Columns
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The Blue Velvet Project, #78
Second #3666, 61:06 After Frank and his gang leave the Slow Club, Jeffrey follows them. He is a detective, now. The scene is bathed in hellish red. The slow rumble of thunder ratchets up the tension. There is no one for Jeffrey, neither Dorothy nor Sandy. Not now, in the silence of his car. In fact, the movie has carried itself forward without functional dialogue for a while; it’s become pure cinema, where the images and sounds render dialogue obsolete, because of what use is dialogue in the bloodlands? In 2666, by Roberto Bolaño, a character, Norton, repeated, in German, […]
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The Dish & The Spoon — A Hammer to Nail Review
(The Dish & The Spoon world premiered at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival. It opens theatrically at the reRun Gastropub in NYC on Friday, February 10, 2012. Visit the film’s official Facebook page to learn more.) Alison Bagnall’s The Dish & The Spoon opens with a distraught young woman named Rose (played by Greta Gerwig) hastily driving an old, large Mercedes station wagon into the rainy sprawl of an off-season Delaware beach town. When her cell phone rings, she only hesitates for a moment before throwing it out the window onto the highway. This act — equal parts defiant, hostile, […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #77
Second #3619, 60:19 See shot 9 from the previous post (#76). Frank, here, is someone caught between the hipsterism of the 1940s and the 1990s, his Pabst Blue Ribbon signifying the working man’s authenticity as opposed to the soft, foreign Heineken, the baby-faced college boy’s beer. And yet Frank aspires to suaveness in his soft nightclub shirt and beer poured into a glass, not drunk out of a bottle. Frank is a slave to a fixed idea. When he watches Dorothy on the stage, what does he really see? What if there’s something in Dorothy that’s only available to him, […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #76
Second #3572, 59:32 Back at the Slow Club, Jeffrey has just poured himself a Heineken, and Dorothy has noticed something that has caused a shadow of fear to cross her face. In a subtle relay of looks captured in nine shots that last just over one minute, this happens: Shot 1: Jeffrey, having poured a Heineken, watches Dorothy perform “Blue Velvet.” Shot 2: (second #3572, the frame above) Dorothy sees something in the audience that spooks her. Shot 3: Jeffrey notices Dorothy’s fear, and turns his head to where she is looking. Shot 4: We see Frank, the object of […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #75
Second #3525, #58:45 A classic two-shot, Jeffrey and Dorothy looking at each other across the open space of the screen. Dorothy is framed within the frame by the impossible closet (a sort of black screen) in the background. No longer dressed in black, Jeffrey’s character begins to separate itself from the hinted-at idea that he is somehow another, younger version of Frank. Although Blue Velvet is not alone in taking viewers into a sealed-off fictive world, it does so, strangely, by referring to the outside, “real” world (our world) not directly, but indirectly, through archetypes. There is a detective, a […]
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Bad Fever — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Bad Fever opens in New York City at the reRun Gastropub beginning Friday, January 3, 2011. It world premiered at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival and is being distributed by Factory 25. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) For those viewers with a deep-seated fondness for the character-based New Hollywood dramas that were churned out in the 1970s, Dustin Guy Defa’s Bad Fever will feel like a welcome return to that glorious past (I should know, as I am guilty of said deep-seated fondness). From the spare opening title card—complete with a copyright tag at the bottom!—to its […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #74
Second #3478, 57:58 Jeffrey’s return to Dorothy’s apartment is framed in a shot radically segmented by top-to-bottom of screen vertical lines, such as the door itself, the doorway, the protruding wall, the closet doors. This lends a certain crazy dimensionality to the scene, with Dorothy occupying the foreground, Jeffrey the middle ground, and the hallway wall behind him the background. And yet all this appears on a flat screen. Gerald Mast, in Film/Cinema/Movie (1977) asked whether we perceive the projected image as two-dimensional at all? The very fact that we call one object in the projected image apparently close to […]
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The Microbudget Conversation: The Success Of Failure
Well after a great holiday, and another Sundance, we are back for a new season of the conversation. This year we’re going to try and expand the definition of micro and see it as more of a state of mind and community, as oppose to a budget. I’m looking to hear from more filmmakers, see how they are expanding the limitations of technology, and see how the new model is effecting the old. We are also working on a project you’ll be hearing more about as the months roll on. Our hopes is that it will be some of the […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #73
Second #3431, 57:11 Outside of church (St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, in Wilmington, North Carolina), Jeffrey and Sandy prepare to leave. The scene in question is a fulcrum point in postmodern cinema: are Jeffrey’s lament about the presence of evil in the world, Sandy’s monologue about the robins bringing light, and the church itself, shaded with sincerity or irony? For many contemporary reviewers, the “hokey,” melodramatic acting was the sign of a cold tactician at work. In his Washington Post review, Paul Attanasio wrote that “Lynch likes to use wooden acting as a distancing technique, or a kind of joke.” […]
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TONEELGROEP AMSTERDAM STAGES “CRIES AND WHISPERS” AND “DISGRACE”
One of my biggest complaints about Broadway theater is the lack of artistic risk. (Indeed, one could make the case that Julie Taymor’s cursed production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark had the media riveted more by its performers’ injuries than by its Hollywood blockbuster budget. The safe Great White Way had become dangerous again!) Which is why it’s been like a breath of fresh air to take in several English-surtitled productions from Toneelgroep Amsterdam (headquartered a very easy hour’s train ride away from the International Film Festival Rotterdam), where in lieu of bodily harm to actors there’s a couple […]
