Columns
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Margaret — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Without any fanfare, Margaret was released theatrically by Fox Searchlight on Friday, September 30, 2011. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) Oh boy. Oh wow. If your idea of a rewarding time at the movies is a symphonic drama that aches with the blood, sweat and tears of real life while simultaneously upholding the finest traditions of opera, of theater, of poetry, of literature, look no further than Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret. Much has been written about the unfortunate legal brouhaha surrounding the film’s post-production — it was shot in 2005 while here we are twiddling our thumbs in […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #28
Second #1316, 21:56 A stairway exposed / A monastic image / Deep River Apartments / The silence of the film / The sound of sound / Has come apart / I’d like to think / In curved brick archways / The light / The 90 degree angles / Against that light / The Bug Man / Auden: “The bug whose view is balked by grass” / The steady climbing / Of the stairs / Then dark / Then Frank / What light will come of this? / The metal handrail across the door / A chance to stop the frame […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #27
Second #1269, 21:09 We don’t know it yet, but the faint buzzing sound of static we hear at this point comes from the flickering red neon ELEVATOR sign that Jeffrey—emerging from the far right side of the frame—will encounter in a few moments. Ian Watt—the great deconstructor of the barely visible codes of narrative fiction—once described the actions of a character named Kayerts in Joseph Conrad’s short story “The Outpost of Progress” and in doing so introduced the phrase “delayed decoding” to describe how Conrad sometimes placed readers in the position of his characters, for whom events unfolded more quickly […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #26
Second #1222, 20:22 A bug man, a Jehovah’s Witness, and an anonymous cleaning man converge in the frame. It is near this point that Blue Velvet begins trembling under the weight of its own narrative expectations: what will Jeffrey find in Dorothy’s apartment? Will he get caught? What does Sandy really think of what’s happening? The framing follows the elegant horizontal lines of Jeffrey’s convertible, and the movement over the next few moments will follow the direction of the car, from right to left. Sandy holds copies of Awake! magazine, slipping into the role of Jeffrey’s accomplice and the religious […]
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MEDIA CURRENT: NEWS AND ANALYSIS FOR INDIE MAKERS
Media Current is a monthly heads-up tracking developments effecting the indie film scene. It’s a big — and forever getting bigger – world out there, so readers are encouraged to e-mail me stories I’ve missed or something you believe is important for others in the indie community. I can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net. The IFP’s Independent Film Week 2011 The IFP market, established in 1979, was rebranded several years ago and was held this year at Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. It drew a diverse, friendly crowd ranging from seasoned professionals long battling in the indie vineyard to […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #25
Second #1175, 19:35 Confession: the first time I saw Blue Velvet—and each subsequent viewing has only reinforced this—I’ve always felt that when Jeffrey pleads with Sandy at this moment (“Sandy, let’s just try the first part”) he’s talking about sex. What sort of plan is Jeffrey hatching, and is Sandy agreeing to? In their classic 1969 essay “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni ask whether it’s possible for any film to escape the ideological boundaries of its making. While most films, they argue (Marxist cultural determinists that they were!), can never break free of the gravitational forces of ideology, there […]
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The Microbudget Conversation: Do Your Homework
It’s been a few weeks longer than usual, and the list of reasons is a mile long. The first, and important few are: I’m moving, there are big things being planned for this column’s future, and I was at Independent Film Week. If you ever get a chance to go to IFW… Go. Especially if you are planning a film. I won’t get too far into it, (as many wonderful folks already have) but it was thrilling, inspiring, and sobering. Our industry is changing almost faster than we can keep up. There are a ton of creative folks out there […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #24
Second # 1128, 18:48 1. “The first thing I need,” Jeffrey tells Sandy, “is to get into her apartment and open a window that I can crawl into later.” As it turns out, this plot line never develops, as Jeffrey spots a key to Dorothy’s apartment which he takes instead. It seems like a minor point, the window, (although in the apartment in his bug overalls Jeffrey does glance twice at the window above Dorothy’s sink) and we soon forget about it. It’s one of those moments in Blue Velvet that only obliquely and in the most obscure ways references […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #23
Second #1081, 18:01 “There are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experience,” Jeffrey has just said to Sandy as they sit in Arlene’s. In 1844, two years after his eldest son died of scarlet fever, Ralph Waldo Emerson began his most radical essay, “Experience,” with these sentences: “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward […]
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Take Shelter — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Before world-premiering in the dramatic competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Take Shelter was picked up by Sony Classics. It went on to win the Grand Prize at Critics Week, as well as the FIPRESCI Prize, in Cannes. It opens theatrically in New York City and Los Angeles on Friday, September 30, 2011. Visit the official website to learn more.) [DISCLAIMER: I am very good friends with several of the key collaborators involved with the Take Shelter production. Ordinarily, I would absolve myself from writing a review based on far more tenuous connections, but in this particular case, I […]
