Two Years at Sea
The 2012 Wisconsin Film Festival began last Wednesday night with London filmmaker Ben Rivers’s Two Years at Sea (2011), his majestic feature-length portrait of an eccentric recluse named Jake Williams, whom he had filmed previously in a fourteen-minute short This is My Land (2006). The film documents and explores Jake's isolated rural existence within the […]
We Need to Talk about Kevin
Most people don’t think twice about having children. That’s not exactly the case for Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton), a career woman and travel writer who decides to have a kid, but remains ambivalent. A potential parent might wonder: what if I don’t actually love my child, or what if he or she doesn’t love me? […]
Best Independent Films of 2011
Although the overall quality of this past year's independent films remained strong, most still had difficulty finding an audience. Of the films on my list, Martha Marcy May Marlene grossed the highest amount, at nearly $3 million; Take Shelter and The Future made less than their budgets. Todd Solondz claims his films don’t make money […]
Take Shelter
The suspense/horror genre has gained new prominence in indie cinema lately. This appears evident not only in films such as Ti West’s House of the Devil (2009) and The Innkeepers (2012), and Calvin Reeder’s Lynchian-inspired The Oregonian (2011), but also in films that employ elements of the genre, notably Todd Rohal’s The Catechism Cataclysm (2010), […]
Jess + Moss
At last year’s Sundance Film Festival, the reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter wrote: “Experimental films at Sundance are not unlike the flu bugs that run rampant through the festival’s many crowded venues: They’re inevitable but to be avoided if possible” Even though the reviewer considered Jess + Moss to be an exception, he nevertheless qualified […]
Without
Mark Jackson’s debut feature Without is the latest independent film to leave me excited by the work that young indie filmmakers are able to accomplish on very low budgets these days. Without tells the story of a 19-year-old young woman, Joslyn (Joslyn Jensen), who takes a temporary job as a live-in caretaker for an elderly […]
The Catechism Cataclysm
Todd Rohal’s richly inventive debut feature The Guatemalan Handshake (2006) was overlooked by the Sundance Film Festival at the time. In retrospect, this seems like an inexcusable oversight. Lacking a distribution deal after playing at Slamdance, Rohal took a single 35mm print on the road for two years. At the end of the journey, according […]
Terri
In Azazel Jacobs’s Momma's Man, there’s a scene toward the end where the mother of the protagonist, Mikey, gets him to sit on her lap and he looks like an overgrown baby, dwarfing her in size. The image serves as an apt metaphor. He’s not a momma’s boy, but a grown man – stuck in […]