I first found out about Kathy Leichter’s documentary, Here One Day (above), via an email announcing the film’s Kickstarter campaign. Like many independent filmmakers, I receive many such emails. But what set this one apart from the others was the sender, filmmaker/editor (and friend) Pola Rapaport, whose work I greatly admire – and the film’s subject. Here One Day (screening at IFP’s Independent Film Week, Spotlight on Documentaries) is about Kathy’s mother’s bipolar disorder and suicide. It’s a story about what a person with mental illness does to a family — a story many of us can relate to — and […]
Knuckleball, the new documentary from Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, is about a small group of athletes who’ve gone against the grain. Just a handful of pitchers in the century-plus history of Major League Baseball have relied on the famously unpredictable knuckleball, a pitch that doesn’t spin yet darts every which way. Stern and Sundberg followed two of these guys—Tim Wakefield, of the Boston Red Sox, and the New York Mets’ R.A. Dickey (above)—for the duration of 2011 season. Significantly lighter than the Manhattan-based filmmakers’ previous documentaries—The Devil Came on Horseback was about the genocide in Sudan; The Trials of […]
“When the doors slid open, furious flashes of light jolted me out of my reflections. That’s why they had cuffed by hands in front. As far as I could see, reporters and photographers were crowded into the lobby. Trying hard not to look surprised, I lifted my head, straightened my back and between the two agents, made the long walk through the light flashes and staccato questions toward the caravan waiting outside.” These lines from Angela Davis’s 1974 autobiography, written at the age of 28 and edited by Toni Morrison, describe the way she remembers a humiliating perp walk four […]
Start out with a seed of Back to the Future and end up with the atmospheric uneasiness of Memento or Pi. Perhaps it’s not a trajectory that one would normally project, but Easton’s Article fits the bill. Sub the Internet in for the Delorean and information rather than Marty McFly as the passenger, and you begin to pick up the path left by writer/director/producer Tim Connery. He states, “Think if you received an email from a ‘future you’. You could alter a lot of things by just reading one sentence. And in 1997 websites weren’t slick and efficient; the web was still weird and buggy […]
What master do you worship? Does your master have a name — God, Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu, Great Spirit, Creator, Father, Mother — or remain nameless? Is He/She/It an abstraction — love, light, power — or have you met? Has your master sat across a table from you and asked you to account for your transgressions? Did you stare your master in the eyes without blinking? The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth feature film, is an epic, 70mm story of tiny details that plays out viscerally on the most complicated expanse imaginable: The human face. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a snarling, […]
In the years since his death in 2000, the work of artist Mark Lombardi has seemed even more prescient and relevant than it had during his lifetime. Lombardi’s finely-etched drawings, filled with annotated lines, circles and squiggles, traced the flow of capital and political power between various government, private and underworld actors. His subjects were American foreign policy, crime, corruption and conspiracy, and his artwork consisted of not only his drawings but the investigative work required to create them. Lombardi’s drawings reference the drug wars, the BCCI scandal, Charles Keating and the savings and loan scandal, and Iran contra, but […]
Easily the most out-there film I saw at last year’s CPH:DOX was one touted by the programmers as “the discovery of the festival”: Maiko Endo’s Kuichisan, receiving its New York debut tomorrow as part of the LaDiDa Festival. Previously, Endo was a vocalist in the band Battles and co-produced Jessica Oreck’s documentary Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. Now, Oreck has produced Endo’s debut picture, with Beetle Queen d.p. Sean Price Williams behind the camera. Stunningly shot in both black-and-white and color, Kuichisan is a tumbling collection of images, organized as much by feeling, sensation and the rhythms of its experimental soundtrack […]
Tall and part blonde/part brunette, Leslye Headland darted into our interview and gave me a warm greeting and an intense gaze. She explained that she had just run across town in Manhattan to walk her dog in between interviews while promoting her debut film, Bachelorette. The film is based on her stage play of the same name, about a gang of attractive girls (Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Kaplan and Isla Fisher) behaving badly before their friend’s wedding. I ask what her dog’s name is. “His name is Ramius. Which is Sean Connery’s name in The Hunt For Red October,” she says, […]
While Ethel, Rory Kennedy’s portrait of her mom, widow of dad Bobby, might have made a splash at Sundance, it’s not the only descendant-directed doc about a member of political royalty to have played the fest circuit this year. With California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown, director Sascha Rice and her sister, executive producer Hilary Armstrong – both of them daughters of former California State Treasurer Kathleen Brown – have chosen to bring to the screen the story of their grandpa, the late Governor Pat Brown. Nicknamed the “Architect of the Golden State,” the two-term governor had a slew […]
In Sophia Takal’s Green, a couple of young, New York sophisticates travel upstate in order to research a book on sustainable farming, but when a working-class local woman becomes the object of their affection, jealousy and sexual gamesmanship threaten to ruin their relationship. Mining the insecurities that persist amongst young lovers is not necessarily new ground, but Takal, working with her fiance Lawrence Levine and roommate Kate Lyn Sheil, invests the storytelling with a moody disquiet, an emotional honesty and a jarring sense of foreboding that elevate the film above so many of its predecessors. Widely deploying the color of envy in […]