Chris Wilcha
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Hard Drives Full of Abandoned Projects: Chris Wilcha on Flipside
With Chris Wilcha’s recommended documentary Flipside opening today — including at NYC’s IFC Center — from Oscilloscope, we’re reposting Vikram Murthri’s deep dive interview below. — Editor In his first feature, The Target Shoots First, Chris Wilcha documented his tenure at Columbia House, the mail-order music service whose ads famously promised “12 CDs for a penny.” Then a recent NYU philosophy graduate, Wilcha landed the job partly due to his familiarity with “alternative culture,” a burgeoning new market at the time (Nirvana’s In Utero was soon to be released), and brought a sardonic Gen X sensibility to chronicling his time […]
by Vikram Murthi on May 31, 2024 -
TIFF 2023: Flipside, Nowhere Near
Introducing his third feature, Nowhere Near, Miko Revereza said that his first, the train travelogue No Data Plan, was shot in three days and edited in about a month, fooling him into thinking every movie would be as easy. Instead, Nowhere Near took seven years and five or six entirely different cuts to compose itself. Similarly contemplating a mountain of longitudinally acquired footage, Chris Wilcha’s Flipside is assembled from work shot over nearly three decades. Their approaches and intentions are entirely different, but the two films work well together. Wilcha is the maker of 2000’s The Target Shoots First, an immaculate workplace comedy about his mid-’90s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 15, 2023 -
Pay Tribute to Bankrupt Columbia House with The Target Shoots First
Given the news that Columbia House — the mail-order CD club that famously promised eight CDs for a penny — is filing for bankruptcy, there’s no better time to (re)watch Chris Wilcha’s The Target Shoots First, his 2000 documentary about his time working there in the ’90s. What once played as a blackly funny portrait of trying to stay sane while working in a cynical corporate culture is now oddly nostalgic, given the relatively relaxed working environment. For more context, it’s well worth reading this AV Club piece by Annie Zaleski, in which she interviews four former Columbia House employees (including Wilcha) about […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 11, 2015
