DVD Review: Tiny Furniture (Criterion Collection)

Lena Dunham and Alex Karpovsky. Courtesy IFC Films/Submarine Entertainment

Article first published as DVD Review: Tiny Furniture (Criterion Collection) on Blogcritics.

Aura is a young artist just out of college. She lives with her sister and her mother, who also happens to be an artist. Aura gets depressed, tries to get a job, tries to go on dates, and establish herself as an artist in a world of affected phonies. In the usual scheme of things this would be the kind of movie about a young woman finding her voice. But the dynamic at play here is more interesting than that. Lena Dunham, in her breakthrough second feature Tiny Furniture, has cast her own mother and sister in the film, and filmed in her family’s Manhattan apartment. Is this reality or fiction?

Laurie Simmons and Lena Dunham. Courtesy IFC Films/Submarine Entertainment

The title of the film is only mentioned in passing, but tracing its source leads you to what the movie is about. Dunham’s mother, Laurie Simmons, plays Dunham’s fictional mother Siri, but is playing a version of herself. Since the 1970s, Simmons’s work has used dolls, ventriloquist dummies and dollhouse miniatures to create a world of Lynchian domesticity and sexuality. Her photographs can be seen on the apartment walls in Tiny Furniture, and naming the film after her mother’s work presents this uncomfortable dramedy as a meditation on family and art.

What may be problematic for many viewers is that the movie can be deliberately grating. The film is populated with affected characters who spout out lines like, “I’ve always thought of myself as Tribeca’s solution to Marianne Faithful.” And that’s Aura’s best friend! The characters, including Dunham’s family, may be affected, but the sibling and parental relationships feel real. As pretentious as everyone around her can be, Dunham’s character in the film is insecure and unpretentious. If this sounds like a Woody Allen movie you’re right, and Dunham makes numerous references to Allen’s work, but the Woodman has never exposed himself as figuratively and literally as Dunham does here.

The two-disc Criterion set is generous with extras that enhance appreciation of the feature and the director. A half-hour conversation with Dunham and author/director Nora Ephron is a fascinating look at what different generations of women have gone through as artists. Dunham also gives props to cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes, who gives the film a stylish look that one is not used to seeing from the Mumblecore School that inspired it. Lipes’s work as a director can be seen on two excellent and very different documentaries, NY Export: Opus Jazz  and Good Times Will Never Be the Same.

A bonus disc covers Dunham’s film work before Tiny Furniture, including her first feature Creative Nonfiction as well as short films, all of which were made while she was at Oberlin College.  Dunham has brought her family into her film work since her college years, and Simmons and painter Carroll Dunham feature prominently in one hilarious short. For the entire five-minute length of “Open the Door,” the camera is trained on Dunham’s apartment door. Dunham stands guard watching her parents arrive through a video screen, and she asks each of them in turn to recite lines for a film, the plot of which implicates her father as a drug dealer and her mother as a hapless enabler. It’s the kind of uncomfortably funny sort-of-reality and sort-of-performance art that’s typical of Dunham’s work. Tiny Furniture, like all of Dunahm’s films, can make you feel uneasy, and it can make you laugh, sometimes at once.

Somewhere to Disappear

Courtesy Sophie Mas.

Laure Flamarrion and Arnaud Uyttenhove’s hour-long documentary Somewhere to Disappear opens with a view of its subject in his element. Photographer Alec Soth, backlit and in silhouette, points a view camera out a window. He calls out from the window to a passerby and potential subject, and after some effort, Soth catches his attention, and turns around excited that he made contact. This is an apt introduction to the artist’s method and personality – the reaching out, the enthusiasm, the modesty. And it’s a reminder of what Soth and his subjects leave behind in this film about running away from society.

Somewhere to Disappear is a document of Soth’s Broken Manual project, which followed the stars of men who choose to retreat from the world to varying degrees of success and isolation. Soth is himself a family man, with kids who have produced their own books like The Brighton Bunny Boy (itself about running away). But Soth too is sympathetic to these self-proclaimed outcasts, and in finding that his subjects often desire human contact despite their hermetic lifestyles, captures his own conflict between the allure of escape and the comfort of home.

Soth’s photography first gained a wider audience at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His debut monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, became an instant classic, and he has produced a steady stream of work and even  established his own publishing venture, Little Brown Mushroom. Soth  was recently honored with a mid-career retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Courtesy Sophie Mas

When asked what is the message of his photography, Soth answered, “It’s closer to poetry than to essay writing.” This can be said of the film as well:  it’s an artist’s road movie.  “I want to feel carried, even though I plot out a trip and everything. I always say I don’t know what’s gonna happen because I want the opportunity to be carried. Okay: I’m gonna have an adventure.” This is the wandering photographer’s m.o., as along a country road he hears dogs barking in the distance and tells the cameraman, “I’m just going to see what this is.”

Long shots, as of Soth photographic distant landmarks in Monument Valley, show the loneliness of the project, but the camera crew is right in the middle of it when they encounter those men who live at the edges of society.

Somewhere to Disappear introduces you to men who live in caves, in the mountains, in houses that seem uninhabitable. But they all have something  to communicate, about politics or life. That Alec Soth can enter these people’s lives and gain their trust is a credit to his personal vision as well as his personality.  He has worried that he’s exploiting his subjects, but his pictures give them a voice, and Somewhere to Disappear gives that voice sound and motion.

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Somewhere to Disappear can currently be seen at New York’s  Sean Kelly Gallery, accompanying an exhibit of Soth’s Broken Manual. A DVD is available for pre-order from info[at]mas-films.com

DVD Review: Classic Episodes of the Lawrence Welk Show: Vol. 1-4

I tried not to cannibalize the Lawrence Welk piece I wrote for The Man too much. In a slightly different form, this article was first published as DVD Review: Classic Episodes of the Lawrence Welk Show: Vol. 1-4 on Blogcritics.

The commercials for your typical Lawrence Welk program give the viewer a clear idea of the intended demographic. Anybody watching Film Chest’s four disc set Classic Episodes of the Lawrence Welk Show: Vol. 1-4 may or may not have the sudden urge to build up or renew their supply of Polident and Geritol. But does Welk have anything to offer today’s viewers?

The life of the bandleader-accordionist spanned nearly a century. Born in North Dakota in 1903, Welk’s early career was in 1920s radio. He was already a seasoned veteran when he landed his first television show in 1951. The Lawrence Welk Show ran until 1982 and featured Welk’s band along with featured singers like the Lennon Sisters and Guy and Raina; instrumentalists like accordionist Myron Floren; and featured dancers like Bobby Burgess.

These hour-long programs seem the antithesis of so much contemporary entertainment. But time can play funny tricks on cultural markers. YouTube is loaded with candy-colored clips of Lawrence Welk’s show, featuring dance and musical numbers that can be so square they’re surreal. The Welk image was used in Darren Hacker’s underground film “Velvet Welk”, which marries footage of the North Dakota native and his illustrious charges to the pulsating drive of the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray.”

Welk’s music as well as his visual image is certainly a throwback to a time Before Irony. It’s easy for 21st Century consumers to approach Welk with a camp aesthetic but the musicianship and the spectacle can be appreciated without irony – JoAnn Castle’s ragtime piano walks the edge of cloying but can also verge on avant-garde as she fingers the keys ever more furiously. Lyrics to forgotten songs like “Frankfurter sandwiches” shock modern audiences who assume our parents and grandparents listened to such words in complete innocence.

FilmChest and Synergy have assembled 720 minutes of Welk episodes, transferred from kinescopes that were made before the era of videotape by filming off a broadcast monitor. It’s too bad some of the collected programs from the 1960s, well into the color television era, survive here only in black and white. But the crude shading that the kinescope process often leaves on dark portions of the screen give the monochrome image a familiar patina of age that doubles as a metaphor for shadow selves and mortality. The spell is somewhat broken by a persistent “SYNERGY” watermark on the screen, but unlike other releases from the Inception family of distributors, it took me a couple of episodes to even notice it here.

There are no DVD extras on this set, and the transfers will not have the clarity that consumers would expect from a major studio product. But the music and visuals of the champagne music man will send fans of all ages into a reverie of time travel from which they may not want to return.

Out of Frame: Pina

This review originally appeared on DCist on February 3, 2012, and has been edited for clarity.

No! Definitely not!

Director Wim Wenders was on vacation in Venice when his girlfriend pointed to a poster for choreographer Pina Bausch and elicited that violent response, according to the Windy City Times. But he surrendered, and encountered Bausch’s work for the first time. The year was 1985, and as Wenders likes to tell interviewers, it was like unto a conversion experience: “I found myself on the edge of my seat, crying like a baby … it was like lightning struck me.”

Pina, Wenders’ gorgeous 3D document of the Tanztheatre Wuppertal, might not leave you in tears, but it may well convert the uninitiated: fans of Wenders who know nothing of the late choreographer; devotees of Bausch unfamiliar with the German’ director’s arthouse favorites Wings of Desire and Buena Vista Social Club; and finally, film skeptics who feel 3D adds nothing but a gimmick to the moviegoing experience.

The film opens with a birds-eye long shot of the theatre where the film’s stage performances were shot. The camera is still. But this establishing shot demonstrates a use of 3D both subtle and evocative, as the depth of foreground trees and traffic signals gently assert themselves in the space of the frame. The shot also recalls the old saw that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. There’s a common retort: of *course* dancing is about architecture. The body moves through and is restricted by space, and expresses itself within the limitations of a stage, an auditorium. Wenders uses 3D to reveal a spatial depth never before seen in dance films — and expands the stage to picture-perfect outdoor locations as well.

This depth is not restricted to the body in motion, the kind of in-your-face tricks that pepper the typical 3D project. Wenders and cinematographer Hélène Louvart, along with 3D pioneer Alain Derobe, present loving closeups of the dancers’ diverse faces. Light plays on the contours of bone structure, and, in some cases, wrinkles, and show an appreciation of the body in all its form and ages that you’ll never see in Hollywood.

The action begins with members of Bausch’s troupe marching in formation on stage, each repeating a series of gestures that represents the cycle of the four seasons. The line moves around a curtain, whose material may be fragile but gives you the first sense of how the film will treat 3D in motion. The various ages of the dancers resonates with the changing seasons of the dance, and this becomes the foundation for a survey of a life’s work. Time passes, the seasons change, our bodies change – and this is how we live and love. We dance.

As well as Wenders depicts this most graceful of visual arts, he also sets up the stagecraft behind it. Bausch’s interpretation of The Rite of Spring makes up the first section of the film, and is introduced not mid-dance but as stagehands prep the floor with a square of dirt. The systematic choreography of these functional gestures set the stage for the expressive choreography of symbolic gestures, as the dancers muddy themselves and rise, nourished by earth. The theme of earth returns like the seasons near the end of the film, on a set that recalls the claustrophobic doorways that mark apartment sets in Rosemarys Baby: sets of doorways on the stage frame action-within action.  A dancer carries a young tree on her back in the distance while on the main stage an older brunette dancer shovels dirt onto a younger blonde, who tries to right herself as her tormentor keeps shoveling. Wenders has never shied from references to pop culture, so it’s apt that this dance of mortality vividly recalls the Looney Tunes classic “The Old Grey Hare,” in which the aging Bugs and Elmer reminisce before Bugs buries his friend and nemesis alive.

Pina will come as a welcome surprise to those who know and love the Wenders of Wings of Desire or The Amercan Friend. The director has captured dance as if he’d been doing it his whole life. His use of 3D reveals a kind of depth and intimacy that would not be possible in a live performance. I regret that I never saw the Pina Bausch’s group perform live, but Wender’s Pina is a terrific approximation.

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Pina
Written and directed by Wim Wenders
With Malou Airaudo, Andrey Berezin, Azusa Seyama, Ditta Miranda Jasifi.

DVD Review: Futurist Life Redux

Article first published in a slightly different form as DVD Review: Futurist Life Redux on Blogcritics.

What does an avant-garde cat video have to do with Fascism? The omnibus film Futurist Life Redux, distributed by Microcinema, answers that burning question.

This isn’t the first time Microcinema has brought its viewership the finest in 21st century cat entertainment. But this time the cat comes with a pedigree. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched the Futurist movement in 1909 with the publication of a manifesto that dictated his aesthetic concerns: mainly, the past=bad, the young and strong=good. Adherents of Futurism admired violence and Fascism. In 1916, Marinetti , Arnaldo Ginna, and other Futurist-aligned artists made the movement’s only official film, Vita Futurista, which consisted of eleven segments with titles like “How the Futurist Walks,” “How the Futurist Sleeps,” and “The Sentimental Futurist.” But the sole surviving print was lost decades ago, and only stills and a synopsis survive.

The Futurists influenced better known art movements like Dada and Surrealism, but remain fairly obscure today. The non-profit arts organization Performa celebrated the centennial of the birth of Futurism by commissioning eleven artists to recreate “Vita Futurista” for our time. The demographic of the selected artists is primarily female, which seems to fly in the face of the male-centric Futurist ideal. But if the past=bad, then the Futurists should embrace, if hugging is their thing, this more inclusive document, which looks forward and backward at the same time.

If the resulting work seems random, that’s because to a large extent it is. The video and film artists selected were given a challenging assignment: after accepting the commission, they received their instructions: a one sentence description of their randomly assigned segment of the film, along with surviving stills and a four-week deadline. Curated by Lana Wilson with Andrew Lampert, the eleven segments that make up Futurist Life Redux are a mixed bag, but the strongest of them are bursting with the kind of spontaneous inventiveness that you’d hope for from such a project, but which they seldom achieve.

A segment by the late George Kuchar will be of interest to fans of the legendary underground filmmaker, but the video effects make one long for the black and white film stock of his best known work. Martha Colburn’s “One and One is Life” casts Wonder Woman in a stop-motion paper animation that avoids the cheesy 80s video look of much of the work here for the more subtle look of 16mm film. The super-heroine battles flaming automobiles and civil war soldiers on horseback on a mirrored stage that disorients but also reflects back the vivid imagery in fluid ways that send the action out in all directions.

Production still from Ben Coonley's Why Cecco Beppe Does Not Die." Courtesy Performa.

Ben Coonley is the genius behind the viral video “A Valentine for Perfect Strangers.” In “Why Cecco Beppe Does Not Die,” Coonley takes a similar artificial speech-cum cute cat video approach, using the limitations of commercial video to hilarious advantage. The surviving synopsis of this Futurist segment revolves around smell, and the artist runs with it, praising “the illuminated smells of a new technology” with scratch and sniff ovals “embedded” into the screen. That the Futurist messages are delivered by a cat and a pair of toddlers in skeleton outfits subverts conventional narrative in much the way the Futurists would have liked. But Coonley also pokes fun at the received wisdom of avant-garde film, wondering if an awful smell is “Austria? Hungary? Essential Cinema?” referring to the established canon of experimental films.

Coonley explains as much in one of the DVD extras, which feature chats with several of the participating filmmakers, including Kuchar, Shana Moulton and Lynne Hershman Leeson. Leeson explains that she made her segment, which combines video game footage with fragmented videotaped joggers, in two days.  By contrast, she had just completed a feature film on which she spent 42 years.  This film is the documentary Women Art Revolution, her recently released survey of feminist art. Leeson’s feature is essential viewing for anybody interested in modern art, particularly the generation of women who paved the way for the artists like Miranda July. Futurist Life Redux is unlikely to add to the canon of essential cinema.  But despite some inevitable indulgences, if you add it to your queue, there will be a few gems in your future.

Going Underground and other recent writing

So I have been crazy busy again and have lately written about almost everything except art.

• What’s Up with the Dupont Underground (right), a photo gallery made from a tour of a former Washington, DC streetcar station. Thanks to my fiancee Veronica Ebert for the assist!
• Godzilla vs. DCist: The Ba Bay Monster that Might have Been (below).  My first food article for DCist, about a sandwich you can no longer get from a restaurant that abruptly shut its doors just a few days after I consumed this monster in record time.
• Out of Frame: Jack and Jill.  Speaking of monsters, I reviewed the latest Adam Sandler movie  for DCist. I am not of the school of cinema studies that normally consider Sandler’s films crimes against celluloid, but this film caused physical pain.
• DVD Review: Dahling: A tribute to Zsa Zsa Gabor. For Blogcritics. Remember the name Hollywood Select Video, and don’t ever buy anything with their imprint or persistent watermark.

And recent Popcorn & Candy columns for DCist:

• Celluoid Heroes Edition, in which I blurb The Swell Season and various local repertory screenings.
• Marine, Tailor, Birdman, Clown Edition, in which I rave about the Afghan War doc Hell and Back Again and recommend George Franju’s Judex sight unseen, though it turns out the film isn’t nearly as intriguing as this misleading clip.
• Homewrecker Elmo Edition, in which I review Being Elmo, a documentary that despite the apparently inspiring career arc has its moments of darkness.
• Why the Long Face Edition, in which I plug Franju’s more successful Eyes Without a Face and reluctantly admire the indie rock-father daughter  team of Janie Jones.
• It’s Crawling Down Your Back Edition. Has it really been that long since I’ve posted these?
• Hard Boiled Edition, in which I round up the AFI’s Noir City festival.

Jane Greer, Robert Young, and Susan Hayward They Won't Believe Me.

Photobook Review: Vivian Maier: Street Photographer

From Vivian Maier: Street Photographer photographs by Vivian Maier, edited by John Maloof, published by powerHouse Books.

Article first published as Book Review: Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, edited by John Maloof with an essay by Geoff Dyer. on Blogcritics.

Real estate agent John Maloof was researching a book on the history of Chicago’s Northwest side when he purchased a group of photographic negatives at a storage unit auction. Maloof was not yet schooled in the art of street photography, but grew obsessed with his find and sought out more until he had amassed over 100,00 negatives, a third of which had not yet been processed. Maloof hoped to ask the photographer for tips, but sadly, when he finally came across the person’s name, a Google search came up with just one item: an obituary published just days earlier.

Her name was Vivian Maier. This artist who made a lifetime’s worth of photographs but had never showed them in public was a New York born nanny who died in Chicago in 2009 at the age of 83. If you follow photography circles online you may have heard of her. If you haven’t seen her work, from Maloof’s first inquiries on Flickr to this handsome mongraph and accompanying exhibition at New York’s prestigious Howard Greenberg Gallery, you may well wonder if the work lives up to the hype.

Absolutely.

In his introduction to Vivian Maier: Street Photographer,  critic Geoff Dyer notes that Maier’s work at times resembles to Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt, Walker Evans, and others, and wonders if this influence was conscious or simply a photography student’s projections. But video of Maier’s belongings shows the book collection of someone well-versed in photography, from old-school photographers like Berenice Abbott and Cecil Beaton to contemporaries like Thomas Struth (see the 5:26 in this clip from WTTW’s Chicago Tonight Show.

From Vivian Maier: Street Photographer photographs by Vivian Maier, edited by John Maloof, published by powerHouse Books.

Maier’s work may recall more familiar names, but her vision is very much her own: fresh and inquisitive, spontaneous as well as disciplined. Maier’s distinct photographic voice is at ease as a street portraitist, a documentarian of vernacular business signs, an abstract artist and finally a self-portraitist. As obsessed as the man who discovered her work, she carried her camera everywhere. Some of her most striking images are shot on or from public transit:  the elegant woman in front of the main branch of the NYPL, the peacefully sleeping elderly couple on a bus. Her pictures are at once artfully self-conscious and hilarious, as in the grocery store window dresser whose work shoes are caught peeking out from the stacks of canned peaches. Her eye is as sharp from distant shots of crowds to intimate portraits of strangers – eyeing her suspiciously, vamping for the lens, or simply going about their business. Maier’s timing is the envy of any photographer: the smouldering shell of an armchair left to burn on a curbside, the brilliant self-portrait that she must have seen happening and planned out to the second as a worker moving glass plates leaves but a perfect moment for the photographer to capture her reflection – and she gets it. You’ll get it too. In an era when everybody wants to be and is a photographer and can instantly share their work, Maier’s quiet persistence in obscurity gives one hope for visual wheat among the chaff.

Wish You Were Here: Emperor X, Western Teleport

Loved this album so much I turned down a comp and special-ordered  a vinyl copy (thanks Melody Records!) . Article first published as CD Review: Emperor X – Western Teleport on Blogcritics.

A glance at the lyric sheet for Western Teleport, the new album from Chad Matheny, aka Emperor X, reads like the dystopic rantings of a technophile making obsessive notes to himself: “Don’t think of her swimming sideways/Don’t think of her kicking at the topsoil/Don’t think of her fists in the facemask.” It’s a stark and somewhat obscure poetry; but these are songs, and the music Matheny makes transforms his laboratory sensibility (he’s a former high school science teacher) into romantic, dystopic, technophile love songs that are scientifically proven to be hummable.

Matheny’s dual nature reminds me of Dave Eggers, whose staggering genius tempered his heartbreaking tale, and whose heartbreaking narrative tempered the staggering genius. Matheny’s art and science, heart and mind complete each other. A tender melodic vignette about living by a landfill and finding mysterious language tapes reminds the singer of his beloved’s human fragility; this tender observation is packaged in the forbidding title, “The magnetic media storage practices of rural Pakistan.” This interesction of technology and tenderness plays out through the whole album: “Compressor repair” sings of BTUs and wishes that you’d be cool. “Sincerely HG Pregerson” appears to be a desperate missive sent from the front lines of a deadly post-apocalyptic epidemic. Did I mention the melodies? In every song, the melody makes the ideas soar even if the plot is unclear without a lyric sheet.

Matheny’s technological fascination has led him to more noise-heavy recordings in the past, and he’s lost none of that here: electronic sounds are prevalent, but these are warmed by plenty of acoustic guitar and those gorgeous melodies. Live, in various youtube clips, you can hear Matheny unencumbered by blips and beeps, and his voice seems warmer, more open. But the man knows how to make a record — and a framework:  the songwriter buries master tapes of the album’s songs in locations across the country. It’s a marketing ploy both 21st century (he posts GPS coordinates to fans and tweets the results) and old-fashioned (master tape!) but finally it’s part and parcel of a basic human condition: to share and connect. The title Western Teleport sounds like an impersonal telecomm, but at heart it sums up the artist’s major theme: wishing you were here.

The So Empty Inside Variations

So I’ve been busy (and sick) the last few months,  and one reason for the former if not the latter is the show that opened at the posh L2 Lounge in Georgetown Thursday before last, and came down yesterday.

It all began with a set of Hernard Title Letters that my friend Robin  gave me.  I wrote  about my early experiments with these letters, and background on why it would occur to someone to give them to me here.

The phrase “So empty inside” was born of real pain and emptiness, but art sometimes goes places you don’t expect it to, and in the setting where I hung a 30″ x 30″ print of the above,  it took on a new meaning.  When I checked into L2 on for the first time on FourSquare, I was greeted with the message, “Congratulations! You have checked into your first speakeasy!” The exposed brick lounge is across from and an extension of Leopold’s Cafe in Cady’s Alley, but not only do you need to know where L2 is to find the place, you need a membership to get in.

“So Empty Inside” was one of the first and best of the 3D-lettered photos I took, and it has been a template adaptable to invitations:

And to live commentary:

Thanks to all the people who provided support and/or materials, including Veronica Ebert, Robin Edgerton (who provided the letters), Pat Goslee (thank you for the nomination!), Andrea Hope of Vivid Solutions for the great prints, Heather Goss, Samantha May of Hillyer Art Space, and Michael O’Sullivan.  And thanks to Tony Padua and Garth for help installing.

Bonus image: a print I couldn’t get made in time for the show:

recent writing

every camera I own and the photobook review will return shortly. Meanwhile my writing for other venues continues apace.

DCist: Out of Frame: Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life

Can a graphic novel successfully make the transition to a live action feature film? The attempts have varied wildly from sources both independent (Terry Zwigoff’s spot-on adpatation of Dan Clowes’ Ghost World) to blockbuster (Zach Snyder’s muddled vision of Alan Moore’s Watchmen). Comic artist Joann Sfar bypassed the usual artistic differences by adapting his own graphic novel based on the life of an iconic and controversial French singer. The resulting film, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, straddles the fence between graphic novel invention and cinematic convention. Its cinematic successes and graphic novel excesses make me wish it had taken the real life plunge and left the comic art world alone.
Read the rest of the review here. 

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DCist: Out of Frame: 50/50

A lot of virtual ink and chatter has been spilled and offered about 50/50, directed by Jonathan Levine. The script by Seth Rogen’s longtime buddy Will Reiser is based on Reiser’s own cancer scare at the age of 24. The film is already being met with almost universal accolades that it Gets Cancer Right. 50/50 has a well-meaning script that gets a lot of the details right: of hospital life, of sickness and dying. But it’s so wrapped up in Hollywood convention that not even Seth Rogen, try as he might, can lift this out of the Lifetime Movie for Hipsters aisle.

Read the rest of my review here.

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DCist: my review of Thunder Soul from Popcorn & Candy: The Funky Passage of Time Edition

Thunder Soul

What it is: The inspiring story of an unlikely funk success.

Why you want to see it: Director Mark Landsman hits one out of the park with his feature-length documentary debut. Thunder Souldocuments the history and reunion of a legendary 1970s funk band that happened to be made of high school students. At the end of the 1960s, band director Conrad O. Johnson took charge of the music department of Kashmere High, an all-black school in Houston, Texas. He instilled his students with a sense of dignity, discipline and showmanship, and with his own stirring original compositions and arrangements he turned the Kashmere Stage Band into an international success. The stage band scene grew out of the big bands but with a pop bent — think early Chicago or “Spinning Wheel” played in velvet suits. The bands were typically very square and very white, but Johnson proved that expert musicianship, both professional and soulful, could be achieved by inner-city kids — and that they could blow away the competition. The film is told in vintage footage and photographs of the band along with contemporary interviews, as well as a look at the rehearsal process of the band’s reunion for their 92-year-old prof.

You may have never heard of the Kashmere Stage Band, but the film opens with a sound clip that may sound familiar. It’s DJ Shadow, working with Handsome Boy Modeling School. Josh Davis (a.k.a. DJ Shadow) appears late in the film to explain that when he found that drum break (from the funky theme song Johnson wrote for Kashmere High) he had no idea he was listening to a student band. A hipper director might have taken the DJ Shadow angle and framed the entire story around it, but thank your documentary stars that Landsman focuses on Kashmere itself and treats the rediscovery of the music as a sidebar. It is an important sidebar, as the music reached an audience far beyond the Houston community that spawned it. Interviews with record label owner/”funk musicologist” Eothan Alapatt tell the story of rediscovery, as he tracks down the albums in thrift shops and is eventually introduced to Conrad O. Johnson and his treasure trove of master tapes. A CD compilation of the Kashmere Stage Band’s music band was, as Alapatt put it, popular with “middle-aged white people.” It climbed as high as number 3 on the Amazon charts, and if Thunder Soul has the legs it deserves, their numbers will be going up again. The reunited band is available for gigs, although many of the reuniting band members had not picked up their instruments in more than thirty years. You hear those missing years in the early rehearsals. But then the voices come together again in unity and all is fight and funky with the world. (Note: I could insert an Amazon link to the CD, but ask your local independent record store — if Melody Records doesn’t have it in stock, I bet they can get it).

View the trailer.
Still playing at E Street and the AFI Silver.

Other recent writing:

For In The Muse: 

• Sheet Music of the Week: The Birth of Cinema Edition October 5th, 2011. In which I namecheck Tommy Wiseau for The Man.

For DCist:

• Popcorn & Candy: Visions and Revisions Edition, including blurbs for Blackthorn, Sweet Smell of Success, the AFI’s Vincent Price Centennial, Time Regained, K.364: A Journey by Train, and more.
• Photo of the Day: October 6, 2011
• Photo of the Day: October 13, 2011