I ended this year's Florida Film Festival on a chilly, rainy night by screening Snow Angels by director David Gordon Green, whose debut feature George Washington I feel is one of the best American independent movies of the past decade.
From A.O. Scott's review in the New York Times:
But to say that is not to diminish the film's strengths, of which there are many. One of the parallel stories involves Arthur (Michael Angarano) and Lila (Olivia Thirlby, Ellen Page's best friend in Juno), two high school teens navigating that most tenuous of young adult terrain: having a crush on a classmate. Cute without being cutesy, this budding relationship is the real soul of the film that partially takes a back seat to the eventual tragedy of the film, heavily foreshadowed in the film's opening scene. The problem with this tragic part of the storyline (of which I'll reveal nothing else) is that it seems coolly distant without seemingly trying to be. It lacks the fully lived-in feeling of the young romance and thus feels emotionally stunted, whereas the other is emotionally satisfying.
The night before I screened Young @ Heart, the British documentary about a choir of senior citizens who tour performing classic and newer rock and pop songs. There seems to have been a spate of movies recently that deal with the pairing of rock 'n' roll with unconventional performers--Richard Linklater's School of Rock, and the documentaries Rock School and Girls Rock! (the latter of which played at FFF this year, but unseen by me). Either one of these films would make a good double-feature with Young @ Heart, but watching the film, I kept on thinking about a short TV documentary on VH1 I saw years ago on an album called Innocence & Despair by The Langley Schools Music Project.
A recording on the completely other end of the spectrum than the seniors of Young @ Heart, Innocence & Despair is a collection of songs by a chorus of elementary school children from Langley, British Columbia during the late 70s. Ranging in material from David Bowie to The Beach Boys to ABBA, these songs are sparingly orchestrated and incredibly lo-fi in quality. The wonder of it all is how moving these songs can be even when their sung by kids who don't even really understand what they're singing about. I mean, how can a 9-year-old kid fathom the longing of a song like the Eagles' "Desperado" or the loneliness of The Beach Boys' "In My Room"? Well, maybe kids get a lot more than we think they do.
From A.O. Scott's review in the New York Times:
With both his subsequent films, "All the Real Girls" and "Undertow," Mr. Green has retained just enough of that idiosyncrasy to keep the promise of "George Washington" alive in the minds of his critical admirers. But these movies have also felt uneasily caught between his poetic nonconforming impulses and the requirements of sustaining a career as a midlevel, specialty-division auteur. Each one is less special than the one before.To add, I think Green's movies have, at least overtly, become increasingly more structured--their narratives more focused on its trajectory towards a specific conclusion, rather than languishing in the nuance of character and place.
But to say that is not to diminish the film's strengths, of which there are many. One of the parallel stories involves Arthur (Michael Angarano) and Lila (Olivia Thirlby, Ellen Page's best friend in Juno), two high school teens navigating that most tenuous of young adult terrain: having a crush on a classmate. Cute without being cutesy, this budding relationship is the real soul of the film that partially takes a back seat to the eventual tragedy of the film, heavily foreshadowed in the film's opening scene. The problem with this tragic part of the storyline (of which I'll reveal nothing else) is that it seems coolly distant without seemingly trying to be. It lacks the fully lived-in feeling of the young romance and thus feels emotionally stunted, whereas the other is emotionally satisfying.
The night before I screened Young @ Heart, the British documentary about a choir of senior citizens who tour performing classic and newer rock and pop songs. There seems to have been a spate of movies recently that deal with the pairing of rock 'n' roll with unconventional performers--Richard Linklater's School of Rock, and the documentaries Rock School and Girls Rock! (the latter of which played at FFF this year, but unseen by me). Either one of these films would make a good double-feature with Young @ Heart, but watching the film, I kept on thinking about a short TV documentary on VH1 I saw years ago on an album called Innocence & Despair by The Langley Schools Music Project.
A recording on the completely other end of the spectrum than the seniors of Young @ Heart, Innocence & Despair is a collection of songs by a chorus of elementary school children from Langley, British Columbia during the late 70s. Ranging in material from David Bowie to The Beach Boys to ABBA, these songs are sparingly orchestrated and incredibly lo-fi in quality. The wonder of it all is how moving these songs can be even when their sung by kids who don't even really understand what they're singing about. I mean, how can a 9-year-old kid fathom the longing of a song like the Eagles' "Desperado" or the loneliness of The Beach Boys' "In My Room"? Well, maybe kids get a lot more than we think they do.
There's probably no better way to have people understand each other than to have them make music together. As cliché as it is to say that [music] is a universal language, it's in fact the truth.-----
All-in-all, this year's Florida Film Festival, despite some mishaps and stumbles, was as fun as it was exhausting. In order, my three favorite movies at the fest were Disfigured, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, and August Evening. Other highlights included my mom meeting and getting an autograph from A Clockwork Orange actor Malcolm McDowell. I'm not entirely sure, but as my mom tells it, I think he might've been hitting on her! Another slightly surreal moment occurred during the Midnight Shorts program. For those who don't know, all of the midnight showings tend to skew--how shall I say it--to the more depraved, the slightly dysfunctional. The filmmakers of one of the shorts entitled Dirty Words: The Letter C were in attendance and were passing out raffle tickets to win a vibrator and throwing out tiny bottles of lube to the entire audience.
And I find it incredibly inappropriate to tell you whether or not I've used my bottle so I'd appreciate if you'd stop asking me.
1 comment:
The last comment is fascinating. But don't worry, I would never ask.
I do want to tell you that a friend of mine read your blog and really liked it. I think he found it insightful. He is a big movie fan, a sort of walking IMDB.
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