Dreams With Sharp Teeth

Directed by Erik Nelson

After writers (the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd) retrieved genre filmmakers (Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock, etc) from the dust heap of cinema, how fitting that movies should reciprocate by rescuing genre writers from literature’s recycling bin. With Philip K. Dick now firmly canonized (thanks in no small part to Blade Runner), long-time Werner Herzog-collaborator Nelson turns our attentions to the somewhat-obscure yet searing bright Harlan Ellison. An incredibly intelligent, opinionated, and funny graying man with a scrappy work ethic, Ellison (and longtime friend Robin Williams) electrifies this otherwise utilitarian documentary – bizarre green screen-backed excerpt-readings notwithstanding. Intentionally or not, you’re likely to leave with an intense desire to read a collection of Ellison’s short stories, but only vague recollections of the movie that sparked your interest.

This review will appear in the June 4 issue of The L Magazine.

"Then What Happened" by J-Live

[BBE Records]

J-Live finally ventured beyond his comfort zone. The Brooklyn MC reveres old school hip hop, but through 2007's Reveal the Secret had stuck to that breezy early-90s jazz-inflected style perfected by De La Soul. That influence hasn’t vanished here – De La frontman Posdanous even appears on the first single “The Upgrade,” which, fittingly, sounds like an upgraded brass-hooked track from Three Feet High and Rising. That aesthetic wouldn’t be so problematic, except J-Live’s delivery develops a detached monotony over repetitive soundscapes – the central flaw of previous releases. Here, however, producers (including DJ Jazzy Jeff and Nicolay) incorporate West Coast gangsta rap (fused onto piping brass on “The Last Third”) and scratched up bass-heavy beats a la DJ Premier (most notably on “We Are!”). J-Live’s lyrics remain clever and verbose as ever – remember, he was an English major and middle school teacher. More engaging beats push his delivery in exciting new directions – as on “The Zone” – while typical tracks like “The Understanding” will satisfy longtime fans. This promising evolution in J-Live’s career raises new questions like, for instance, now what happens?

This review will appear in the June 4 issue of The L Magazine.

Eminent Domain

New York Public Library

Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street

These six New York-based artists explore blurry borders between the city’s public and private space. Four photographers document private citizens’ tactics for reconciling personal and urban rituals, another explores the encounter between municipal bureaucracy and urban fringes, and the last recounts his personal journey around the city through apartments.

Zoe Leonard’s series Analogue takes after Eugene Atget’s photographs of Parisian storefronts in the early 20th century. Her work immortalizes today’s disappearing window displays of old-New York retailers on the Lower East Side and in parts of Brooklyn. In Untitled/This is just to say, Ethan Levitas uses elevated subway cars in Brooklyn and Queens as his own widescreen storytelling settings, capturing poetic moments of unsettling coincidence, stolen glances and intense emotion. Thomas Holton’s series The Lams of Ludlow Street focuses on the titular Chinatown family and their adaptive use of a cramped apartment. Window by Reiner Leist offers a private diary of public space: the photographer’s daily snapshots of Lower Manhattan from his apartment for over ten years. The exhibition’s only glaring faux-pas comes in this series, where the investigation of public and private claims to urban space is subverted in favor of the morbid voyeurism afforded by Leist’s view of the World Trade Center towers. Where the rest of the show challenges viewers, this decision is an unfortunate capitulation to the lowest common denominator.
In borough edges, nyc (which can be seen in its sweeping totality here) Bettina Johae traces the official boundaries of the city as accurately as public accessibility allowed her. Images from these blighted fringes alternately reveal industrial waste, household trash and natural splendor. Glenn Ligon’s diary-like narrative of different apartments and neighborhoods he’s lived in – including two moves motivated by eminent domain disputes – recurs throughout the show. These paragraph entries offer a mix of private and public insights, and provide text-based relief between the different photo series.
Concentrated in the New York Public Library Bryant Park building’s main exhibition space, fragments from each series are peppered throughout the building. This stroke of curatorial creativity ensures that issues broached in the gallery will extend to other areas, leading viewers to keep engaging the public/private divide as it plays out in different spaces. Similarly, the solicitation of viewer contributions on the exhibition website means attendees will continue to address the ownership of urban space on their own terms.

A similar review will appear in an upcoming issue of The L Magazine.

AMERIKA: Back to the Future

Postmasters

These five artists envision a post-apocalyptic future where the America of stripmalls, Disneyland and post-industrial might has alternately persevered to global domination, or fallen into chaos. Anthony Goicolea’s sober photographs construct a landscape of derelict buildings silently echoing America’s demise. David Herbert’s sculptures, and Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s video installations picture this future through pop culture narratives like Star Trek and Dawn of the Dead. Markus Kenney’s collages reimagine America’s origins on a trash-heaped retro sci-fi moonscape. Closes 6/21.

This review will appear in the June 4 issue of The L Magazine.

Clifford Ross: Mountain Redux

Sonnabend Gallery

The narrative unfolding through the rooms of the New York-based photographer’s show approximate a micro-history of art. In the first room, two innocuous realistic mountainscapes smack of academicism; adjoining rooms add impressionistic hues and expressive details. Over another threshold and the narrative crashes into modernism and postmodernism: the mountain is replaced by its negative; miniature mountainscapes cluster, floating in pictorial space. Finally, the image shatters into colorful fluttering splinters of itself. Closes 6/21.

This review will appear in the June 4 issue of The L Magazine.

Neo Rauch

David Zwirner

Rauch unfolds uncanny narratives within canvases – characters’ actions recur in different places at different stages – but frustrates any sense of continuity. Space-time melts, ends abruptly, leads into fragments of familiar-yet-bizarre events; objects and characters materialize from collective memory; unnatural colors give mundane settings a radioactive edge. Artistic crisis could be a uniting theme: in Parabel a noose binds painter and easel while gallows loom nearby, and Entfaltung shows an artist crouching while figures from his imagination overwhelm the canvas. Closes 6/21.

This review will appear in the June 4 issue of The L Magazine.

Zang Huan: Blessings

PaceWildenstein

Zhang’s historicism spans both PaceWildenstein’s Chelsea spaces. At 25th Street a massive cow hide-laden installation dramatizes a child’s relation to its parent culture, and a series of engraved and poster-ed doors ponders China’s recent history from the threshold of a new era. Ash provides the principal metaphor – creating something new from the consumed hopes of the past – on 22nd Street, where scaffolding lets viewers take in the massive ash painting Canal Building. Closes 7/25.

This review will appear in the June 4 issue of The L Magazine.

Anita Dube: Recent Works

Bose Pacia

Indian artist and critic Dube’s dark DIY aesthetic underlines strangeness, impermanence and violence in the everyday. Her conceptual investigations begin in a photograph series showing words formed with raw meat, expressing dissent on private terms. A large candle installation forming the word “void” questions strategies for organizing and controlling reality, and a room of household objects covered in camouflage fabric articulates the show’s otherwise implicit theme: the personal is political. Closes 6/28.

This review will appear in the June 4 issue of The L Magazine.

Erica Svec: Same Enemy Rainbow

Larissa Goldston Gallery

Integrating surrealism, abstraction and symbolism, Svec paints extremely colorful figures, off-kilter grid-marked spaces, and vaguely familiar shapes that never stabilize completely. There’s anxiety in her recognizably human characters. Many are injured – as in Break Thru where a thrusting arm is cut at the elbow – some are alienated – in Earthbound two heads float uneasily over green landscape – others are so deconstructed that trying to read the painting causes anxiety in the viewer. Closes 6/21.

This review will appear in the June 4 issue of The L Magazine.

Sofía Maldonado: Tropical Storm

Magnan Emrich Contemporary

Merging skater and graffiti subcultural styles, Maldonado demonstrates how such empowering mini-movements get branded for consumption. Her cloudy, playful, drippy graffiti style flows across gallery walls, skateboards and skate bags mounted thereon, a ramp installed in the space, and (via video) a recuperated skating bowl in her native Puerto Rico. The combination of media and locales underlines the adaptability of youth styles that resonate across regions and languages, and their congruent marketing potential. Closes 6/21.

This review will appear in the June 4 issue of The L Magazine.

Natsu: Crystallization

Onishi Gallery

The Japanese artist bridges interior design, arts and crafts, fine art and fashion in sculptures formed from sparkly strung plastic beads. This show features meteorites, figures that are simultaneously mesmerizing, threatening and life-sparking, stoking fascinations over our origins and possible demise. In Natsu’s hands these sublime celestial bodies are all the more bewitching, turned into shimmering skeletal forms casting fantastic colorful shadows that remain vaguely ominous and unknowable. Closes 6/28.

This review will appear in the June 4 issue of The L Magazine.

War, Inc.

Directed by Joshua Seftel
John Cusack, Marisa Tomei

This must be the pandering liberal Hollywood circle-jerk studio execs wanted when they poured millions into David Kelly’s Southland Tales. Action unfolds in near-future Turaqistan (brilliant, right?), where a corporation-run war is destroying all things local then rebuilding for billions, American-style. There are also terrorists, CIA agents, and Hillary Duff as a Middle-Eastern pop star (who ends up being American, so it’s okay). Such simplistic satire becomes scenery wherein Cusack’s emotionally-injured corporate head-hunter reaffirms his manhood and gets the girl (two girls, in fact).

This review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.

Let The Right One In

Directed by Tomas Alfredson

They don’t come much more stylish than this Swedish hybrid of vampire and adolescent sexual awakening genres. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s elegantly composed shots and Jessica Fridén’s retro-cool costume department create an aesthetic somewhere between a fashion spread and a music video. Director Tomas Alfredson, and production designer Eva Norén work in a kind of icy blue-gray palette throughout the film’s Scandinavian modernist locales in suburban Stockholm. The hard geometry and morgue-like tiling of the housing complex setting nonetheless harbors a rag-tag community of friends and gossipmongers that we come to know well. This set-up of community life arranged around a courtyard recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window, particularly as suspicions multiply and home invasions increase.

But such adult concerns (murders and other meddling problems) serve mainly as backdrop in Let The Right One In’s child-centric narrative. Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is our vaguely girly leading lad, living with an emotionally absent mother, and whose (perhaps gay) father resides in the countryside. Oskar is relentlessly bullied at school, and his budding knife fetish suggests he’ll soon seek a violent solution to his social problems. Mysterious Eli (Lina Leandersson) moves in next door, and a relationship of mutual growth and support evolves.

To call the mix of child sexuality and tactfully deployed vampire action that ensues a genre hybrid is reductive though. The two narratives aren’t grafted onto each other for novelty’s sake. Rather, they carry each other into more interesting territory – not unlike the way Oskar and Eli push each other into greater confidence and maturity. Vampirism as a metaphor for sexuality is nothing new – with Interview With A Vampire and Buffy as only the most recent iterations of a trend already firmly established by the time Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released in 1897. But that tradition is wonderfully adapted here as a vessel for exploring the too often taboo subject of children’s sexual awakening.

Not that Let The Right One In is all psychosexual allegory, but that dimension is very present. The portrayal of the housing complex’s depressed adults is also well-rendered, and provides a kind of crystal ball onto the future that makes Oskar and Eli’s evolution into even-keeled individuals all the more important. How depressing it would be if these conflicted but endearing kids ended up like the adults they’re growing up around. Let The Right One In places firm hope in its young duo, and does so with a mix of visual and narrative flair that’s original and entertaining.

This review appeared on The L Magazine's blog as part of that magazine's coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, and can also be read here.

Fermat’s Room

Directed by Luis Piedrahita & Rodrigo Sopeña

Equal parts David Mamet double-cross thriller (House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Heist) and quasi-metaphysical math-themed sci-fi (Cube, Cube 2: Hypercube), this stylish Spanish story of four math geniuses stuck in a shrinking room doesn’t have the narrative chops to sustain its tension to the end. Piedrahita and Sopeña create a nail-biting scenario over the first hour, but as Fermat’s Room enters its final phase leaps in logic and overwrought explanations make for a disappointing ending. Also, the riddles these supposed geniuses are made to solve in order to avoid compaction are old favorites most of us learned as teenagers. Does this mean Americans have finally climbed to the pinnacle of logic and mathematics education, vastly outstripping these Iberian lackeys? Doubtful. More likely Piedrahita and Sopeña weren’t ballsy enough to write a script of completely mumbo-jumbled equations that we would never have bothered to investigate.

After expository introductions, the four main characters are invited via mysterious letters to a meeting of great mathematically-inclined minds in the titular room. Our four protagonists quickly fall apart and reveal their secrets as the walls push them together. There’s the old-world aristocratic professor, the working-class engineer, the egocentric young math star (such a thing exists apparently, in Spain), and the uppity woman they pass around more or less metaphorically. This is where the film falters, as elaborate back-stories are provided to connect these characters who function much better as archetypes without fully-developed personalities.

Fermat’s Room is strong where Cube and its sequel were weak (acting, art design), but could have benefited from mimicking their disregard for narrative explanation. Referring to past events and having characters recount injurious stories slows the pace more than the additional information justifies. This background data does little to heighten the tension. If putting four essentially likeable characters into a deadly trap doesn’t make us care about them (which it had), finding out they’re alternately lying, cheating, lecherous and murderous won’t help.

Beyond its over-determined audience identification and over-simplified riddles, Fermat’s Room is an enjoyable film. The narrative is engaging until the last third, and there are no glaring weaknesses. It’s more polished and big budget-looking than many international entries at Tribeca this year, with snazzy locations and sets, and stylish cinematography. The opening credit sequence, incidentally, is a close second to Simon Brand’s Paraiso Travel for the Festival’s coolest.

This review appeared on The L Magazine's blog as part of the magazine's coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, and can also be read here.

My Winnipeg

Directed by Guy Maddin

The latest from the Manitoban mystic known for his inventive prairie expressionism is a kind of “Dear John” letter to his hometown. Maddin combines family anecdotes, local history, regional legend and pure fantasy to create a portrait of himself and Winnipeg. The result is an endearing collage of public and private insights that privileges revealing fictions over hard facts. The otherwise disparate elements are held together by the movements of a sleep train around the hushed city – Winnipeg has ten times the national rate of sleepwalkers, we are told – and the charming deadpan of the director’s commentary (recounted at one remove by Darcy Fehr, who acts and narrates the part of “Guy Maddin”).

Early moments in Maddin/Fehr’s voice-over narration recall another filmmaker who tends to append personal narratives to documentary subjects. As Maddin introduces his sleepy city, Michael Moore’s recurring visits to Flint, Michigan come to mind. Luckily the likeness is momentary. The earnestness of Maddin’s strangest claims (that, for instance, sleepwalkers who re-enter previous homes must be welcomed by the current inhabitants) undermines the vanity a project like My Winnipeg inevitably suggests. These and other citywide pronouncements (“everything that happens in this city is a euphemism,” was a personal favorite) flow smoothly into ruminations on the director’s family, especially his mother.

In fact, for those familiar with Maddin’s trademark style, the visual integration of My Winnipeg’s original material and stock footage might be its most impressive achievement. Whether showing archival film from the early 1900s of horses frozen in the local river, re-enacted domestic scenes or the recent implosion of the city’s storied hockey arena, the disparate materials of My Winnipeg all adhere remarkably to the Maddinian aesthetic.

Beyond visual coherence, My Winnipeg mobilizes many metaphors to string its materials together. Aside from the sleep train, Maddin’s vehicle for exploring and leaving the city (“what if I film my way out of here?” he asks early on), the most interesting is his Native-informed interest in The Forks. According to local legend The Forks – where the Assiniboine and Red Rivers meet – is a churning pool of discordant energies. This geographic intersection shapes Winnipeg’s layout, but for Maddin its upheaval of imperceptible powers is the generative force behind many of his hometown’s idiosyncrasies. This fork imagery also evokes Maddin’s career. If My Winnipeg is a kind of therapeutic exercise, it will be interesting to see what direction the director takes from this juncture.

This review appeared on The L Magazine's blog as part of the magazine's 2008 Tribeca Film Festival coverage, and can be read here.

Sangre de mi Sangre

Directed by Christopher Zalla

Part relentlessly dehumanizing immigration movie, part identity theft thriller, Christopher Zalla’s stylish Sundance-winning debut (originally titled Padre Nuestro) picks apart its male protagonists’ fractured psyches. An outstanding Latin drum-fueled opening chase – only the most obvious similarity between this film and 2002’s City of God – sets the terms of their personality crises. The pursuit of money hurtles Zalla’s male trio across borders, through life and identities.

Evading his chasers, Juan (Armando Hernandez) befriends Pedro (Jorge Adrian Espindola) in a Northbound shipping container. Upon arrival in Brooklyn, Juan finds Pedro’s estranged father and poses as his son. The film then charts the two men’s (mis)fortunes, Juan’s relationship with Pedro’s father Diego (Jesus Ochoa), and Pedro’s fraught exchanges with local squatter and sex worker Magda (Poala Mendoza). Though Sangre’s immigration politics are well developed, the gender issues raised by the Magda character remain frustratingly unexplored. Throughout, the action unfolds in moody monochromes, with alternately blue-, gray- and golden-hued scenes. Cinematographer Igor Martinovic puts his artistry on full display, reveling in expressive zooms, instinctual handheld movements and an isolating focus.

Such technical prowess reinforces characters’ unstable situations while Zalla’s hybrid immigration and identity theft script keeps the moving parts in flux. After all, what better occasion to remake oneself or replace another than the complete identity erasure experienced by so many undocumented entrants? The three men – hulking hardworker Diego, trusting loser Pedro and trickster Juan – assume different compromised identities formed in response to the demands of a society driven by the bottom line. If money makes the man, these marginalized characters are never completely themselves – or someone else, for that matter.

A similar version of this review appears in the May 13 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.

"Rising Down" by The Roots

Def Jam

If dissent is “in,” The Roots have their finger on the body politic’s pulse. That said, their tenth album’s intense pessimism has bubbled for years. Just look at literary intertexts referenced in the Philly-based group’s recent album titles. Where The Tipping Point and Game Theory name-dropped concepts for forming consensus and resolving conflicts, Rising Down quotes William T. Vollman’s massive treatise on politically-motivated violence. This album’s a work of incredible synergy, connecting local, national and global crises over urgent beats propelled by mostly percussive and electronic instrumentation.

Black Thought and guests rap with captivating immediacy over ?uestlove’s stripped sounds. The title song features Styles P and Mos Def (spitting his best verse in much too long), while Thought warns of class-determined disaster: “you in trouble if you not an Onassis.” Later on “I Can’t Help It,” he laments having to sell discontent like another product. “I’m feeling like I’m making a sales pitch,” Thought complains, “I got too many options, it’s so many toxins.” We’ve been sold on The Roots for years now, and as their formula sheds toxins every outing, where better to get well-crafted, politicized hip hop?

A similar version of this review appears in the May 14 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Poultrygeist: Night of the Living Chicken

Directed by Lloyd Kaufman
Jason Yachanin, Kate Graham

In true Troma form, no taboo is left unexplored, no stereotype unquestioned, no bodily secretion un-spewed in this biting indictment of just about anybody who opens their mouth in contemporary American discourse. Poultrygeist is card-carrying low-class art, and the crass context gives the filmmakers license to go after everyone. Kaufman expertly balances political satire and all-out parody (and musical numbers). Throughout unrelenting class-conscious, military-theme zombie chicken action, only the fast food industry comes out completely vilified, but everyone gets at least a little dirty.


This review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.