The Screengrab : lance hammer

Screengrab Review: "Goodbye Solo"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Goodbye Solo, the third feature from Ramin Bahrani, the 34-year-old, American-born writer-director of Iranian extraction who was recently inducted by A. O. Scott into the "neo-neo-realism" hall of fame, represents a major leap forward for a filmmaker who wasn't in a bad place to begin with. Shot in Bahrani's home town of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, it's one of those rare movies that is hard to discuss, in terms of the story and characters, without making it sound simpler--and more pat--than it is. The title character, Solo (played by Souléymane Sy Savané) is a Sengalese immigrant who's driving a cab while working at fulfilling his dream to become a flight attendant; optimistic and high-spirited, he meets his match in the form of William (Red West), a sturdy-looking old man and the demeanor and expression of someone who once loaned Death twenty bucks and has decided to go ask for his money back. William regularly employs Solo to drive him to the movies, a pilgrimage he seems to be making so he'll have an excuse to talk to the kid who mans the ticket station; one night, he tells Solo that he'd like to schedule an appointment at some future date for Solo to chauffeur him out to a nearby nature spot--a mountain called Blowing Rock, where the wind blows up towards heaven--and leave him there. There's a good tip in it for him.

Part of what sets Bahrani-- who co-wrote Goodbye Solo and his previous film, Chop Shop, with Bahareh Azimi--apart from the run of Hollywood directors is how resistant he is to reducing his characters to pieces in a machine that runs on formula. Having gotten Solo's attention, William finds himself unable to get rid of him. The cabbie, who already has a full plate studying for his flight attendant exam while juggling the demands of a lover (Carmen Leyva) who'd rather he stay grounded and close at hand and the woman's tiny daughter, Alex (Diana Franco Galindo), stays in William's face, calling him "big dog" and trying to show him a good enough time that he'll snap out of his suicidal fixation. He also makes a stab at getting to the bottom of whatever has turned William against life, which is a dry run: Solo does learn a bit more about his favorite passenger, but if Goodbye Solo is packing anything that be given so banal a lable as a "point", it's simply that the forces that drive people can't be summed up in the space of a ninety-minute movie, and that someone who's made up his mind to recede and withdraw, and who has his own damn reasons for it, can't be easily persuaded to change course by all the free beers and childlike smiles in the world.

What sets Bahrani apart from some of the other directors in Scott's neo-neo-realist pantheon, such as Lance Hammer (Ballast) and Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy, Old Joy), is that he can put miserable people on the screen and generate something from their presence that's richer and more complicated than mere pathos or the warm feeling some moviegoers get from feeling sorry for poor people. And as he demonstrated with his nonprofessional leads in both Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, he's also different from some of his alleged peers in that he knows how to get non-actors to behave expressively and to hold the screen, instead of filling a movie with nonprofessionals and inviting the audience to admire how authentically uninteresting they are. In an interview with the director at SpoutBlog, Noralli Ryan Fores described a moment during filming when Galindo pulled Bahrani aside "to ask why it was that [Solo's] character at this moment seemed so sad. 'I don’t know; why do you think he is so sad?' Bahrani asked." That kind of intelligent openness to the mystery of what people are about suffuses the picture. You can taste it even in Michael Simmonds's cinematography, which makes Winston-Salem seem like a place so alive that it seems likely that every bit player would have a story worth telling.

The movie's web site describes Souléymane Sy Savané as a "former flight attendant, high-fashion runway model and African televison star." I don't know what he got up to on African TV, but Savané's performance in this, his first movie, is altogether remarkable. It's earned comparisons to Sally Hawkins's work in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, and it's a similar kind of high-wire feat, in that you may be aware of how easily Solo's cheerful determination to insert himself into other people's lives, whether they want him to or not, because he thinks he can get them to share his affable worldview (and then everything will be all right) could easily make him one irritating son of a bitch. Solo doesn't have as secure a support network or financial status as Happy-Go-Lucky's Poppy, and there are moments when life wipes the smile off Solo's face and leaves him winded. Even then, he never senses what's clear to the audience, which is that his indefatigable good cheer and expansive nature are every bit as mysterious as William's determination to pull defeat out of the jaws of acceptance and possibility--or, as William might see it, to go out on his own terms.

As William, Red West has the most well-worn face, in terms of its exposure to the camera, of anyone who's been in a Bahrani movie to date. The 72-year-old West is best known as a member of the Memphis Mafia, the group of old pals and bodyguards that settled around Elvis Presley. You can catch glimpses of him in Elvis on Tour and Elvis: That's the Way It Is, but long before that, he had broken into movies and TV as a stunt man, with help from actor and Friend of Elvis Nick Adams, who hired West to work on his TV series The Rebel. That eventually led to scads of acting jobs, mostly in small roles, in such movies as Walking Tall and Framed and a shitload of TV. More recently, he appeared in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker, Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune, and Ira Sachs's 40 Shades of Blue, though his most prominent role in a film may have been in the 1989 bad-laugh classic Road House. He's a hard-working pro, and in Goodbye Solo, he looks like an inexplicably magnetic old man who Bahrani lured over from standing in line at the DMV. Nothing in West's catalog of eighty-something movie and TV appearances would give you much reason to think that he could pull off what's asked of him here. William turns out to have a greater tolerance for Solo's company than you might have guessed, and he also turns out to be capable of going from ornery to scary when he feels that Solo's crossed the line. Then the moment passes, and you can see that William has one more trespass to regret, and that it'll be bothering him long after Solo has shrugged it off, which happens pretty much instantaneously. West never overplays his hand, and you can't take your eyes off him. The next time he runs into Elvis, who famously fired him and banished him from his sight a year before the King's death, West can delight his old pard with the news that, of the two of them, he was the one who wound up getting the breakthrough movie role.

Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Movies Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Like Saturday Night Live, people never get tired of complaining about the Sundance Film Festival, comparing it unfavorably to its glory days of yore...and yet, just as Lorne Michaels’ 34-season comedy juggernaut (despite decades of grumbling and reports of its imminent demise) has and continues to spawn everything from the Blues Brothers and Bill Murray to 30 Rock and Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impression, Robert Redford’s love child has likewise changed the face of American filmmaking for (mostly) better and (sometimes) worse since its inception in 1978, 1981 or 1985 (depending who you ask...especially if you ask our own Phil Nugent).

I was tempted to illustrate this introduction with a sexy naked picture of recent Sundance carpetbagger Paris Hilton tied up in microphone cord to (A) draw the prurient eyeballs of Nerve.com sex enthusiasts, but also (B) to make a snarky statement about the way Redford’s annual celebration of the “indie spirit” is really little more than a high-altitude version of the same old Hollywood rat race, where the usual suspects pimp low-budget versions of the same old crap while patting themselves on the back for their "edgy" artistic integrity at pricy soirees that would fund a dozen projects by the real indie filmmakers shivering in the cold on the wrong side of the velvet ropes separating them from the A-list glitterati.

But, no...instead I chose a still from “Any Given Sundance,” because (A) the Simpsons are cooler than Paris Hilton and (B) as a reminder that, for all its faults, Redford’s indie film revolution (like the Easy Riders and Raging Bulls of the 1970s American film renaissance) has penetrated mainstream culture and generally expanded the boundaries of what audiences see, both in the art house and (to a certain extent) on multiplex and television screens.

And so, partly to wrap up our extensive coverage of this year’s festival and partly to remind ourselves of the hours and hours of fine entertainment Mr. Redford has indirectly unleashed upon the world, this week we here at the Screengrab are hitting the slopes with our FAVORITE SUNDANCE MOVIES OF ALL TIME!

STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1985)

The first Special Jury Prize winner at Sundance way back in 1985 was also the movie that really put Jim Jarmusch on the cultural map. Watching it today, it’s easy to see why judges found it so charming, but it’s also easy to see how little Jarmusch’s overall aesthetic has changed: he’s got bigger budgets now and can afford actors who demand bigger paychecks than the goofy Richard Edson and the lovely Eszter Balint (making her film debut here), but his technical approach – long static shots and drifting movement from the middle distance – has hardly changed at all. His obsessions with untethered losers, people with their own inexplicable moral code, and the vagaries of American culture as viewed through the eyes of foreigners, likewise haven’t changed very much. When they first appeared, though, in this alternately hilarious and depressing film about a disconnected New York scenester and his Hungarian cousin wandering to Cleveland and then to Florida for no particular reason, it looked like something that had dropped in from another world. Stranger Than Paradise is one of the films that helped define the modern era of indie film, and helped establish Sundance as the tastemaker’s festival for that particular aesthetic. More than 25 years later, the movie and the festival have a strong connection.

POISON (1991)

By the time Todd Haynes won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for his first widely released full-length, Poison, he was already famous (or, rather, infamous) for making Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story – a film about the late pop singer made entirely with Barbie dolls. A pair of lawsuits drove that film underground, but Poison proved that Haynes was more than just a gimmicky joke: its technical skill and audacity placed him at the forefront of a growing movement that became known as the New Queer Cinema, and its unsettling tone marked him as a filmmaker with a distinct and not always pleasant point of view. Poison consisted of three distinct narratives, each done in a different style: “Homo”, an adaptation of a Jean Genet short story, is the most visually sumptuous, telling a disturbing tale of gay prison romance. “Horror”, an unsubtle AIDS metaphor, evokes 1950s sci-fi shockers as a scientist turns into a deformed madman after isolating a chemical extract that is pure sexuality. The most disturbing, eerie, and inexplicable of the three is “Hero”, a pseudo-documentary of a child who murders his abusive father and flies away, never to be seen again; the straightforward way this bizarre story is told is what makes it so memorable. Haynes’ next movie would be the absolutely brilliant Safe, but Poison remains a powerful signal of a newly arrived talent.

BOTTLE ROCKET (1996)

A lot has gone wrong since Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket tipped at Sundance in 1996. Anderson has become a highly controversial director, and for everyone who finds him innovative and engaging, there are those who finds his movies facile and self-indulgent. His star and co-writer, Owen Wilson, has occasionally shown signs of his old talents, but more often has become a smirk in search of a paycheck, much more content to collect a fee than to push himself artistically, and his personal life has been a shambles marked by substance abuse and a suicide attempt. But there’s no denying their first, and best, moment of greatness: Bottle Rocket is a surprising, clever, well-made, and extremely likable film that came more or less out of nowhere to become one of the best-loved movies of the 1990s and a touchstone of that decade’s indie movement. Though it didn’t take home any of the big prizes at Sundance, it generated a huge amount of buzz there, and its later success was largely due to the positive reviews and publicity it garnered in Park City. Anderson’s direction is ambling but never aimless, Wilson’s writing and acting are funny and charming but not lazy, and the whole movie gets the best out of its small budget and creates a rarefied atmosphere that’s worth revisiting. It’s sad to think of Bottle Rocket as a high point its writer and director would never reach again.

WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (1995)

The winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 1996, Welcome to the Dollhouse is another film whose director somewhat wore out his welcome with later films. Todd Solondz has established himself as a filmmaker so determined to push boundaries that he’s become alienating rather than empathetic, and who seems to confuse relentless bleakness with clear-eyed realism; the incredible depths of understanding that make Welcome to the Dollhouse such an appealing and moving film are soured or nearly absent from his later work. (He even manages to piss away the good will generated by his most famous creation by killing off Dawn Wiener for no particular reason in Palindromes.) However, no amount of excess can rob his first feature of its power; Welcome to the Dollhouse is still one of the most touching and sympathetic, albeit incredibly uncomfortable, views of adolescence ever captured on film. Dawn’s negotiations through the bitter lessons of bullying, pre-teen sexuality, parental neglect, and sibling rivalry are as real as it gets, and all the more surprising for how well a male writer/director was able to communicate the specific problems of an adolescent girl. Welcome to the Dollhouse would also likely have been less successful had the role of Dawn not been assayed with such perfection by the young Heather Matarazzo, who, like Solondz himself, never quite recaptured the greatness of her debut.

BALLAST (2008)

One of the big winners at this year’s Sundance film festival, Lance Hammer’s Ballast took home well-deserved prizes for directing and cinematography (astonishing work by Lol Crowley). Hammer has been around for a while, but this is his first full-length feature film, and it came at a key moment for Sundance: many critics at this year’s festival complained about burnout, the fragile state of the economy has seen a number of established festivals shutter their doors, and much wringing of hands has taken place over the future of independent film. That’s why it was important for a movie like Ballast to come along, to signal the continuing strength of indie cinema and the continuing importance of places like Park City for them to find an audience. The quiet, powerful story of a Mississippi family plunged into despair and inertia by the suicide of one of its members, Ballast features some incredible naturalistic acting, a mesmerizing pace and visual sensibility, and an emotional punch that’s become increasingly rare in the growing inward smirk of a lot of American independent film. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s one that completely justifies the importance of the festival circuit and neatly answers at least a few questions about the state of indie movies in 2009.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

The Best of 2008: Leonard Pierce's Picks for the Best Movies of the Year, Part One

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

2008 is already getting a rap as a bad year for filmmaking, which is entirely unfair -- it's merely a good year that has to contend with coming right after 2007, one of the greatest years in recent cinematic history. It's also the first year where I spent the entire year as a critic living in a city that seems allergic to art films; when it came time to compile my top tens, which no doubt reflect my current cultural circumstances, I found I had seen fewer of the most highly praised films of the year than in any recent memory. Putting this list together involved a lot of work on my part -- not the normal intellectual work of weighing the artistic merits of each movie and finding something to say about them, but the physical work of actually seeing the damn things, when a good half of them didn't play in my city. This is especially true of the 2008 end-of-year releases. But throught a combination of tactics, including but not limited to Netflix, filesharing, begging publicists for screeners, shuttling back and forth to Austin, and, in the case of my #1 pick, engaging in a quest that would, itself, make a pretty good movie, I managed to put together a list of my ten favorite films of the year. I don't know how you loyal readers will take it -- I know that I'm at odds with a few of my Screengrab colleagues on at least a couple of these -- but here I stand, in a year that ain't as bad as it seemed.

10. MILK (Gus Van Sant, dir.)

Three decades too late, but this is the year of Harvey Milk: the new album by an Athens-based band that bears the assassinated San Francisco supervisor’s name is one of the best of the year, as is Gus Van Sant’s biopic of the country’s first openly gay elected official. Noted by Van Sant as the first movie of his return to mainstream filmmaking, Milk has been criticized for taking a straightforward approach rather than showcasing the director’s more experimental side, but, like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, it largely succeeds because it lets the flashy stylistic touches take a back seat to what is, after all, one of the most compelling political stories of the American century. Sean Penn is rightly getting props for his terrific performance as Harvey Milk; it’s a career-redeeming showing after nearly a decade of missteps. But no one should ignore the excellent supporting performance, especially those of James Franco as Milk’s partner Scott Smith and Josh Brolin as the tortured killer Dan White. Elegant, appealing, timely and persuasive without being preachy, Milk is one of the best biopics of recent vintage.

9. BALLAST (Lance Hammer, dir.)

Lance Hammer’s debut feature film Ballast is being widely proffered as proof that reports of independent film’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The indie scene was on the rocks this year, to be sure, but Ballast is a mighty convincing argument for its continued vitality. It deals quietly and hypnotically with the emotional paralysis into which a Mississippi family is thrown after one brother commits suicide, and its characters – played almost entirely by an amateur cast using improvised dialogue – are so real as to be astonishing. The performances by a batch of promising unknowns are halting, wandering, and unspectacular, because people rarely react to such an event in a spectacular way. Likewise, criticism of the film’s slow pace seem off the mark to me: the movie’s slow movement and stately grace (visually abetted by some incredible cinematography by Lol Crawley) recall Ozu, who was rarely subject to such carping. Ballast is a thing of dark, slow beauty.

8. THE DARK KNIGHT (Christopher Nolan, dir.)

The opinion of a million IMDB fanboys notwithstanding, The Dark Knight isn’t one of the greatest films ever made. Now that it’s available on DVD, its flaws are easy to catch on repeat viewings: too much of David S. Goyer’s heavy scriptwriting hand, a confused and uncentered role for Batman himself, and an ending that continues to make precious little sense. But, by the same token, its strengths are also mightily in evidence, ready for anyone to savor who thinks a big-screen action picture can’t also be a good movie: a number of near-perfect emotional moments, a riveting conjuration of a city caught in the grips of terror, and, of course, Heath Ledger’s absolutely electrifying performance as the Joker, one of the greatest screen villains in history. And, in the same way he used a pulp noir thriller as the framework for one of the most deeply philosophical mainstream movies ever in Memento, Nolan manages to take a superhero punch-‘em-up and turn it into one of the most profoundly political movies of the year.

7. IL Y A LONGTEMPS QUE JE T'AIME [I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG] (Phillipe Claudel, dir.)

This French drama is, with Synechdoche, New York, one of two amazing films made this year by first-time directors who are better known for their writing. Phillipe Claudel, a well-respected screenwriter and novelist, has made a movie as small and controlled as Charlie Kaufman’s is ambitious and sprawling: it’s remarkably tight for a first effort, with none of the excess that often betrays a first effort. With not a single frame wasted, he brings us the story of Juliette Fontaine, a woman whose sister takes her into a distrusting – not to say dysfunctional – family after she has spent fifteen years in prison; Kristin Scott Thomas (who seems an entirely different actress, and a far superior one, in French than she is in English) plays her with an emotional and physical reticence that borders on exhaustion, and she’s perfectly complemented by Elsa Zylberstein as her loving, determined sister. It’s the best family drama in years, understated and nearly perfect at conveying its emotional complexities.

6. MAN ON WIRE (James Marsh, dir.)

The most compelling documentary of the year is based on an event so trivial it would be almost entirely forgotten if not for the existence of the movie: Phillipe Petit’s jaw-dropping, pointless, spectacular, and foolhardy tightrope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center during its construction in 1974. Filmed by the director of Wisconsin Death Trip and using similar techniques (including some arbitrary, though skillful reenactments), Man On Wire brings us a movie about the WTC that has nothing to do with the terror attacks that brought it down – and yet which cannot escape comparison, with its images of bits of the towers in chaos (though from construction, not destruction), its central plot of a small group of schemers engaging in intricate planning to conquer them (though their motivation is art, not violence), and its unforgettable image of Petit suspended between the buildings, so eerily reminiscent of the shots of those who fell on September 11th. Petit did not fall; we know he did not, because we see and hear him from the movie’s first shots. The fact that it’s so fascinating to watch though we know he didn’t fall is a testament to its power as a film.

Click for Part Two

Movie Review: "Ballast"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Ballast, which was made in rural Mississippi with a small cast of non-professional actors, most of them African-American, begins with Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith, Sr.), who is discovered sitting in his living room in shock, with the body of his twin brother, a suicide, lying in bed in the other room. For a while, the movie cuts back and forth between Lawrence's sad story and the troubles of twelve-year-old James (JimMyron Ross) and his indulgent single mother Marlee (Tarra Riggs), without at first making it clear how their lives are connected. Bored and lonely, James hooks up with an older group of drug dealers and begins making drops for them on his bike. He also acquires a gun and begins seriously acting out, at one point barging in on Lawrence in his home and robbing him, though Lawrence is so far lost in his depressive misery that it feels a little off applying so active a verb as "robbing" to anything that could be done to him; sticking a gat in his face is like yelling at a dead dog to heel. Eventually, things go very wrong with James and his new friends, and as the increasingly desperate Marlee begins to flail out looking for a way to keep herself and her son safe, the central trio collide with a bang.

Ballast won awards for its first-time director, Lance Hammer, and its cinematographer, Lol Crawley, when it played at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and it has since gone on to become one of the best-reviewed movies of the year. I was eager to see it myself, partly because I grew up in rural Mississippi myself, and the world this movie touches on doesn't show up in movies that often. Crawley gives the back country landscape a blue-tinged loveliness that's very easy on the eyes but is also a little at odds with the uninflected, "natural" performances of most of the male cast members. The world of this movie doesn't bear much connection to the Mississippi I know, not because there's no visible resemblance between the two, but because the movie feels airless and stylized and as devoid of any sense of ongoing life as a diorama. Yet at the same time, Hammer, who invokes Robert Bresson in discussing his intentions, seems to mean for his nonprofessional cast to bring something to the screen that's more "real" than trained actors can. Though it may be blasphemous to say it, Bresson himself wasn't always able to get what he needed out of the supposedly pure, malleable untrained actors he came to favor, and Hammer hasn't yet had the experience that Bresson had wracked up before he started treating the casting of non-actors as an essential part of his "transcendental style." Here, Micheal J. Smith has a solid dignity that isn't always enough to hold the screen but does translate into a respectful admiration for his character. But young JimMyron Ross has no idea how to communicate whatever is supposed to be inside his troubled character, and Hammer has no idea how to guide him. If the viewer is pure-hearted and sympathetic enough to have no end of intrinsic sympathy for a lost, fatherless kid who likes to wave guns around, lies all the time, and stupidly stirs up trouble that puts the people who care for him in mortal danger, that might not be a problem, but for the flawed mere mortals among us, watching this little punk who has no depths of inner life that the camera can pick up on run amok creating plot complications can get old fast. Tarra Riggs, who has won roles in a few other pictures since making her movie debut here, gives the movie's most nuanced performance, but even her work suffers a little because of the writer-director's failure to really get a handle on the kid at the center. This woman is supposed to have a past history of substance abuse, and she's supposed to be hard-headed and self-sufficient enough to have gotten past that and made a living for herself and her boy by scrubbing urinals. But she never suspects that her acting-out little snot of a son might be involved with drugs, even after her starts turning up with bruises on his face. For the first half of the movie, she's so sweet and reasonable beyond the call of duty that she seems delusional, and there's so little preparation for her flaring up emotionally after things turn bad that she seems deranged.

It's nice to see a movie whose characters qualify as "the working poor" that actually seems to be set in the same economic world we live in: no Hollywood screenwriter would be constitutionally capable of writing the scenes in which James tells his mother that he needs twenty dollars for school or a hundred or so dollars to get right with the drug dealers, and she reacts as if she couldn't imagine earning that much extra cash in a single lifetime. But a lot of Ballast falls solidly in the "worthy" category. Pauline Kael once said that one of the few ironclad rules about movies is that the good ones never leave you feeling virtuous, and by the time that the catatonic Lawrence, whose dog was taken in by a neighbor after its grieving owner went off the deep end, goes to fetch the animal so that he can use it to bring James out of his shell, virtuousness is just what the film seems meant to embody. It's artful and well-meaning, but there may also be some condescension built into its joyless depiction of the tragic zombie lives of the underclass. The Delta setting may be a hint that Ballast is meant as the cinematic equivalent of a blues song, but if it is, it's the kind you get from the academic appreciators of the form who don't get that the term "the blues" describes the state that the music itself is supposed to lift you out of.

Sun Rises In East, Independent Film Industry Doomed

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Every couple of months, someone in the press gets wind of the notion that independent film -- which, to our knowledge, has never been a field people have entered with an eye towards getting rich -- is on its last legs. Lamentations ensue, and then someone pulls out the box office receipts for The Dark Knight, and everybody has a good laugh. This time around, it's National Public Radio's turn to sound the doom bell for our favorite art form.

"Chicken Little was right", screams the headline to Kim Masters' article on the last days of indie film, placing into evidence the testimony of one Mark Johnson, a big-time studio producer (Chronicles of Narnia) who also dabbles in the independents. Unable to find a distributor for his small-budget southern gothic Ballast, he and director Lance Hammer are now taking it from city to city, screening it in front of whatever audiences will pay attention. "I thought that, at the end of the day, quality would win. We would like to think that if something is made well, it ought to be able to pay for itself," says the producer, who apparently has never ever paid any attention to any aspect of our culture. Art-house executive Mark Gill points out that independent films now have a 99% chance of failure (which, we're guessing, is up from the 98% of a few years ago, or the 100% of most of Hollywood history), and warns that "You have to be very good, or great, or you will die," which should come as exciting news to all the people who made great movies and failed anyway as well as reassuring every failure in the industry that they just aren't good enough.

Don't get us wrong -- no one is more sympathetic to the Sisyphean struggle of the independent filmmaker than we are, and no one would love to see a true meritocracy in film, where Charles Burnett gets to make any movie he wants while Michael Bay has to work double shifts at the car wash to afford a new fisheye lens. But all this weeping and gnashing and grinding of teeth every few years about how this time, indie film is really and truly doomed, and if you don't make Citizen Kane the first time you step behind a camera you might as well go back behind the counter at Taco Bell not only ignores the reality that determined artists have always found new and innovative ways to get their movies made, but does a disservice to aspiring filmmakers by making things seem even more dire than they actually are.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 4

Peter Smith — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Just a few minutes into Ballast, Lance Hammer's methodically withholding feature debut, I already felt confident of two things. One, I wasn't going to like this movie. Two, everybody else would, for reasons having little to do with Hammer's artistry and a great deal to do with his sensibility. Sure enough, shortly after I bailed at the end of reel two, weary of the film's mannered silences and artless shakycam, I found Robert Koehler's Variety rave, which predictably declared Hammer "a humanist artist" and praised his film for "engag[ing] audiences' best human responses." (As opposed to, say, their arachnoid responses.)

Alas, since I don't subscribe to the self-congratulatory notion that a film's worth hinges on the degree to which it reflects your own worldview, thereby making you feel good about yourself for admiring it — a phenomenon I've dubbed "soup kitchen cinema" — I can't join in the hosannahs. My friend Noel Murray of the Onion AV Club, who stayed to the end (and was somewhat underwhelmed), assures me that Ballast does eventually shake off its sub-Dardennes torpor and achieve some genuine power. But let me briefly recount the moments that made me decide I'd seen more than enough. (This will involve some mild spoilers concerning events that happen in the first few minutes, which you're likely to encounter anyway if you're so much as skimming other reviews/synopses.)

After a brief, lyrical pre-title sequence, we discover Lawrence (inexpressive nonprofessional Micheal J. Smith, Sr.), a heavyset black man, sitting on the couch in the darkened living room of a dilapidated house, just staring into space. A neighbor appears, first knocking and then, when Lawrence fails to respond, opening the unlocked front door and stepping inside. The neighbor, a middle-aged white guy, is looking for someone who turns out to be Lawrence's twin brother, and finds him lying dead in the bedroom, an apparent suicide. Naturally, the neighbor has questions for Lawrence, but Lawrence says nothing. He just keeps staring into space. Eventually, as the neighbor calls 911, Lawrence silently stands and walks out the front door, without so much as a glance at the neighbor; through the open door, we can see him disappear around a corner.

At which point I had to restrain myself from saying aloud "Aaaand gunshot in five. . . four. . . three. . ." I wasn't 100% certain whether Lawrence was about to return with a gun and blow the neighbor away or just shoot himself offscreen. But Hammer's setup for an "unexpected" act of violence couldn't possibly have been more clumsily blatant. If you don't know that a nonresponsive, near-catatonic character who abruptly leaves the room is about to do something horrific, you can't have seen very many movies in your life.

One offscreen gunshot later, Lawrence is in the hospital, having survived his suicide attempt. We get a series of brief, uninflected shots showing his surgery, his recovery, his discharge. (This is all in the film's first five to ten minutes.) People speak to Lawrence, but he never says anything in return. Weeks have now passed — we hear from a doctor that Lawrence was unconscious for ten days — and the same neighbor shows up, wanting to know whether Lawrence is okay; he's also come to return Lawrence's dog, which he's been looking after since the "accident." Lawrence opens the door when the neighbor knocks and then just stands there, silent, for the entire scene. Are you okay, Lawrence? Silence. I brought your dog back, figured you'd want him now. Silence. I guess I'll just keep him a while longer, then. Silence. You sure you're okay? Silence. All right then.

I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. We're not talking here about the melancholy expressionism of a Tsai Ming-liang or the perverse whimsy of a Kim Ki-duk. This is by no means a deliberately stylized world in which a mute character violates no rule of verisimilitude. Hammer is aiming for raw naturalism, and we're apparently expected to believe not only that Lawrence's behavior is a credible expression of grief (which I might buy in the immediate aftermath of his brother's death, but not weeks later following a lengthy hospital stay), but that the neighbor, who in all respects appears to be an ordinary guy, would simply accept these unmistakable signs of mental imbalance, never once pressing or protesting.

Ask yourself how you would react if someone you knew just stood there like a statue, making no response of any kind to anything you said. This nonsense bears no relationship whatsoever to genuine human behavior — it's just a novice filmmaker's misguided notion of what might constitute badass minimalism. That so many people seem prepared to take it seriously only shows how far good intentions will take you.