Sometimes a Good Notion

New & Notable: SecretProjectRevolution

Directed by: Madonna & Steven Klein

The film contains some beautiful photography by Steven Klein, it’s enough of a reason to watch. However, what is most surprising is Madonna.  She strikes me in this as not being totally self-aware, but just self aware enough.  Madonna tells us that she wants to start a revolution, but people do not take her seriously.  She isn’t willing to admit that people do not take her seriously because she’s Madonna, not because she’s a woman.  But at least she is aware of the uphill battle she faces, which is more than I can say about other people with an equal amount of influence.

Madonna is reminding us here of what she is always reminding us of; that she is the “unique and rare and fearless” person she wants us all to be.  She is expressing herself, for better or for worse as she always has. I think, for the most part that this is a admirable thing.

It will be interesting to see what this new platform Art For Freedom @ artforfreedom.com  turns up.  Their mission is  to EXPRESS YOUR PERSONAL MEANING OF FREEDOM AND REVOLUTION IN THE FORM OF VIDEO, MUSIC, POETRY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY.  

Individual artists will have the opportunity to showcase their work through the project.

New & Notable: Born Sweet

Directed by: Cynthia Wade

Born Sweet is an intimate portrait.  The filmmakers here are able to get simple truths from their subject about the nature of life and hope.  The surprising aspect is that these truths come from a 15 year old boy living in a remote Cambodian village.   Vinh, the film’s subject, has contracted arsenic poisoning from a contaminated well.  He will be terribly sick his entire life and fend off death every day he wakes.  This is his fate. However, Vinh is not resigned to accept this.  He is willing to find hope in unlikely experiences and discovers, if only for a brief moment, that there is power in believing there is a future where he can dream and perhaps even love.

The filmmaking here is both deft and bulky.   The director, Oscar winner Cynthia Wade, understands the inherent drama in this boy’s experience. She relishes in quiet moments where the symbolism coming from the sights and sounds in Vihn’s life are plentiful and meaningful.  The first five minutes of this film are powerful, and some of the most compelling documentary filmmaking I have seen in a short film in a while.  However, the film is sluggish as the filmmaker relishes these moments too much and for too long. The pacing, though deliberate, simply bores.    It was also surprising that the information explaining how the boy came in contact with the poison was presented as a series of titles.  Wade clearly had access to individuals who could have answered the basic journalistic questions that needed to be asked.  Presenting the information in interview format would have helped to break up the monotony the film sinks into.

Script of the Week: Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil & Vile by Michael Werwie

This might sound like a cop out…, but there is no practical way to talk about Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil & Vile by Michael Werwie without spoiling it altogether, so I won’t.  Other readers and reviewers have done so online, but I suggest that you stay clear from any site that reveals the story’s intricate details.  It’s just that good.   Werwie demonstrates his adeptness here with gusto. The script manipulates us expertly; it guides our hands through the experience, and when it fully reveals itself in the last three pages you won’t know what hit you, even if you suspect it all along.

The only problem I see here is that the film, its release, and its success depends on total secrecy.  If you walk into a theater knowing what you are about to see, the illusion Werwie has created simply won’t work.  That’s a tall order in today’s Hollywood.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil & Vile was 7th on the 2012 Black List and a Finalist of the 2012 Nichols Fellowship. 

New & Notable: It’s Not You, It’s Me.

Directed by Matt Spicer

I love it when a short delivers something unexpected.   It’s Not You, It’s Me starts off with a character on the verge of breaking down.  When she finally takes her turn, it jolts you out of your seat and moves forward without stopping to contemplate the consequences, just like a good character should.

Gillian Jacobs  hams it up perfectly.  Check it out.

New & Notable: Magnesium

Directed by: Sam De Jong

A gymnast preparing for national competition discovers that she is pregnant and decides to have abortion. The Doctor explains that the law requires for her to take five days to think about her decision before the procedure can be performed. So she goes to think. With very little plot or action, Director Sam De Jong gives us a truly intimate portrait of a girl in trouble.

The film opens on Isabel’s face, pony tail wagging behind her, and the camera stays there for the almost 20 minutes we spend with this character. This is a girl who is totally alone in her choices and the filmmakers bravely let her be in order tell us her story. It is an exercise in subtlety. The actress here, Denise Tan, is deft and focused. She never so much as emotes. She thinks, and her eyes communicate the strain of her choices quietly and effectively. It is a performance that builds to a climax where her training for competition strikes us more as punishment and a joyride on go-carts becomes self-injury.

Catch of the Day: 2013 Jefferson Lecture

The Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, established by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1972, is the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.

This year’s lecturer was Martin’s Scorsese.

“…We were experiencing something fundamental, together. We were living through the emotional truths on the screen together, often in coded form, these films from the ’40s and ’50s. Sometimes expressed in small things, gestures, glances, reactions between the characters – light, shadow. I mean we experienced these things that we normally couldn’t discuss or wouldn’t discuss, or even acknowledge in our lives.

And that’s actually part of the wonder. So whenever I hear people dismiss movies as fantasy and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. And, of course it’s not life – it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life.”