Richard Brody
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The Wrong Box: Zach Clark’s Little Sister, MoMA’s Sally Bergerless Doc Fortnight
“I needed structure!” says former goth Colleen Lunsford (Addison Timlin, star-to-be) in a revelatory moment in Little Sister, the latest feature by Brooklyn-based Zach Clark (White Reindeer, Vacation). It is one of two unaffected masterpieces (the other is Ira Sachs’s Little Men, which I’ll review when the increasingly daring Magnolia Pictures releases it) screening at BAMcinemafest (Jun 15-26) that I was fortunate enough to catch early — two for two! Colleen is exasperated trying to explain to her estranged, self-absorbed mom, Joani (Ally Sheedy, better than ever), why she left home to seek out spiritual redemption in a cloistered New […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jun 14, 2016 -
What’s In My Instapaper: Jason Molina, Google Reader, Female Road Narratives and More
I discover the links for these weekly columns through one source: Google Reader. Well, last week, Google sent the beloved Google Reader to its graveyard. I didn’t initially understand how difficult it will be to replace Google Reader until listening to last week’s Accidental Tech Podcast, even as the show’s Marco Arment believes that Google’s departure from the RSS space will be a good thing in the long run. Still, the shutdown has prompted a lot of press, and not all in the tech field, questioning our dependence on Google given their penchant for launching and shuttering services. For Google […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 24, 2013 -
DAVID LOWERY ON STORY STRUCTURE IN “MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE” & “SLEEPING BEAUTY”
Filmmaker David Lowery (Pioneer, St. Nick) has an interesting piece on his blog today comparing the storytelling engines in Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene and Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty. Martha, he argues, deliberately builds tension by withholding key information, while Sleeping Beauty lays everything on the table up front in an attempt to diffuse tension and focus deeper on story, theme, and character. In the article, Lowery also defends Martha against Richard Brody’s recent New Yorker blog post (a response in itself to Anthony Lane’s review of the film) in which Brody argued that the film’s flashback-heavy narrative […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Nov 7, 2011 -
WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER: SUNDAY MORNING LINKS, 2/13/01
Here are a few of the articles in my Instapaper this week. At Bad Lit, Mike Everleth has his usual excellent selection of Underground Film Links, including this link to “Foreign Cinema: Whither San Francisco’s Experimental Film Legacy,” by Kimberly Chun at the Bold Italic. She visits Canyon Cinema and and various local filmmakers, looking for scene described in the Pacific Film Archive’s first book, Radical Light. Chuck Tryon watches (and likes) The Fighter with his Massachusetts-born fiance and notes the reference to the documentary High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell: A look back at the documentary shows […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 13, 2011 -
PARK CITY CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK #1: WOMEN IN TROUBLE
On the night the latest edition of the Sundance Film Festival kicked off, I was approached by a man in a beat-up looking bubble coat and slacks three thousand miles away in a Crown Heights, Brooklyn laundromat. He extended his hand, in which he was holding six plastic sheets with DVDs in them, and tersely said, “Movies.” I looked down at the half-a-dozen bootleg discs in his hand, most of which were sequels to “urban” thrillers I had never heard of in the first place. “I’m good,” I brusquely whispered, causing him to saunter off into the fluorescent hum and […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 22, 2011
