Authors — Vadim Rizov
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“What About the First Time I Got Drunk?” Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton on All This Panic at Tribeca
In their impressively fleet debut All This Panic, the personal/professional partnership of Jenny Gage (director) and Tom Betterton (DP) train their gaze on a group of teenage girls growing up in Brooklyn. Tracking Lina, Ginger, Dusty and Delia as they transition from 16 to 19 (with older and younger outliers), the film unfolds in a 79-minute blast, articulately speeding through years of teen not-quite-turmoil. Impressively locked in, edited for speed and emotional impact, and exponentially more complex than most depictions of contemporary teen girls in either fiction or non-fiction filmmaking, All This Panic is an empathetic rush translating their experiences into something […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 18, 2016 -
“Here’s the Sporting Event Down by the Gym”: Bill and Turner Ross on Contemporary Color at Tribeca
Last year, David Byrne — capable of developing a deep enthusiasm for and knowledge of seemingly anything — held four concerts at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. Ten color guard troops from across the country performed routines to songs written just for them by ten artists; performance highlights include Byrne himself, St. Vincent and Tuneyards. The Ross brothers’ Contemporary Color is a documentary of this unusual performance that refuses to just be a concert movie. The film regularly skips away from the arena altogether, lurking backstage with waiting performers or cutting back to individual performers seen, in dreamy almost-flashbacks, in their hometowns. Performances themselves are […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 14, 2016 -
Jarmusch x2 Tops Cannes 2016 Competition Lineup
Announced this morning, this year’s Cannes slate brings forth the expected pack of established masters in Competition, with some unexpected outliers sprinkled in per usual (Brillante Mendoza!). You’ll want to turn to David Hudson for a thorough annotation of everything known about these films to date. (Annual gender equity note: three out of 20 films in competition are directed by women.) A special congratulations to overachiever Jim Jarmusch for having two titles at Cannes: the Adam Driver drama (?) Paterson in Competition, and Gimme Anger, a documentary on The Stooges. Opener Cafe Society (Woody Allen) Competition Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil) American Honey (Andrea […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 14, 2016 -
Watch: Haskell Wexler and Others in Other People’s Footage: Copyright & Fair Use
Robert Johnson, Jr. and Diane Carson’s Other People’s Footage: Copyright & Fair Use is a documentary about exactly what its title says it’s about. Per the film’s website, the doc features “illustrative examples from nonfiction, fiction, and experimental films that use pre-existing footage, music and sound from other individuals’ creations,” while drawing upon a solid roster of lawyers, archival producers and other specialists in this often-muddy field. In this clip, the late Haskell Wexler discusses his strategy in using a Coors commercial in his documentary Who Needs Sleep?, followed by some interesting insights on the strategies used by 20 Feet from Stardom and Bowling for Columbine. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 13, 2016 -
Happy Hour, The Best 317 Minutes of New Directors/New Films 2016
Bad news first: Happy Hour is pretty much a must-see. Given the option of watching 5+ hours on a weekend afternoon, I suspect most of us would rather not, but there are things it’s worth blowing your day up for. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s 317-minute drama is a mysterious movie that begins as one kind of straightforward film before mutating into something much stranger — discussing it thoroughly without spoiling it is tough. I’ll try. Happy Hour initially presents itself as something like a shomin-geki, a term Wikipedia snippily notes is a “pseudo-Japanese word invented by Western film scholars”; Donald Richie defined it as “the drama about common people […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 25, 2016 -
SXSW: Five Questions for The Bandit Director Jesse Moss
Jesse Moss’ documentaries often take on heavy material, and his last film — 2014’s The Overnighters — was no exception. The experience of profiling pastor Jay Reinke — a North Dakota minister whose decision to open up his congregation to homeless laborers seeking oil field work placed him at odds with his flock — took a heavy toll on Moss. His new documentary The Bandit is a completely different kind of movie, an archival-based profile of Burt Reynolds and his good friend Hal Needham. Moss examines their complicated relationship through the making of 1977’s Needham-directed Smokey and the Bandit, a film still in regular circulation […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 14, 2016 -
True/False Dispatch 2: Locked In
One of my favorites at True/False, Sergio Oksman’s O Futebol constructs/chronicles the director’s reunion with his long-out-of-touch father. After 20 years based in Madrid, Oksman has returned to São Paulo to spend a month watching all the 2014 World Cup games with his father. Even in a nation as soccer-crazed as Brazil, Oksman senior’s recall is massive: of a potential challenger for his claim to ultimate knowledge, he responds, “Let’s see if he knows who was the referee of the 1954 Fourth Centenary Cup final.” Father and son never do make it to the stadium — dad says he’s too busy, and then […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 11, 2016 -
True/False Dispatch 1: Director w/vs. Subject
It was a very good year for True/False, but I’ll save the taking-fest-temperature overview for our next print issue. In starting to sort through this year’s films, therefore, I need some kind of arbitrary framework that will provide the illusion of meaningfully segueing from one work to another. In this dispatch, I’ll be focusing on the thorny subject of what happens when documentaries do — or antagonistically don’t — try to serve as compassionate ambassadors to the world on behalf of their subjects. Unambiguous Sympathy Christopher LaMarca and Jessica Dimmock’s The Pearl is a nighttime movie, all quiet, warmly illuminated interior spaces populated by a self-supporting […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 10, 2016 -
Two From Rendez-Vous with French Cinema: Valley of Love and Story of Judas
Greeted with predominantly mixed-to-negative reviews at Cannes, Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love — tonight’s Opening Night selection of this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema — hit me so strongly I had to read up afterwards. Whatever the obvious problems with this movie may be didn’t register with me, so reading the notices helped. This isn’t a case of non-arthouse-friendly viewers finding a movie too slow and boring, but there are, I suppose, some obvious hurdles with this film. It starts as naturalism and unexpectedly keeps left-turning into mysticism, turns too jarring and ill-fitting for some (but, by definition, can’t movies turn […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 3, 2016 -
No More Parties in LA: Knight of Cups
Here’s a snatch of dialogue I never thought I’d hear in a Terrence Malick movie: “My life is like playing Call of Duty on easy. I just walk around fucking shit up.” A good line: punchy, funny, mining comedy from an unexpected analogy, profanely concise and self-aware. It is also exactly the kind of thing you’d never expect to hear in a latter-day Malick film, where dialogue is nearly forbidden and vocal self-expression confined to vaporous voiceover. Malick began as a screenwriter for hire, and in Badlands (and only there) he displayed a great gift for laconic humor. For whatever reason (and it’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 2, 2016
