The Animation Show

(Key Lime Pie)

Short form animation might be the most accessible art form for imaginative computer-savvy minds working with less-than-Spielbergian budgets. The jumble of mostly wonderful shorts in this year's Animation Show – a mix of high-tech, high-concept, economic and low-brow currently showing at the IFC Center – certainly attest to that accessibility.

(Angry Unpaid Hooker)

As is invariably the case with broad annual surveys of a medium or genre though, this fourth edition of The Animation Show is an uneven affair that occasionally seems far from its stated mandate of highlighting "the world's greatest independent short films." Comedy fails the show's weakest entry, Steve Dildarian's Angry Unpaid Hooker, which is not only sexist beyond recuperation, but also one of the least imaginatively crafted shorts. Awkward situational humor works much more nicely in Matthew Walker's Operator, a shy guy's hilariously banal telephone conversation with God.

(Operator)

(Blind Spot)

Upholding The Animation Show's stated standard, Gobelins (a French animation school) takes the cake for sheer volume (at least three entries, I lost count), though each could stand alone as a beautifully computer-animated little tale of sweet whimsy. This is indie fare though, not Disney, and they don't take refuge from violence in cute imagery, as Gobelins' perspective-hopping hold-up vignette Blind Spot turns a fatal robbery into a terrifically implausible case of mistaken identity. Another short, Stefan Muller's Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker, also takes advantage of animation's cameraless-ness to fly between points of view and cut up continuity, retelling a hilarious series of neighborly coincidences (involving drugs, BDSM and disco-dancing pink elephants) from four perspectives.

(Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker)

Two recurring series supply some sort of continuity amid the disjointed successions, one more successfully than the other. Yompi The Crotch-Biting Sloup is a claymation series about people of different sorts and stripes having their crotches bitten by a maniacal Pillsbury Doughboy clone. There must be more deserving films out there for Animation Show judge Mike Judge to deliver to the masses. Usavich by Satoshi Tomioka, a kind of videogame/anime hybrid starring rabbit-like creatures, weaves its road trip throughout The Animation Show, providing recurring bouts of nearly-car-crashing physical comedy. The pleasure is also in the journey (chases and races proved to be very popular narrative structures in this year's show) in Smith and Foulkes's This Way Up, an elegant and epic father-son funeral procession.

(Usavich)

The series' best entry also deals in death (another frequent theme, several shorts ending with life-ending blows) the beautiful noir pastry-popping existential diner stand-off Key Lime Pie by Trevor Jimenez. Such beautiful artistry and clever writing makes ball-biting claymation blobs seem particularly pointless, but also well-worth enduring.

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

"Untitled" by Nas

(Def Jam)

So hip hop isn't dead after all, though you might not know it listening to Nas's first album since he rang the culture's death knell two years ago. After headline-grabbing hype sparked by Untitled's original title – the Wal-Mart-rejected Nigger – the final product is disappointing (Unfulfilled Promises might have been a better backup title). Of course that's pretty much what we've come to expect from Nas, whose last few albums seem assembled from samplings of his former selves: Illmatic's rugged street poet (Nasty Nas), It Was Written's bling-bragging gansta-superstar (Nas Escobar), and Nastradamus's crap-spewing couch potato (um, Nastradamus?).

Untitled might be the first to be dominated (in spirit if not in actual skill and style) by a new Nas, the rap industry's political unconscious. Sadly, the record comes off like its shortest track – 'Project Roach', a horrendously muddled pest-project dweller analogy – a good idea poorly executed. Nearly half the 15-song album investigates the contemporary semantics of "nigger", but only a couple of those songs prove genuinely insightful (none approaches the intelligence of Wale's 'The Kramer' from his Seinfeld-themed The Mixtape About Nothing, available for free download here). On 'N.I.*.*.E.R. (The Slave and The Master)', Nas simplistically conflates heritage and his own nagging predilection for conspicuous consumption: "descendant of kings/it's necessary I bling/put rims on everything/wear Timbs on every scene". On the breathy, quietly brilliant title track, Nas expands the term to all oppressed classes: "no matter what color you are, everybody niggas/you can stand by and watch or you can march on with us." On the album-closing Obama endorsement 'Black President', Nas seems dangerously close to reducing partisan politics to racial dualism. Conspicuously, that song samples a line from 2Pac's 'Changes', but the late rapper's semantic recuperation of "nigga" on his debut album ("I'm Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished") is still more empowering than most of what Nas musters here.

With all the bloated politics, the good non-"nigger"-themed tracks on Untitled are welcome relief, the bad ones frustrating Nastradamus-era throwaways. The electric guitar-fueled 'Sly Fox' (produced by Dead Prez's stic.man) is an awesome mainstream media attack, and the Busta Rhymes-assisted, Mark Ronson-produced jazzy woman-as-food romp (or is it food-as-woman?) 'Fried Chicken' provides some welcome humor amidst the self-seriousness (bring back the fun, pre-Aftermath Busta!). On the opposite end, laughable entries like the Cool & Dre-produced 'Make The World Go Round' ("Y'all living trendy on pennies/I cop plenty Fendi", good for YOU, Nas), the UFO-themed 'We're Not Alone' (what the fuck, Nas!?) and 'Breathe' (just listen to Fabolous's same-named track instead) should have been excised. Embarrassingly, the best track on Untitled is the lead single 'Hero', an engrossing sci-fi epic of a song. Not since Salaam Remi's 'Made You Look' has an adventurous beat choice pushed Nas's flow to new heights like this booming, trippy, synth-speckled anthem from Polow da Don. Generally though, careless rhymes and poor beat selection (as per usual with Nas albums) makes for some aggravating earsores throughout Untitled, with the good narrowly outweighing the bad. As he proclaims (in a telling, contradictory statement) on the 'Hero' chorus: "can't leave it/the game needs him/plus the people need someone to believe in/so in God's Son we trust/'cause they know I'm-a give 'em what they want." You rarely give us exactly what we want Nas, but we still need to believe in you.

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

Man On Wire

Directed by James Marsh

Thankfully – conspicuously – 9/11 is never mentioned in this fanciful recounting of French tightrope walker Philippe Petit’s daring and illegal skywalk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. Rather, well-crafted assemblages of interviews, archival materials and whimsically stylized re-enactments restore a much-needed dash of naiveté and magic to a dreamy, ugly building whose mythology is otherwise shrouded in darkness.

Man on Wire follows a quirky, fated logic of poetic collision, wherein Petit and the World Trade Center start off at a vast distance – briefly acquainted through a photo spread in Paris Match – and grow gradually closer and more familiar in the build-up to the big day. Indeed, there’s a sort of first date anticipatory tension not unlike the planning phases of your average heist movie (say, Ocean’s 11 or even Entrapment). The pieces come together, Petit trains, crewmembers on both sides of the Atlantic join and disband, there are arguments and moments of realization, and all the while the towers grow into their hideous, clunky frames.

The narrative is a wonderfully edited and engaging mix of loquacious French aesthetes rhapsodizing over the poetic beauty and daring of the act, more monosyllabic Americans justifying their participation, and hilariously wacky re-enactments. “The coup” (as the group called the event during planning) happens in a cheesy 70s crime-saga aesthetic, with hideous broad-collared shirts, massively ugly suits and simply massive sideburns. Scenes of Petit’s early acrobatics development, meanwhile, are rendered in the wacky silent film style of Buster Keaton movies. The influence of Guy Maddin’s period-popping style is in there somewhere.

Coordinating the coup is so chaotic and grueling for perpetrators and spectators alike that when Petit finally steps onto the wire everything stops and the next few minutes are pure bliss. In the same moment, all of Man on Wire’s potent analogies come to fruition. Walking weightlessly, defiantly between the two-pronged epitome of mindless profit-driven innovation, Petit and his team of dreamers and dropouts perform the beautiful triumph of the imaginative underdog over rigid bureaucracy, the artist over the office worker, maybe even of the Frenchman over Americans.

Images courtesy Jean-Louis Blondeau/Polaris Images, ©2008.
This review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.

Mad Detective

Directed by Johnny To
Lau Ching Wan, Andy On

Hong Kong genre-jumping auteur Johnny To’s films are invariably pretty and intelligent (though not always clear-headed and restrained), and his specific achievement here is in pushing neo-noir conventions (already a hyphenated set of narrative rules developed from Chinatown through Blade Runner, L.A. Confidential and beyond) into post-neo-noir territory. His multiple personality-seeing tragicomic detective Bun is no hard-boiled Raymond Chandler P.I., but he’s also well beyond Memento’s revenge-seeking amnesiac. He combines elements of both – and the languid fatalism of Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye – into a terrific tangled ball of contradictions, eccentricities and unwavering determination.

The opening scenes make hilariously, abundantly clear that Bun belongs to that school of film detectives who does best thinking like and becoming the killer they’re tracking. By comparison Bun’s young partner On is a little less intuitive – though not unfeeling, as a wonderful sort-of-double date scene shows – more practical and level-headed. That said, by the end of Mad Detective signs that he’ll inherit his mentor’s split personality-visualizing ability are piling up. Unlike other To genre pushers like Election or Breaking News, the gulf between young and old isn’t so wide here, and generational differences appear to be reconcilable.

Most of the pleasure in Mad Detective – beyond the perpetually-panning cinematography and dramatic whooshiness of every sound effect – comes from the agile interactions between Bun and endlessly mirrored and multiplying personalities, while colleagues simply see a very odd interaction between two people. Playing this game, Mad Detective raises the stakes until the all out climactic schiz-fest, where metaphoric mirroring gives way to the real thing, and To updates a particularly amazing early noir ending.

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

Boy A

Directed by John Crowley
Andrew Garfield, Peter Mullan

At points during Crowley’s second feature, it’s hard to tell from how far inside the head of recently released murderer Jack (Andrew Garfield) we’re watching. Friendships and fears emerge from a fuzzy haze surrounding crisply-focused Jack as he readjusts admirably after coming of age in prison. Everything out of his reach seems blurry and undefined, and his perpetually downcast gaze betrays a lively mind behind his social ineptness. Cutaways to adolescent Jack (Alfie Owen) build towards the murder, whose instigating best friend (Taylor Doherty) might just be our protagonist’s externalized id (Brad Pitt to Fight Club’s Ed Norton, if you will).

Delightfully ambiguous mindgames and rapturously exquisite cinematography aside, this is an actor-driven tragedy about an endearing shy guy winning over a surrogate father (Peter Mullan), a devoted girlfriend (Katie Lyons) and his co-workers. Jack’s kind-hearted awkwardness invariably charms us too, despite repeated intimations of inescapable tragedy in Crowley and screenwriter Mark O’Rowe’s pessimistic, humanist script. Shortly after one of the most beautiful night club scenes ever shot (entire film school syllabi should be devoted to cinematographer Rob Hardy’s virtuoso camera work in this film), a fight breaks out and we worry that when Jack defends one of his new friends he will go too far. Later Jack saves a young girl (of roughly the same age as the girl he killed) from a car accident, and it’s abundantly clear that the line between heroics and horror is particularly thin for our sweet, gentle protagonist.


Thankfully Boy A’s eventual, inevitable spiral isn’t caused by a moral slip-up on Jack’s part, but rather by the invisible pressures of mass media and their consumers. Consciously or not, with this move Crowley earmarks the patriarch of British cinema Alfred Hitchcock, who several times – most notably in Shadow of a Doubt – invoked the powerful offscreen presence of the popular press. In that film, news of a distant string of murders (the film begins in Philadelphia) slowly but unstoppably reaches the idyllic town of Santa Rosa, where a quaint family is accommodating a mysterious uncle from the East who turns out to be the murderer.

Here, relentless tabloid coverage and a web-based vigilante justice group offering money for Jack’s death convince him that he’s nothing more than what he was before jail. In the face of relentless harassment his recent successes become so many more achievements to have stripped away, until Jack finishes worse off than he began. His eventual downfall suggests that personal growth is often unbelievable for a society best moved to action by fear and anger.

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

Best of Art 2008

Best Illegal Public Art
Move over graffiti, impromptu street welding is the new mode of rebellion for disenfranchised urban youth. Manhattan got its first taste in the form of inaccessible public seating – a bench installed with risers 8 feet off the ground on an East Houston median. The Tall Bench lasted a week and its creators never came forth – a cryptic YouTube video records its creation and installation – but its moment in the bloglight made us reflect on the fleeting nature of public space in the churning city, and height-based discrimination.

Best Legal Public Art
Environmentalism is in, so P.S.1's self-referential summer courtyard-straddling urban farm P.F.1, the wacky work of WORK Architecture, is a natural choice. It's made with sustainable materials, softens the hard concrete edges and gravel grounds of P.S.1's front-yard, and yields actual crops! Badges for participation go to Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls, MoMA's pre-fab housing and the Spring's weird drill/realtime London-linkup on the Brooklyn waterfront.

Best Introduction to an Asia-Centric Art World
We all need to get used to Asia running things, and the Guggenheim's Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective was a good crash course on the Chinese art star's pyrotechnic performances and grandiose installations. Even the Murakami blockbuster at the Brooklyn Museum couldn't outdo Cai's neon-billowing flying cars, cascading wolf wave and log ride-reappropriating water circuit.

Best New Museum
Being the only new museum, The New Museum must be the best new museum in addition to actually being a great new museum (follow?). Its sleek stack of shimmering silver boxes on The Bowery is a great destination for time-strapped art fans, a well-curated best of from the global gallery scene – and with its free Thursday nights still not too crowded it's affordable too.

Best Gallery Show
Survey shows can be spotty, often a gallery-owner's excuse to gloat over her or his accumulated art wealth. Not so with this spring's Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns? at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, a postmodernist quilting from dealer Gavin Brown and artist Urs Fisher. Overlapping artworks and painted-over murals mashed Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat up with Francis Bacon, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons and Robert Morris. Beyond the envelope-pushing presentation, the jarring arrangements actually made for insightful comparisons.

Best New Building
Even though the now dissipated building frenzy gave us lots of all-glass uglies, there were also some great additions to our built environment. The most remarkable structure that will definitely be completed – currently growing its mesh skin on Cooper Square – is Thom Mayne's Cooper Union building, a spectacular cascading collage of metal layers and impossibly contorted interior atriums.
Best New All-Glass Ugly
When putting together one of those vertical suburbs for multi-millionaire compulsive narcissists, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel goes balls to the glass wall. After his subdued Soho condos, the Nouvel Chelsea (opening later this year at 19th St and Eleventh Ave) will feature an all-glass facade with over 1,600 individual panels. It probably won't actually be ugly, just a little gross.
This feature will appear in The L Magazine's upcoming Best of New York 2008 issue.

Very Young Girls

Directed by David Schisgall

This horrifying portrait of a late capitalist society trafficking its citizens’ flesh like drugs (an analogy developed throughout the film) is a hard-line Marxist’s wet dream. And like anyone else seeing Very Young Girls, the Marxist would do well to come equipped with a box of tissues. The first half of this New York City sex trade expose spirals like one of those humanitarian documentaries where things just keep getting worse. Arrogant pimps film their conquests, dreaming of a reality TV series; indifferent cops keep their distance – behind bullet-proof glass – from a desperate mother hoping to rescue her daughter; courts contemplate sending underage sex workers to jail; and the spirited young women at the center juggle extremely adult situations while still in their early teens (the average age of entry into the U.S. sex trade, we’re told, is 13).

Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom (just mostly). GEMS (Girls Education and Mentoring Services), a perpetually under-funded organization that helps redirect young women in the sex trade towards safer, long-term careers and stable lives, dominates the film’s second half. Therein, things resemble a kind of terrifying blend of rehab and Survivor-style reality TV. Some women flourish, get jobs, reconnect with their families, start their own, and resist the destructive if comforting allure of returning to their pimps. Others, like Ebony and Carolina (as misfortune would have it, this doc’s most charismatic and endearing subjects), waver on the line between the frugal GEMS safe house, and the relative luxuries of “the life” and its sweet-talking father-lover-employer figures.

Certainly, Very Young Girls will speak to film-going Marxists’ desire for stories about how the selling of lives and bodies has become part of normal life. Underneath its broad ideological implications though, this film is intensely humanist, concerned less with commodified bodies than with people for whom “normal life” is a beautiful if distant dream.

A similar review appears in The L Magazine.

Tell No One

Directed by Guillaume Canet
François Cluzet, Marie-Josée Croze
An agile murder mystery informed by Hollywood thrillers and French detective serials, Canet moves the parts of his sophomore tension engine at just the right velocity to keep viewers interested and guessing. Sweet widower Alex (François Cluzet) evades cops, evil henchmen pursue him while avoiding police, and throughout the puzzling details of Alex’s wife’s (Marie-Josée Croze) disappearance are taken apart and reassembled.

Despite a penchant for flashy and elaborate Parisian set pieces (a public park stake-out, an airport nail-biter, a beltway-crossing foot chase), this stylishly filmed action-mystery hybrid (and all the Césars – French Oscars – it won) is a testament to that country’s ongoing love of all things American, a muscle-bound blockbuster running along the Seine wearing a ‘J’¤ Paris’ T-shirt. The novel it’s based on is American (Harlan Coben’s New York-set story of the same name), its foot chase is lifted right out of the Bourne series, and its style-shifting cinematography is tried and true Hollywood stuff. Crane shots swirl around gold-lit characters in romantic moments of magical realism, jittery handheld spasms track our doctor hero on the run from would-be killers and cops, and tense silences and dramatic arguments happen in eerily still cold-blue close-ups.

Most blatantly however, the cast features a checklist of nods to U.S.-brand political correctness: lesbians are polite upper-class ladies (one played by apparently-fluent-French-speaker Kristen Scott Thomas), immigrants are disenfranchised, gruff and gold-hearted (and always willing to help a saintly middle-aged white protagonist), old people are mean, rich people are evil, and old rich people will stop at nothing to kill you and everyone you know. To Canet’s (and editor Stratos Gabrielidis) credit, however, it’s easy to miss Tell No One’s moralistic tokenism, as those parts rarely stop moving long enough for us to notice their one-dimensionality. Ultimately, class concerns end up carrying the film to its conclusion, and the opposition between our upwardly mobile hero and an aristocratic politician adds some populist satisfaction to the climactic payoff.



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

"Jeanius" by Jean Grae

(Blacksmith)


There’s no good reason Jean Grae isn’t a superstar (except, you know, rap industry misogyny), and this long-delayed collaboration with ex-Little Brother producer 9th Wonder is the strongest proof yet. Begun years ago, leaked, shelved and now revamped, Jean and 9th are still a perfect, flexible fit. With minimal guest appearances and the perfect balance of variety and consistency in both vocals and production, this is a great rap album in the Illmatic mould. Gone are the over-thought concept songs of Jean’s 2003 EP The Bootleg of the Bootleg, and the directionless filler that weighed 2004’s This Week down in its second half.



9th’s moody, elastic beats sprinkled with soul and funk samples are his best since his 2004 Murs 3:16 The 9th Edition collaboration with L.A. indie-rapper Murs (‘Billy Killer’, meanwhile, is among his best tracks ever). Jean has never sounded this good, with her trademark sense of humor and braggadocio continually twisting her woman-in-a-man’s-game position to her advantage, as on ‘This World’: “I’m entertaining, yes, attacking like Dick Cheney’s chest/but lacking nuts so macadamia fuckers claim the best.” Meanwhile, ‘My Story’ and ‘Love Thirst’ – pain and sex anthems respectively – feel earnest where similar songs on previous albums seemed forced. Finally, one of the best MCs in the game has a classic album to match her talent.



This review will appear in The L Magazine.

"The 3rd World" by Immortal Technique

(Viper Records)

The most exciting thing about Immortal Technique is his growled, gargly delivery of pissed off so-far-left-they’re-almost-far-right barrages with a battle-rapper’s bravado and a cyborg’s relentless insistence (best exemplified here on the title track and ‘Parole’). You probably (hopefully) don’t always agree, but it’s rather thrilling that someone’s saying it and making it sound so great. Technique's third effort (produced by DJ Green Lantern) features some so-so songs with lackluster beats and unfocused rhymes (lines about racism, terrorism and capitalism assembled randomly), and well-constructed, coherent arguments connecting local problems and global crises over hard (occasionally excellent) beats.

So on the pretty brilliant ‘Harlem Renaissance,’ Technique connects his neighborhood’s artistic golden age to its present-day gentrification, and to broader problems in municipal politics and globalization. Later, on the booming ‘Reverse Pimpology,’ he dissects music industry branding and pigeonholing: “I’m not a crack rapper/I’m not a backpacker/I’m not a wack rapper moonlighting as a bad actor.” What’s missing here though (what made Revolutionary Vol. 2 amazing) are the few tracks that humanize the outraged and angry cyborg Technique.

A similar version appeared in The L Magazine and can be read here.

Blue Planet

Directed by Franco Piavoli

Franco Piavoli’s is a cinema of synecdoche: brief snippets of life – farmers fighting over a foot of land, a traveler conjuring memories of home – stand for all human experience, and massive narratives boil down to an economic symbol. In the director’s feature-length debut, the 1981 pastoral documentary Blue Planet, water becomes shorthand for the resilient cycle of life. It carries Piavoli’s minutely ambitious film through the hours of the day and the seasons of the year, beginning and ending in a frozen riverbed.

Shot over three years and brilliantly honed in editing booths and mixing studios, Blue Planet combines epic aspirations and storytelling restraint in a way subsequent micro-documentaries like Microcosmos forgo. Blue Planet unfolds in tight close-ups and delicate pans shot in and around a farmhouse. The location (near Piavoli’s Italian hometown) is virtually irrelevant: snapshots of nature and agricultural life resonate universally.

Still, the film’s intimate yet objective style provides a quaint charm that keeps it from lapsing into longing for a sentimentalized past. Moments after capturing the otherworldly (and rubbery-sounding) mating rituals of snails identical rhythmically paced close-ups show the film’s first humans, a couple having sex in the same field. The poetic transition from microscopic to human scale establishes a basic natural connection, but Piavoli wisely keeps up the pace, moving on to more distinctly human rituals.

Despite modestly beautiful cinematography, Piavoli’s editing and sound design set him apart. Often, watching his films is like hearing a great DJ: catchy samples from disparate synchronous sources build on one another, pleasurable connections are laid out for the viewer to make, and a cyclical rhythm runs through.

A similar review appeared in The L Magazine.

When Did You Last See Your Father?

Directed by Anand Tucker

This father-son parable – adapted from author Blake Morrison’s memoir of the same title – sticks to tired family melodrama conventions, merely touching on much broader and more interesting material. The cast, admittedly, is outstanding. Colin Firth plays the adult Blake to Jim Broadbent’s dying father Arthur, and Juliet Stevenson’s selfless mother Kim. The film bounces through time as child, teenage and adult Blake grapples with daddy’s perpetual adolescence. The film is undoubtedly elegant, with colorful sets and costumes signaling flashback scenes while a drab and muted palette renders the melancholy present. However, muddled connections between micro- and macro-histories keep Morrison’s straightforward family narrative from achieving greater thematic breadth.

Steeped in signifiers of quintessential middle-class British-ness – rolling hills, Scottish maids, pubs and cottages – there’s another film here about the death of an older England. Sadly, that film surfaces rarely, and then only briefly. Instead things devolve into patented tear-jerking, and here Tucker wears a few old tricks really, really thin. In the penultimate scene a spinning, time-ripped, Vertigo-quoting father-son embrace obnoxiously announces Blake’s liberating epiphany. Just as glaring, a good third of Tucker’s film is shot in bedroom mirrors. Now granted, a few shots refracted through blurred reflections or obstructed by objects in the foreground intimates nicely that family history is unreliable, but come on! What could have been a beautiful period piece about the rebirth of a son, the death of a father (and with him, an entire way of life), is little more than a series of pretty family photo album reminiscences.

A similar review appeared in The L Magazine.

Garden Party

Directed by Jason Freeland
Vinessa Shaw, Richard Gunn

A post-millennial copycat of grand, multi-narratived, L.A. films like Short Cuts or Magnolia, Garden Party is bad, obnoxious and too short, in that order. There’s plenty of material here for a massive three-hour epic – indeed, the structure of multiple characters’ stories occasionally intersecting as they glide through the fabric of the city (which, ideally, evolves into a character all its own) practically demands butt-numbing length. However, Garden Party is so flawed that its short running time is a godsend.
The script raises some interesting (if not very original) thematic preoccupations with voyeurism, selling out, and the effects of class in the suburban sea of America’s dream factory. All three meet in April’s (Willie Holland) journey from her bathroom-peeping stepfather’s home to couch surfing and a differently creepy photographer’s studio. Sadly, her engaging pratfalls get sidelined by the embarrassingly clichéd exploits of emo-rocking space cadet Sammy (Erik Smith), and the castrating, Weeds-evoking (and porn-named) power broker Sally St. Clair, to whose story April gets stapled in the final rush for tidy resolutions.

There’s also Sally’s sexually undecided, latte-ordering assistant Nathan (Alexander Cendense), with his quarterback looks (he’s from Nebraska, of course) and a pot habit supported by the weed his boss grows to slip to her real estate clients (hence the Weeds connection). And, as in every suburban story, we have a midlife crisis-suffering husband in Todd (Richard Gunn), with his lackluster marriage and stalled artistic career. Gunn is terrible in this role (partly because half his lines come awkwardly dubbed), with his Keanu Reeves-level monotone.

In fact, most of the acting in Garden Party is sub-par, which, for a film set in film-land, is either a telling state-of-the-industry shortcoming or a muddled Brechtian move. Probably the former. The greatest scenes come between Nathan and April, when these two beautiful youngsters lost in a narcissistic sea of billboards and business cards try to make sense of their lives. Occasional charming dialogue can’t make sense of this jumbled mess though, and the script’s crisp moments fade quickly into the surrounding noise.

Poor acting and uninspired writing aside, Freeland and cinematographer Robert Benavides keep things predictably (boringly) indie. Garden Party is all handheld long-ish takes with a couple scenes shot through with gels and filters, gold- and blue-hued because, apparently, that’s what so-called independent American cinema “looks like” these days. Were all these problems fixed, we’d have a legitimate heir to the dystopic urban sweep of the aforementioned classics, instead we have another one for the trash heap, a film so unremarkable it’s rather a shame it was even made.

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