driven period piece that is at once an action film and an act of historical reexamination, with a dash of slow burn horror and spiritual rumination to boot. Eddie Redmayne plays Osmund, a monk in a small bubonic plague-ridden hamlet in rural England. Cloistered from the decimation somewhat, he carries on a forbidden love affair with a young woman (Kimberley Nixon) from his home town. After dispatching her back to their village in order to escape the plague, Osmund is tasked with […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 9, 2011 -
DAVID MICHOD, “ANIMAL KINGDOM”
Originally posted online on August 11, 2010. Animal Kingdom is nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Jacki Weaver). Like his stunning short films Netherland Dwarf and Crossbow, David Michod’s terrific and terrifying feature debut, the 2010 Sundance World Dramatic Competition winner Animal Kingdom, is a smoothly photographed, moodily scored tale of a trapped, dim and docile young man who suffers at the hands of a careless and, in this case, criminal family. As in his previous work, Michod relies on an insistent voiceover to provide biting interiority while the unrelentingly grim working-class Melbourne milieu is strikingly depicted in slow-motion shots and […]
by Brandon Harris on Feb 26, 2011 -
JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL, “RABBIT HOLE”
Originally posted online on December 16, 2010. Rabbit Hole is nominated for Best Actress (Nicole Kidman). David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Rabbit Hole might seem like an odd choice for helmer John Cameron Mitchell, a director whose reputation wasn’t gained built on tasteful, upper-middle-class family dramas. Perhaps he’s mellowed, and given the results, why not? The film’s story of parental grief, that of a Westchester County couple (Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman) who, eight months later still lack the emotional wherewithal to deal with the accidental death of their young son, may seem like the stuff of so many […]
by Brandon Harris on Feb 22, 2011 -
JORGE MICHEL GRAU, “WE ARE WHAT WE ARE”
In We Are What We Are, first time Mexican helmer Jorge Michel Grau creates a deeply unsettling portrait of contemporary Mexican urban life which steady grows into many things all at once: a sincere family drama, an earnest exploration of the moral implications of cannibalism and a ribald satire of the seemingly intractable political and economic corruption that is haunting present day Mexico. All moody nighttime vistas and grim, claustrophobic interiors, Grau’s film manages both social commentary and grisly, bone-chilling terror the old-fashioned way, but it still manages to have a depth of human feeling that isn’t the stock and […]
by Brandon Harris on Feb 16, 2011 -
Peter Byck, Carbon Nation
Hope is easy to sell, but fear is easier. Billing itself as a “climate change solutions” movie, Peter Byck’s Carbon Nation doesn’t want you to panic. If fear of the consequences of climate change has been the primary emotional content associated with the slew of climate-themed docs that have found their way to screens in the wake of An Inconvenient Truth, Carbon Nation dwells more on the possibilities that technological innovation, communitarian initiative and an end to political gridlock could have on our world. Time is short, but in Byck’s telling, the means to stymie the long-term catastrophes associated with […]
by Brandon Harris on Feb 9, 2011 -
IN ROTTERDAM, AMERICAN FILMS THAT COULDN’T EXIST ANYWHERE ELSE
After the rush of sales in Park City this year, it seems the entire American cine-punditry is racing to declare this the beginning of a new golden age in American Independent Film. I sure hope they’re right. One wonders if March’s SXSW Film Festival in Austin will continue the trend and finally push that festival into true market status. Nearly 40 films were acquired in Park City and many more that premiered there will surely be acquired in the weeks and months to come. Yet for some of the most daring new American films, the sales rat race at Sundance […]
by Brandon Harris on Feb 4, 2011 -
GREGG ARAKI, “KABOOM”
One of the key figures in the New Queer Cinema and ever youthful at 51 years of age, Gregg Araki is a director who is increasingly hard to pigeonhole. After the critical success of 2004’s Mysterious Skin, the film which confirmed that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a movie-star and that Mr. Araki could direct delicate drama as well as exploitation and cult cinema, it seemed that the director of such indie LGBT classics as The Living End (1992) and The Doom Generation (1995) was moving on to a new, more conventionally respectable, middle-aged portion of his career. Now Mr. Araki is […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 28, 2011 -
PARK CITY CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK #3: GEMS FROM THE OTHER FESTIVAL
While introducing a screening one afternoon this week in the Treasure Mountain Inn’s cramped banquet hall that the Slamdance Film Festival converts into its main cinema every year, Slamdance Co-Founder and expert hat-wearer Dan Mirvish remarked with a bit of awe that this was the 17th annual event, meaning that Slamdance, once referred to pejoratively as Sundance’s “parasite” by Robert Redford, had now been around for over half Sundance’s life span. Continuing, Mirvish claimed that “about a third” of the participants in Sundance’s 2011 lineup were Slamdance alumni. “The inmates have taken over the asylum,” Mirvish joked. Someone sitting behind me […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 28, 2011 -
PARK CITY CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK #2: BEATS, RHYMES, ODDBALLS
After its first weekend has drawn to a close, the 2011 Sundance Film Festival has seen a flurry of buying activity from movies both expected to sell for significant amounts (Jesse Peretz’s My Idiot Brother, which went to the Weinstein Company for $7 million) and movies no one expected to go for as much as they did (Drake Doremus‘ Like Crazy, which without a significant movie star in it went for $4 million to Paramount). While I haven’t seen either film, they both seem to have both their admirers and detractors. In a U.S. Dramatic Competition heavy on formally ambitious […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 25, 2011
