Bad Fever
Dustin Guy Defa’s debut feature Bad Fever, set in the director’s home town of Salt Lake City, presents a fascinating study of contrasting characters: Eddie, a lonely misfit living under the thumb of his mother, and Irene (Eléanore Hendricks), a harsh street hustler, with whom he gets involved. Eddie is a wannabe stand-up comic, who’s […]
Putty Hill
After financing fell through on a scripted feature about teenage metal heads in Baltimore, entitled Metal Gods, Matthew Porterfield put together a five-page treatment based on people and locations he discovered while developing it. Shot guerrilla-style in 12 days, the result turned out to be Putty Hill. Porterfield’s semi-improvised second feature mixes a simple fictional […]
Beautiful Darling
[Photo by Anton Perich]Candy Darling (1944-1974) was a later Warhol superstar from the period after the Pop artist was shot by Valerie Solanas and became the producer of Paul Morrissey’s films. Born James L. Slattery, Candy appeared in Flesh (1968-69) and starred in Women in Revolt (1971), Morrissey’s satire of the women’s liberation movement – […]
Prince of Broadway
Sean Baker has to be one of the most underrated young American indie filmmakers working today. After Four Letter Words (2000), he reinvented himself with two stellar features, namely Take Out (2004), which took years to screen theatrically, and Prince of Broadway (2010), which actually came out a couple of years ago. It played at […]
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
Guy (Jason Palmer) and Madeline (Desiree Garcia). Photograph by W.A.W. Parker. Damien Chazelle’s impressive debut film Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench represents an amalgam between the realist aesthetics of the New American Cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s and the free-form casualness of the French New Wave. It pays homage to American […]
Trash Humpers
To many critics, Harmony Korine’s last feature Mister Lonely served notice that he had finally mellowed. News that he had gotten married, had a baby, and moved back to his hometown of Nashville was supposed to be the confirmation of this. Mister Lonely, his story about a Michael Jackson impersonator, was completely wacko, but it […]
Cold Weather
Aaron Katz’s Dance Party USA (2006) and Quiet City (2007) established his career as one of the best young independent American directors. Quiet City abandoned a written screenplay in favor of structured improvisation, allowing his actors – Cris Lankenau and Jamie Fisher – to improvise their scenes to the point where they shared screenwriting credit […]
Face
Andy Warhol’s many silent Screen Tests provide examples of his predilection for the close-up, as do some of his other films, such as Blow Job (1964), Henry Geldzahler (1964), and Outer and Inner Space (1965). Made during his collaborative period with Chuck Wein, Face (1965) has recently been preserved, along with The Velvet Underground in […]