We Made a Blog

Some Hollywood pitches consist of little more than the familiar trope of this meets that, as in: “It’s ‘Annie Hall’ meets ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’!”. If you had to sell Off/short, it would have to be as Sundance meets Burning Man.

France gets a two-night, two-day nomadic city of “invaders” (filmmakers who get to set up their own unique screening spaces) that show 500 short films – fiction, documentary, animated, clips, screen tests, series or “unidentified filming objects.” The screening areas only have to meet two requirements: they have to be able to be moved and have capacity for at least one person. What constitutes a screen is just as flexible, so if you’re an attendee, be prepared to possibly huddle around someone’s cell phone.

Off/short 2010 is set to invade the town of Aisne in the north of France from August 27th to 29th. The festival will be as cinematic as the creations it shows, with ghost boats, spontaneous pyrotechnics and image mazes. Get a glimpse of last year and set up camp waiting for scenes from this one.

Deep and abiding is far from an adequate way to describe my devotion to the works of  Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. He effortlessly makes the mundane unearthly.

But like many a Murakami fan, my breathless endorsement reaches a hiccup on the subject of “Norwegian Wood.” While it was his breakthrough hit in Japan, it’s a sharp departure from the mystical alleyways of Tokyo that he usually frequents. A narrowly focused love story, it’s as short and tangled with sexual resentment as the Beatles tune Murakami derived its title from.

French-Vietnamese director Anh Hung Tran has taken on the task of adapting the novel to film. A promising venture since the last Murakami work brought to the screen – Jun Ichikawa’s beautifully spare and relentlessly depressing “Tony Takitani” – was widely praised. Tran’s film looks to be on the same path. Though it’s set to open in Japan in December, it will premiere in September at the Venice Film Festival, where it’s already up for the Golden Lion Award.

A “Norwegian Wood” teaser trailer was released a few days ago. Only 30 seconds long, it makes excellent use of the plinky, plaintive tone (maybe the most stripped-down sitar sound commited to tape) of the Beatles song. If the trailer is any indication, this bird will fly, too.

The hero is dead before this tale begins; you fall in love with him anyway. In the opening moments of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child,” Basquiat looks up through his babydoll curled lashes, through the camera, through the screen, through you and smiles so deeply that the corners of his mouth roll into themselves. Maybe he’ll make it. But there is no alternate ending, no director’s cut. Your heart will break before an hour and a half is out.

He was gone 22 years ago of a heroin overdose at that mythically fateful age of 27 and the majority of this film sat in a drawer for its own 20-odd years. Director Tamra Davis (“Half Baked,” “Billy Madison,” wife of Beastie Boy Mike D) has brought out these remnants of her time with her friend Basquiat and pinned them against a backgdrop of interviews and archival footage that brings not just Basquiat but downtown 80s New York back for a full exhibition.

Basquiat drifted out of a comfortable Haitian/Puerto Rican middle-class home in Brooklyn and into New York at 17 in the late 70s to live on his charm and change from the floor of the Mudd Club. His epigrammatic graffiti, under the tag SAMO, won him the attention of the bohemian downtown scene where you could call yourself an artist and become Keith Haring, call yourself a singer and become Madonna, call yourself a filmmaker and become Jim Jarmusch.

On film the power of Basquiat’s work and the naturalness of his creation of it is in full evidence. His talent was “boom for real” as he was fond of saying about things he liked. To testify to that, Davis rounded up representatives of every part of Basquiat’s life – childhood friends (Al Diaz), lovers (Suzanne Mallouk), artists (Julian Schnabel), gallerists (Larry Gagosian), collectors, East Coast friends (Glenn O’Brien), West Coast friends (Davis herself).

Longtime on-and-off girlfriend Mallouk is the steady voice through the film, delivering one of the most devastating moments toward the end. Fab 5 Freddy, a steadfast friend, is the closest there is to having Basquiat narrate, as he relates Basquiat’s inner life and feelings to time and circumstance.

Ultimately, there is a descent into paranoia and depression for Basquiat, aided by the death of his close friend Andy Warhol and humiliations delivered by his father. Davis handles this swiftly and deftly, not taking away any of Basquiat’s radiance that she has committed so well to film.

She was at the opening night at Film Forum. Humble and slightly flustered, she answered questions, listened to reminiscences and emphasized how glad she was to be showing the film in its spiritual hometown.

Walking out into the damp, warm New York evening after, blocks and decades away from the heart of the onscreen action, you feel the loss of the scene, of the possibilities it held, of Basquiat. You hear Julian Schnabel in your head: “New York, in the summer, it’s a motherfucker.”

RZA. Live action. Wu-Tang VS The Golden Phoenix. Get your attention yet? Hot off the heals of his collaboration with Takashi Okazaki on Afro Samurai, RZA is taking it to live action. You heard me, a live action samurai movie.  Not only featuring the legendary Wu-Tang leader’s music but the man himself takes center stage.

Sharing the screen with a platoon of real Shaolin warriors, “Wu-Tang VS The Golden Phoenix” will be an instant cult classic.

In this short film by Ramin Bahrani, the protagonist finds and loses the love of his life, sending him on an existential quest to reach the vortex. Werner Herzog gives voice to his reflections against a celestial score by Sigur Rós‘ Kjartan Sveinsson. Have we mentioned the protagonist is a plastic bag? You’ll cry anyway.

“Plastic Bag”
Directed, written and edited by Ramin Bahrani
Story by Jenni Jenkins and Ramin Bahrani
Voice of Werner Herzog
Cinematography by Michael Simmonds
Music by Kjartan Sveinsson

“Saint John of Las Vegas” begins with John Alighieri (played by Steve Buscemi) midway through the journey of his life, within a gas station dark and his straightforward pathway lost.
 
Director Hue Rhodes has taken on the retelling of the Inferno and, arguably, the entire Divine Comedy in 85 minutes of flat desert. He pairs John with insurance fraud debunker Virgil (Romany Malco) in a quest to find proof to deny a claim to a wheelchair-bound stripper. John is led through his own circles of hell – corporate America and Las Vegas – by Virgil and delivered into the hands of his smiley-face-bedizened Beatrice, Jill (Sarah Silverman) for the rest of his journey.
 
The film falls within the new genre of quirk but Rhodes doesn’t live up to the higher practitioners of the art (Kaufman, Gondry, Anderson, Jonze) in that he hasn’t created a cohesively odd universe for the audience to immerse themselves in. They find pockets of weird, though, a reigniting human torch comprising some of the best of those moments. Heavy-handed allusions (a lighter that says “Abandon All Hope”) are a shame since they outweigh the defter ones (quotidian gates symbolically open and close between the hell, purgatory and heaven segments).

There are some steadily underplayed performances. From Buscemi, particularly, who makes excellent use of his wounded chihuahua persona to bring a forgiving vulerability to the role.

“Saint John of Las Vegas” might not be a divine comedy, but it’s a comedy of a higher order.