Tag: smugfilm

‘Rehearsals’ is a Zeitgeist and Your Bed is a Museum

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Rehearsals (2012)
Directed by Cody Clarke
73 min.

IMDb Synopsis: An experimental documentary in which fly-on-the-wall footage of the lives of sixteen aspiring actresses from NYC is collaged to form a day in the life of one aspiring actress—each ‘playing’ a different aspect of the woman. Through this unconventional approach, filmmaker Cody Clarke has painted a visual poem; an ode to both the beauty and the pain of solitude.

Spoiler-free.

When I go to a museum with friends, unless I’m really close to them already, I act weird. I move from piece to piece quickly, afraid of blocking someone’s view. I make awkward quips. I find myself concerned with whether the person next to me knows more or less about the art than I do. And I almost certainly never read the plaques, although I pretend to. All this doesn’t happen on purpose—it’s an instinctive, self-defeating defense mechanism, and it’s embarrassing and insulting to the art.

This same insecurity happens to pretty much everyone I’ve watched a Cody Clarke movie with. I know this, because I’ve forced a lot of friends to watch them.
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My Streets: The Best Parts & Full Review

Last week, I introduced you all to the best so-bad-it’s-good movie you’ve never seen.  The above video is a compilation of my favorite parts, and here is my full review I promised:
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As I Lay Dying: Filming the ‘Unfilmable’

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As I Lay Dying (2013)
Directed by James Franco
Screenplay by James Franco and Matt Rager
Based on the novel by William Faulkner

Spoiler-free.

As I Lay Dying is James Franco’s seventh feature-length film as a director, but only his second to receive much of a release. The first was The Broken Tower, a biography of the poet Hart Crane, which was completed as his MFA thesis for NYU. Despite the fact that Focus picked it up and it starred Franco and Michael Shannon, that film felt like a student film through and through, and Franco received the critical berating he earned. Two years later, he’s back with another difficult work of American Modernism.

James Franco kind of stepped into a minefield with this one. The literary crowd is unimpressed with his famoused-my-way-into-a-book-deal poetry and prose, and his more mainstream fans are turned off by his occasional excursions into ‘pretentious shit’. Here, then, is a way to alienate two distinct fan bases at once.

I must just be a contrarian, because these are the sorts of films that interest me most.
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An Interview with Zachary Levy, Director of ‘Strongman’

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Zachary Levy’s film, Strongman, is one of the rawest and best cinematic portraits in recent history. In it, he follows Stanley ‘Stanless Steel’ Pleskun, the self-proclaimed ‘strongest man in the world at bending steel’. Over the course of the film, we intimately see Stan’s ups and downs, which are at times comedic, at times tragic, and at times, that perfect, indescribable mix of both. This is a film one watches and never forgets, and thinking back on it later, you almost feel as though you’re thinking back to a chapter of your own life, even though you may have nothing in common with Stan’s experiences and surroundings. It’s that vivid.

I reviewed Strongman a few weeks ago, and I recently had a chance to sit down with Zach and chat about his film. The interview is spoiler-free, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, no worries. But do yourself a favor and see it soon. It’s currently available on iTunes and on DVD.
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My Streets: The Best ‘So Bad It’s Good’ Movie You’ve Never Seen

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My Streets (2009)

When I was sixteen, I made an extremely bad feature-length film called The Velvet Autumn.  It’s two hours and thirty minutes, and it makes absolutely no sense.

The reason it doesn’t make any sense is because at that time in my life, I was obsessed with the visual construction of a movie, and I didn’t yet understand that you don’t just construct images, you construct them in a way that expresses a story. I was consciously working off of the Raging Bull hypothesis—that you create the images first, and your story will come later. Scorsese did a better job at this than me, although he had access to much better materials and had way more experience.  But in any event, The Velvet Autumn, and Raging Bull alike, are proof positive that the hypothesis is incorrect—you gotta have the story first.
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