Commentary: Bombay Beach

Bombay Beach, an unlikely documentary about a failed 1960s economic boomtown in the Californian dessert, premiered last night at the TriBeCa Film Festival. Shot with a hand-held camera from the director’s car and set to the music of Bob Dylan and Beirut, the film is a surreal and poetic introduction to life on the fringes of America. Beautiful and well-chosen footage robustly captures the lives of a variety of Bombay Beach residents. Interspersing traditional documentary footage with dreamlike montages of the area’s scenery and surreal moments in the lives of the people it follows, Bombay Beach is the filmic equivalent to a T.S. Eliot poem. Imagistic and beautiful, it frames moments of joy within an environment of poverty. The film shows the wasteland that is Bombay Beach not as a place of sheer despondency, but one of humanity, character, and kindness.

By focusing on the oddball individuals that make up life in Bombay Beach, the filmmaker imbues an economically depressed area with a massive dose of energy. Instead of belaboring the dereliction and struggle, the film celebrates the vitality of the town’s zany residents. The area’s eldest resident, a spirited and prophetic man who sells cigarettes and gives out wisdom, reflects, “Sometimes I don’t know where my next meal is coming from. Been that way my whole life, but boy have I enjoyed it.” He drags on his cigarette. This laid back acceptance of circumstance, though at first hard to palate, sums up the attitude of the town.

Though the area is poor and remote with most of its inhabitants living in trailers, the film captures life there as joyous and almost ethereal. Families work together, play together, swim in the sea together, and remain optimistic despite the fact there is little to be hopeful about within the town. They live in the moment, for the moment. A young mother fights against the lack of resources in the town to care for her bipolar youngest son. Through her efforts she demonstrates unending kindness and infuses her family’s life with purpose and potential. Transplanted from the dangerous streets of South Central LA, Ceejay, an aspiring NFL player accepts that life in Bombay Beach is “boring”, but sees this as an opportunity to focus on his goals. In this detached and surreal environment he has space to realize his aspirations. On the way, he even finds love. Ceejay dancing in an abandoned gazebo with his girlfriend captures the beauty and innocence of their youth. Like the rest of the film, the montage is so gorgeously and poetically rendered, it comes across as the visual personification of the mood created by Dylan’s Highway 61 album – surreal, spiritual, non-linear, and a touch transcendent. 

Commentary - The Swell Season

The Swell Season, titled after the musical duo it follows, premiered at the TriBeCa Film Festival last night. Notably, it is the follow up to the 2006 Oscar-winning musical film, Once.  Once chronicled the relationship between musicians Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (who now perform under the moniker “The Swell Season”) as they emerged from obscurity. After meeting at Glen’s father’s vacuum cleaner repair shop, the two united in a struggle to overcome their situations through music. In the process, they fell in love. After Once gained distribution, the pair received an Oscar in 2007 for best original song, and ascended to stardom. As the film’s title suggests, Once, is an exploration of the prodigious circumstances that led to what seems like a fated merging of two exceptional musicians. Both are imbued with an incarnate passion for music and the rare ability to capture the raw essence of an emotion through the performance of a song. When their talents unite, the resulting music is paradoxically visceral and transcendent. Catapulting them to the Oscars, Once chronicled their way up and the development of their love story. The Swell Season explores their lives now that they have achieved fame, and the dissipation of their romantic relationship.

While the theme of dealing with celebrity’s unforeseen encumbrances is not uncommon in the music documentary world, The Swell Season takes a fresh look at the subject by focusing on the characters themselves.  Glen and Marketa are interesting as individuals, as musicians, and as a couple. Each is thoughtful, and expresses emotion with clarity and poignancy. A few scenes serve to highlight each character’s unique response to their successes particularly well. These scenes include conversations with each other, family members, and band members. Each interaction offers a nuanced glimpse into their minds. Within their minds live realizations, epiphanies, and fears that are at once compelling and relatable. The difficulty of living up to growing expectations is not unique to the famous, nor is being embroiled in a continual desire to struggle. As the two explore their reactions to their fame, they grow as individuals and begin to separate. Their music mimics the dissolution of their love more expressively than their words or actions. The audience watches as they speak to one another in song, and the dialogue is beautiful. Because their connection is so strong, their music does not seem to suffer as their relationship ends. In fact, the emotions and insights they put into their music as they experience the phenomenon that is stranger than falling in love, falling out of love, are arguably more insightful and universal than their earlier work. The Swell Season selectively incorporates their performances into the fabric of the film. In doing so, the movie provides a robust and textured look at two uniquely talented individuals.

Commentary: Black Butterflies

On Saturday evening this beautiful film debuted at the TriBeCa film festival. An homage to the life of the South African poetess, Ingrid Jonker, the movie began with her childhood and chronicled the ups and downs of her quixotic life until her tragic end. Like her poems, each shot of the movie shone like a gorgeous realization frozen in time.  Moments captured in vignettes and filmic visions contributed to development of Ingrid’s character. Mercurial, passionate, and capricious, she held steady to nothing but her poetry, her daughter, and the one man she loved. Occasionally she let down her daughter and her lover, but never her work. Within her poetry, she captured the struggles of apartheid South Africa and communicated them with visceral human emotion and monumental imagery. Black Butterflies in all its cinematographic beauty, drags on a bit too long. As one viewer commented at the movie’s conclusion, “it seemed she died several times”. This assessment is apt. Ingrid’s multiple “deaths” captured her manic – depressive tendencies and outlined her periods of rise and decline, but could have been dealt with in a more concise manner. Nevertheless, watching her gain inspiration, write, love, and fall apart, over and over, successfully communicated her struggles and the influence of this tortured woman’s incendiary work on South Africa’s literary development and post-apartheid epoch.  

Commentary: Stuck Between Stations

Stuck Between Stations debuted this Friday evening at the TriBeCa film festival to an excited and receptive audience. Beautifully shot on RED cameras, the film is a nostalgic look at the transition between childhood and adulthood presented through the lives of two long-lost childhood “friends”.  After running into one another at a bar under somewhat unusual circumstances, Becky and Casper spend the night adventuring through Minneapolis, and talking. Their first conversation is stilted and childish. Becky does not recognize Casper when they see one another in the bar. Casper is elated to find the girl he idolized as a boy standing before him, but defensive in her overwhelming presence. One unlikely circumstance after another leads them into a night of wandering and talking: a circus party with acrobats (a cameo by Josh Hartnett gives them entre to this), a drop by performance in a bizarre public access television show, and an act of impromptu thievery. Watching Becky and Casper interact is much like watching seventh graders at a co-ed dance. Neither one is self possessed or confident. Like children, they verbally jab at one another, as they simultaneously hope for affection, comfort, and understanding. Though the film is gorgeously shot, its talk-centric plot is thin, and lacks the depth necessary to carry a film that is almost purely dialogue. At only one moment, does the dialogue turn away from the trite and into potentially interesting territory. Becky recounts a story that is shockingly painful and bodes further exploration. Unfortunately, her revelation is quickly introduced, then swept aside for more “talk”.  After this one potentially transcendent moment, Becky and Casper’s conversation swings right back to banality land, and ends there, wavering in between childhood and adulthood, much like its characters – bodily full grown, but spiritually unformed. 

Commentary: Flowers of Evil

Flowers of Evil presents itself as an exploration of how the Internet both connects and divides us. While the film uses the Internet to demonstrate the very real impact the Iranian conflict has on a young Iranian girl who is sent to Paris to escape the violence, and the Muslim-Parisian lover she finds there, the Internet is merely a vehicle to showcase the human stories that dominate the movie. Though entrenched in trying to examine the polarizing nature of how we use the Internet, Flowers of Evil is less about the Internet itself and more about the boy and the girl we watch fall in love and grow up. Yes, their relationship is sparked via Facebook after their initial meeting, but had they only had phones, one is led to believe the boy would have manned up, gotten the pretty Iranian girl’s number, and called her up. The Internet’s real role is to divide the girl’s mental space between the life she left behind in Iran and the new life she is finding in Paris, her lover being no small part of it.

Like the girl’s mind, the film is divided between Youtube videos portraying violence in Iraq, Twitter messages outlining what is happening there, and romantic scenes of the two lovers exploring Paris (these are fictional). The documentary footage is seamlessly incorporated with staged scenes. Interspersed between both the fictional scenes and the YouTube videos from Iran is real footage of the male character dancing. Interestingly, he is a real person whose background is the same as the boy in the film, but the plot of the movie is entirely fictionalized. The fact his character is based on his real life persona has little impact on the film, except to make him more a more nuanced character. Tying all of these disparate elements together is a carefully chosen and inspired soundtrack. Through the development of the love story, which is the plot thread that drives the film forward, we explore the human side of Iran’s unrest and the character’s respective desires to find themselves and grow up. Interestingly, the Internet seems to divide the couple as much as it brings them together. Yet, through the Internet’s unfiltered and unlimited access to all information and worlds, and the impact it has on their lives, the boy and girl seem to come to better understand themselves.  One wonders, however, if it is the Internet or their love that caused their respective realizations.

Commentary: The Bang Bang Club – A great picture is one that asks a question

         The film, The Bang Bang Club, made its US premier at the TriBeCa festival last night. The film is a fictionalized portrayal of the real “Bang Bang Club”, a group of photographers who captured the violence and poverty within the townships of Apartheid South Africa. Highly cinematic, The Bang Bang Club captures the hyperbolic passions and existential angst of the men whose camera lenses recorded endless suffering and senseless death. Opening with a jovial, and almost superficial representation of the competitive camaraderie between the members of the Bang Bang Club, the beginning of the film is almost light-hearted. Ballsy photographers Kevin Carter (Taylor Kitsch), Greg Marinovich (Ryan Phillipe), Ken Oosterbroek (Frank Rautenbach), and Joao Silva (Neels Van Jaarsveld), wake up early, drive through dust covered streets into the heartbreaking violence and penury of the South African townships, force their lenses into the depths of the action, then return home to sell their photos and recount their adventures -- all in a day’s work.

After hours their lives foil the depravity of their work. To their coworkers and other aspiring photographers, they are heroes. They share their “war” stories, congratulate one another, and prepare to do it all over again. In white South Africa’s bars and clubs, they drink, dance, screw, and indulge in every glorious hedonistic pleasure their safety provides. And they do it with the same embroiled beauty they harness in their work.

The initially surface portrayal of the men and their relationship to one another and to their occupation morphs into a serious exploration of their roles as photographers, and on a certain level, the role of media in capturing wars and conflicts. Are the individual photographers responsible for intervening? Do the photographs they take rub salt into the wounds of suffering people, or do they shed light on injustices that are begging for attention? Through the lenses of both their cameras, and their personal lives, the audience is invited into the questioning, and the film, like the photographs it features, leaves us wondering about the significance and role of pictures, both still and moving.

Perhaps the one (and fairly significant) fault of this epic and beautifully shot film is the lack of clear character development. The beginning of the movie shows the men as boys and the women as girls. In the end, they are grown and philosophical. Yet, the film was clearly not intended to be a character exploration. It is an epic portrayal of the larger than life realities of men who lived bigger and bolder than most. Willingness to take risks enmeshed them in situations they did not necessarily predict. Once removed, they became involved. Entwined with what they once looked at as voyeurs, they matured, as did the film itself. The question that lingers is whether we as humans can create anything worthwhile – a great picture, for example - if we are not personally involved, whether that involvement is physical or emotional. The film does not explicitly answer this, but the content of the prize-winning photos does.

TriBeCa Film Festival Line-Up

The 10^th  annual TriBeCa Film Festival kicked-off yesterday, and Reel Life Film has lined-up a wide array of docs and features to watch throughout the festival’s two-week run. Choosing which films to catch was not easy. This year’s films vary from documentaries about economically depressed enclaves in the US scored to the music of Beirut and Bob Dylan, to features about Iranian exiles planning a revolution over the Internet. The 10^th TriBeCa lineup offers an intriguing spread.

The festival itself has also amped up its Internet and Social Media cred by offering online festival access, and an archive of past films viewable on Netflix.

I will be updating the Blog as I view each film in RLF's line-up. For now, I will let the trailers speak for themselves. 

RLF’s LINE-UP

The Bang Bang Club (featuring Ryan Phillipe) 

Love During Wartime 

Love Always, Carolyn 

The Swell Season 

Stuck Between Stations (featuring Josh Hartnett) 

Black Butterflies (featuring Carice van Houten) 

Flowers of Evil 

Beats, Rhymes & Life 

Give Up Tomorrow

Bombay Beach  

More from Single Gal, Liz Tuccillo, and Flower Film’s Drew Barrymore

Yesterday, Entertainment Weekly chatted with Drew Barrymore about her upcoming production, “How to Be Single,” based on the 2008 book –of the same title- by our favorite single gal, Liz Tuccillo. The research for this book was caught on film by Yahoo! and RLF crafted the footage into the 52 episode series, “Single-minded Adventures”.

Check out our webisodes, Liz’s book, and EW’s interview with Drew here:

The webisodes (our bragging rights)

The book

The news

5.7 Billion Hits

In the broad world of “New Media,” the landscape is ever-changing, but what remains constant is growing access to content, and a growing mobile and digital audience consuming this content on their computers, iPhones, iPads, Androids, Tablets, etc. As platforms vie for this audience, they are thinking about their content. And what content sector is growing exponentially? Video.

Yesterday, TechCrunch blogged about AOL’s ascent to the number 2 online platform for video watching, right behind the Google/Youtube contingency. While AOL’s rapid climb up the online video ladder is incredibly impressive, especially for a company whose lights appeared to be out long ago, what we glean from TechCrunch’s post has less to do with AOL and more to do with online video.

Leena Rao wrote: “In total, the U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5.7 billion viewing sessions during March (compared to 5 billion in February).”

A .7 billion increase in viewing sessions in one month? Pretty powerful.

Learn more by reading Leena’s post on TechCrunch: AOL Jumps To No. 2 Spot In comScore Online Video Rankings