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IFF Boston 2012: Gayby

summervillain — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:43:04 +0000

Laugh-a-minute is a dreadful cliché, but Jonathan Lisecki’s Gayby made me laugh more than any other recent feature I can think of. 89 times? Quite possibly. Lisecki has a trick of presenting a gag, and then ratcheting it up until it becomes almost, but crucially not quite too camp. A terrific ensemble cast including Jenn Harris, Matt Wilkas, and Lisecki himself have both the timing to play up the jokes, and the depth to maintain emotional resonance underneath the yuks. I almost didn’t see this because the unlikely-coupling MacGuffin seemed too familiar from the likes of Friends with Kids and Hump Day. But I’m very glad I saw it, and recommend it highly.

IFF Boston 2012: Sun Don’t Shine

summervillain — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:40:42 +0000

It’s tricky to discuss Amy Seimitz’s Sun Don’t Shine without spoilers: it both embraces and subverts traditions of the outlaw-lovers-on-the-run story in inventive and surprising ways. Leads Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley turn in nuanced and powerful performances. Seimitz’s blending of the internal mental landscapes of her characters and their objective environments is sly, effective, and even disorienting (in a good way). This is another film in the festival bolstered by outstanding sound design.

IFF Boston 2012: Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters

summervillain — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:37:18 +0000

Gregory Crewdson has been my favorite photographer since I saw an exhibit of photographs from Twilight a decade ago. Perhaps my expectations of Ben Shapiro’s documentary were accordingly a bit too high. Certainly there’s much here that I loved: plenty of shots of Crewdson and his team of both dedicated professionals and random passers-by creating the elaborate scenarios that Crewdson’s work documents. If you have a chance to see this film in a theatre, it also affords a better look at the rich detail of Crewdson’s work than you can get in a gallery, let alone from one of the monographs of his work. But while there’s ample demonstration of the physical process of realizing Crewdson’s singular visions, and some insightful discussion from the likes of authors Russell Banks and Rick Moody on what Crewdson’s images have to tell us, the energy that drives Crewdson’s mental processes remains obscure. Which is probably just as Crewdson wants it, but still just a touch disappointing.

IFF Boston 2012: Animated Shorts (V)

summervillain — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:10:41 +0000

This year’s animation package was marked by an extraordinary cohesiveness. Elements kept appearing in multiple films: whales, rabbits, briefcases, ominous low tones, visual and audio glitches. Oh, and darkness — this was an almost unrelievedly grim group of films.

Drew Christie’s “Song of the Spindle” is a short, pointed dialogue between a man and a sperm whale. It’s sharp and inventively realized. I liked it a lot.

Daniel Seideneder’s “Hurdy Gurdy” is stop motion piece with a surprising gimmick. It’s very appropriately scored, but I found it such a one-trick pony that it barely sustained it’s four-minute run time for me.

Julia Pott’s “Belly” provides a glimpse into a disturbing environment. It reminded me of Larry Marder’s Beanworld and the work of Jim Woodring, not in any specific detail, but in the sense of the pervasive strangeness of the internal logic of the invented world. One of my favorites.

The unusual techniques Dan Ojari brings to “Slow Derek” were arresting and unusual, but the story just didn’t grab me.

Alberto Vasquez and Pedro Rivero’s “Birdboy” offers some striking imagery, but again, the story failed to engage me.

Frederick Tremblay is probably tired of being compared to Jan Ŝvankmajer and the Brother’s Quay, but his disturbing stop-motion piece “Blanche Fraise” also powerfully, if elliptically called Lynch’s Eraserhead to mind. His claustrophobic, frightening vision is unique and compelling, and the sound design was brilliant. Most likely to give me nightmares of anything I’ve seen in the festival so far.

Chrstopher Kezelos’s “The Maker” present a sumptuously detailed environment and packs a creepy punch.

Kelly Sears “Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise” was the clear standout for me. An evocative narrative that see-saws between silly and scary is bolstered by a genuinely inventive and surprisingly restrained animation technique.

Don Hertzfeldt’s “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” feels a bit like two short films somewhat awkwardly joined by something I can’t discuss without getting spoiler-y. I’m less keen on the second portion. But the first section joins Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Haruki Murakami’s Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Peter Handke’s “The Left-Handed Woman,” and the works of Oliver Sacks among my favorite descriptions of misfiring brains. Some of the purely visual depictions of the symptoms associated with corpus callosum damage are stunning. This is e concluding third of a trilogy which I now very much want to see the rest of.

IFF Boston 2012: Documentary Shorts (I)

summervillain — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:54:35 +0000

The first program of documentary shorts are all character studies.

Helen Hood Scheer’s brief piece “Full-time Ministry” engaged me least. It depicts an art teacher who views his creation of ice sculptures as a form of worship. The black & white cinematography was pretty and the sculpture process was interesting, but not compelling.

Igor Drljaca’s “The Fuse: Or How I Burned Simon Bolivar” is built around some astounding footage of the outbreak of civil war in Sarajevo. Powerful, but as the title suggests, it brings a very human and personal dimension to the impact of the conflict.

Tom and Jim Isler’s “Two’s a Crowd” was a knockout. It’s a surprising, very funny, and tender look at a couple with an unusual relationship dynamic. The chronology of the narrative arc is adroitly structured, and the editing is outstanding. This was my favorite film in the program.

Matt Lenski’s “The Meaning of Robots” starts weird, gets weirder, and then even weirder. It doesn’t provide any real insight into its subject, but it delivers a lot of shocks in its scant four minutes.

Jushua Weinstein’s “I Beat Mike Tyson” is a tough sell for me; I am not a fan of boxing. Weinstein’s portrait of Kevin McBride doesn’t shy from showing that the sport is not good for the men in it; McBride seems surprisingly gentle for a man who makes a living punching people. I liked it better than I expected to.

Ben Steinbauer’s “Brute Force” taught me about a musician I’d never heard of, even though he recorded for the Apple label. Nicely paced and structured; Makes me want to hear more.

The brilliantly titled “American Juggalo” reminded me of Jeff Krulik’s classic “Heavy Metal Parking Lot.” Director Sean Dunne and his crew wander around the Gathering of the Juggalos, letting them describe what Juggalohood means to them in their own words. It’s sharply edited and well-paced, by turns disturbing (even outright frightening), funny, and sometimes touching. I assumed it was shot before “Miracles” unveiled the kinder, gentler Insane Clown Posse, but apparently that’s not the case.