Authors — Damon Smith
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Calvin Lee Reeder, The Oregonian
Since being named one of Filmmaker magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2007, Portland-bred writer-director Calvin Lee Reeder has amassed a small body of impressively uncategorizable work—mostly no-budget shorts like Little Farm, The Rambler, and Snake Mountain Colada—that reveal a taste for the bizarre and beguiling, as well as the shockingly perverse. Prior to making films in earnest, Reeder played guitar with the Lars Finberg–led paranoid post-punk group Popular Shapes (a/k/a The Intelligence) and collaborated with Brady Hall on Jerkbeast, a feature comedy based on a demented, sophomoric public-access program they developed for fun. (Think Morton Downey Jr. […]
by Damon Smith on Jun 6, 2012 -
Brandon Harris, Redlegs
For his micro-budget debut feature Redlegs, which resides comfortably alongside work by Aaron Katz (Quiet City) or Bradley Rust Gray (The Exploding Girl) both tonally and dramatically, Filmmaker magazine contributing editor Brandon Harris (with whom I share this column) returned to his hometown of Cincinnati with three actors and a tiny crew hoping to dramatize the moment when childhood camaraderie dissolves in the face of adult realities and overdue reckonings. Very loosely modeled after John Cassavetes’ Husbands, the film trails three young men — brooding ex-actor Marco (Nathan Ramos), sensitive Willie (Evan Louison), and aggressively obnoxious parking-lot owner Aaron (Andrew […]
by Damon Smith on May 23, 2012 -
Grant Gee, Patience (After Sebald)
One of the great European literary figures of the past half century was the German writer W.G. “Max” Sebald (1944-2001), a late bloomer who fused essay, history, memoir, and meditative fiction into an unclassifiable weld of eloquently bewitching prose in four major works (Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz), all written over the last decade of his too-abbreviated life. Sebald’s solitary narrators, given lightly autobiographical shadings, wander landscapes as far-flung as the Suffolk coast or the Slovakian countryside like melancholic revenants dwelling on the fate of individuals lost to war or time, the operation of memory, and other […]
by Damon Smith on May 9, 2012 -
Jennifer Baichwal, Payback
Jennifer Baichwal is an accomplished Canadian filmmaker whose ever-searching documentaries have taken up such diverse subjects as photography (The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia), literary biography (Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles), the metaphysics of lightning strikes (Act of God), and the devastating underside of mass Western consumption (Manufactured Landscapes). In her latest film, Payback, loosely based on the prolific Booker Prize–winning author Margaret Atwood’s book-length study of debt as a structuring principle of life, language, and contemporary culture (the subtitle for her tome is The Shadow Side of Wealth), Baichwal investigates the disparate ways […]
by Damon Smith on Apr 25, 2012 -
Pablo Larraín, Post Mortem
Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín (Tony Manero) was born in 1976, three years after the coup d’état that toppled democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende and ushered in the long, brutal regime of General Augusto Pinochet, whose chokehold on the South American nation lasted until 1990. Although Larraín is currently shooting the second season of Prófugos, an action-drama series for HBO Latin America about cocaine cartels — “it’s like playing a with a big toy,” he avers — the Pinochet era has continued to fascinate him. The chaotic, thunderous birth moments of this dark and deeply corrupt period in Chile’s late-modern history […]
by Damon Smith on Apr 11, 2012 -
Corinna Belz, Gerhard Richter Painting
Capturing the moment a work of art is born, or rather the arduous process through which a particular masterwork begins to reveal itself to a painter or sculptor, is an old subject for cinema. Hollywood in the classical and postwar era loved biopics, bringing to the screen highly romanticized, larger-than-life portrayals of everyone from Rembrandt to Van Gogh, Michelangelo to Toulouse-Lautrec. There are fewer great films that focus single-mindedly on the creative process, however. Jacques Rivette’s La belle noiseuse is one, a masterful film about a fictional artist whose laborious, continually frustrated efforts to paint his beautiful young muse are […]
by Damon Smith on Mar 14, 2012 -
Justin Kurzel, The Snowtown Murders
For his harrowing debut feature, Australian director Justin Kurzel (Blue Tongue) took on a sensationalistic serial-murder case that rocked the northern suburbs of Adelaide in the early aughts. Known across the country as the “bodies in barrels” case, the Snowtown murders spurred controversy and launched a lengthy investigation that resulted in the conviction of a charismatic drifter, John Bunting, along with three accomplices, including a teenage boy he had taken under his wing. Attached to the project by Warp Films Australia’s Anna McLeish and Sarah Shaw, and working from a script by Shaun Grant, Kurzel brings psychological verisimilitude and a […]
by Damon Smith on Feb 29, 2012 -
Andrew Okpeaha MacLean, On the Ice
Back in 2008, Alaskan director Andrew Okpeaha MacLean was awarded Best Short at the Sundance Film Festival for his period film Sikumi, about a murder and its aftermath in an Inuit community. MacLean, one of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” that year, had set the buzzed-about tale in his frozen Arctic hometown of Barrow, the historical seat of the Iñupiaq people, casting locals and shooting out on the ice in subzero temperatures. (Sin Nombre writer-director Cary Fukunaga lensed the film.) Last year at Sundance, MacLean unveiled On the Ice, a feature-length movie loosely based on the short film; […]
by Damon Smith on Feb 15, 2012 -
Ben Wheatley, The Kill List
A rising star of the under-40 British indie director set, Ben Wheatley (Down Terrace) may not yet be a recognizable name in the States, but years from now his latest film, the brain-bending, spookily enigmatic The Kill List may well be regarded as a milestone in the horror genre. It isn’t just that Wheatley has concocted an ingenious new way of frightening audiences—the film’s ending shocked and thrilled viewers at South by Southwest, who flocked to the Internet to praise its unholy attributes—but that his free blending of seemingly incompatible genre conventions seems so natural as we enter the psychic […]
by Damon Smith on Feb 1, 2012 -
Asghar Farhadi, A Separation
Though not as well known outside Iran as Abbas Kiarostami or Jafar Panahi, writer-director Asghar Farhadi has been steadily building an impressive cinematic resume since graduating from Tehran University in 1998 with a degree in dramatic arts. After a stint developing stage plays and TV series for Iran’s national broadcasting corporation, Farhadi co-scripted Ebrahim Hatamikia’s post-9/11 political farce Low Heights, about a desperate man who hijacks a plane carrying his wife and handicapped son. He then moved into the director’s chair with Dancing in the Dust and Beautiful City, a social-issue film concerning the archaic custom of “blood money” […]
by Damon Smith on Dec 28, 2011
