Toward the end of You Won't Miss Me, Ry Russo-Young’s affecting case study of an exasperating New York scenester that is out this week on DVD, we catch a glimpse of an unorthodox audition. As the squirrelly director engages a room brimming with ambitious misanthropes, one of them is revealed to be Greta Gerwig (the DIY [...]
New York art punks Les Savy Fav have earned a reputation as one of the most unpredictable live bands around. Frontman Tim Harrington—all beard and belly—is known for kicking up a ruckus, so Ryan Little and I headed over to The Black Cat Saturday to see if its low ceiling could withstand Harrington's assaults.
Pre-Show Banter
Ryan Little: How many [...]
Perhaps best known for his epic, three-part documentary The Battle of Chile, filmmaker Patricio Guzmás has spent much of his career focused on the reverberations from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's reign during the 1970s and 80s. Nostalgia for the Light is a mercurial, contemplative document that marries astronomy and metaphysics with the heart-wrenching desperation of the [...]
Famed documentarian Werner Herzog has built a prolific career via his wild-eyed curiosity, bringing an infectious enthusiasm to otherwise didactic and peculiar topics. Happy People is technically not his film—this 90-minute version is condensed from Russian director Dmitry Vasyukov's four-hour, made-for-TV documentary—but the indelible narration ensures this intriguing look at professional Syberian fur-trappers is unmistakeably a Herzog Project.
The happiness of the title refers [...]
The premise behind director Huang Weikai's documentary Disorder makes it sound insufferably fussy. Amassing over 1,000 hours of footage from amateur filmmakers throughout China, Weikai whittled down the mountain of grainy black and white footage guided by the rule that, according to The Atlantic's Hua Hsu, no successive scenes could come from the same source tape. [...]
As Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley faces serious questions regarding his own wind-related plans, Laura Israel's Windfall presents a troubling glimpse into one community's calamitous transition to wind power. In the sleepy town of Meredith, N.Y, where times are tough and bucolic views are placed at a premium, Israel documents the contentious invasion of 400-foot-tall wind turbines, shown here to be noisy, hulking menaces prone to ice flinging [...]
The funny little frog to the right can mean only one thing: The Environmental Film Festival is back. Now in its 19th year, the festival has become a massive understaking, where 150 films from 40 different countries–most for free—screen at museums, embassies, libraries, universities, and movie theaters throughout the District. This year's programming is particularly diverse, including countless screeds against our continued mishandling of fossil fuels, the winner of the 2010 [...]
If the camera lingers on a passed-over urban landscape long enough, will it find something meaningful? This is the cinematic riddle posed by Matt Porterfield’s second feature Putty Hill, a moody micro-budget indie that confuses austerity with profundity. Framed around the death of a troubled 20-something in its titular Baltimore County neighborhood, Porterfield’s skeletal narrative [...]
In 1994’s metal-head romp Airheads—in which the decidedly un-metal trio of Adam Sandler, Steve Buscemi, and Brendan Fraser hijack a local radio station to promote their band— there's a memorable exchange with a suit from Capitol Records, played by Harold Ramis. Asked to name the victor of a wrestling match between Lemmy and God, Buscemi [...]
HO HO WHO?: Jesu is Justin Broadrick's latest project, a name you might remember from his work in "I've seen kids in all black wearing that t-shirt" bands like Godflesh and Napalm Death. More post-rock than grindcore, Jesu has just released the digital-only Christmas EP, which he describes as being "inspired by the onset of [...]
