{"id":154,"date":"2009-03-22T22:59:05","date_gmt":"2009-03-23T03:59:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/?p=154"},"modified":"2021-08-26T09:54:48","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T14:54:48","slug":"the-new-year-parade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/22\/the-new-year-parade\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Year Parade"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year\u2019s Wisconsin Film Festival features its strongest-ever lineup of independent narrative features. The most notable ones include Ronnie Bronstein\u2019s late-addition Frownland <\/a><\/em>(the director will be\u00a0here in person), Antonio Campos\u2019s Afterschool<\/a><\/em> \u2013 both of which I\u2019ve written about previously and made my list of best indie films of 2008 <\/a>\u2013 Ramin Bahrani\u2019s Goodbye Solo<\/em>, Azazel Jacobs\u2019s Momma\u2019s Man<\/em>, Sean Baker\u2019s The Prince of Broadway<\/em>, So Yong Kim\u2019s Treeless Mountain<\/em>, and Tom Quinn\u2019s remarkable The New Year Parade<\/em>. The New Year Parade<\/em> won the Grand Prize at the 2008 Slamdance Film Festival and it\u2019s no surprise in these tough economic times that the film still hasn\u2019t found a distributor, so locals would be wise to catch it\u00a0at the festival. The New Year Parade<\/em> represents a terrific debut effort, and it may be another year before it sneaks into a local theater, turns up in your Netflix queue or the rack of your video store. In the current world of indie cinema, blink and you run the risk of missing out on the best new films being produced out there.<\/p>\n

Tom Quinn, who is still a fourth-year MFA student in Temple\u2019s very fine production program in media arts, has a made a film that \u2013 like other major indie filmmakers, such as David Gordon Green\u2019s George Washington<\/em> (Winston-Salem) and All the Real Girls <\/em>(Asheville, North Carolina), Lance Hammer\u2019s Ballast<\/em> (Mississippi Delta), Aaron Katz\u2019s Dance Party, USA<\/em> (Portland) and Quiet City<\/em> (Brooklyn), Jeff Nichols\u2019s Shotgun Stories<\/em> (Arkansas), Bahrani\u2019s Chop Shop<\/em> (Queens) or Todd Rohal\u2019s The Guatemalan Handshake <\/em>(Harrisburg) \u2013 remains rooted in a regional aesthetic that captures the ethos of a particular place. In this case, The New Year Parade<\/em> uses the backdrop of the annual Mummers Parade \u2013 a tradition that dates back to the seventeenth century \u2013 to explore the working-class neighborhood of Irish and Italians living in South Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

Quinn interweaves his story about an Irish-Catholic family, the McMonoguls, disintegrating under the painful strain of divorce amidst the year-long preparations for the South Philadelphia String Band\u2019s attempt to win the annual parade after finishing a very unlucky thirteenth the year before. That the band, under the captaincy of the father, Mike McMonogul (Andrew Conway), has decided to use a highly theatrical Egyptian theme offers an ironic comment on the film\u2019s own celebration of ethnicity. When the massive floats and gaudily-attired band members finally make their way down the\u00a0street, it\u2019s a totally surreal sight.<\/p>\n

There are more crosses in this film than in any other one in recent memory. Yet all the crosses don\u2019t manage to keep the McMonogul family immune to issues of divorce, drinking, and adulterous, pre-marital, and teenage sex that pervade everyday life. When the parents\u2019 impending divorce surfaces, Jack, a twenty-five-old bartender and musician, tries to fill his father\u2019s shoes \u2013 both financially and emotionally \u2013 within the family. He remains critical of the band\u2019s new strategy for winning the top prize at the parade, and resents his father\u2019s retreat from the family into drinking and Mummery. His father later attacks Jack for being selfish and “playing\u00a0man of the house.” (Although it\u2019s the mother\u2019s infidelity that causes the rupture, the two children remain loyal to her.)<\/p>\n

Jack\u2019s younger sister Kat, still in high school, tries to keep the family secret to herself. In a crucial scene early on, the camera focuses solely on her, as the disembodied offscreen voice of the school guidance counselor quizzes Kat about her emotional feelings regarding what\u2019s going on with her family. Jennifer Welsh\u2019s clipped responses, facial tics and gestures \u2013 especially the way she purses her mouth and tries to appear invisible \u2013 prove absolutely riveting. Welsh, a first-time performer, is amazingly natural in her role as a confused teenager. The guidance counselor suggests that she find a friend or someone with whom she can confide \u2013 a crucial piece of advice that will reverberate throughout the remainder of the film.<\/p>\n

Quinn in many ways filters the story through Jack (Greg Lyons), whose Oedipal fantasies of betrayal in Mummery parallel that of his father in relation to the family. Jack stumbles into a relationship with a hairdresser named Julie (Irene Longshore), who seems not much older than his sixteen-year-old sister. There\u2019s a wonderfully uncomfortable scene where the Julie and Kat wind up brushing their teeth together in the bathroom. Julie\u2019s unexpected presence in the house comes as a surprise to Kat. Julie later tries to relate to her by asking whether Kat has a boyfriend and offering to be available to her for advice. Needless to say, this comes across as improbable as Detective Lu\u2019s efforts to befriend Alex in Gus Van Sant\u2019s Paranoid Park<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Although the film deals with the effects that divorced parents have on their offspring, Jack\u2019s relationship with Julie seems far less problematic than Kat\u2019s initial forays into intimacy \u2013 it\u2019s really Kat\u2019s character that has the most complexity. Kat takes up with a hockey player named Paul (Paul Blackway). When Paul learns she\u2019s still a virgin, he convinces her to start taking birth control pills so the two of them can have sex. Meanwhile, she flirts with her more nerdy and handsome cohort in the school audio-visual club, Curtis (Tobias Segal), whose fidgety performance suggests that he doesn\u2019t quite feel comfortable in his own skin. At a party, Paul tries to initiate sex with Kat in the bedroom, but she resists. He responds with steroidal venom: “I can fucking jerk off by myself. What the fuck do I need you for?”<\/p>\n

Shortly afterwards, Kat responds by leading Curtis into the basement. She throws her arms around his neck and begins kissing him. A month later, as they are about to do their morning TV show, the stress between them becomes unbearable. Curtis alludes to their making out and asks: “Could we please just forget about it\u00a0and be cool with each other. The tension is driving me nuts.” Under questioning from Kat, he concedes that he likes her, but she storms off in anger. Although there are clearly strong feelings between them, the film like All the Real Girls<\/em> suggests that timing is everything. Kat later falls completely apart and tearfully spills her true feelings to Curtis.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s so unusual about The New Year Parade<\/em> is that Quinn is not afraid to go for big drama. It\u2019s hard to think of another recent indie film that risks being this emotional. Nonetheless, his film employs an episodic rather than dramatic structure. Quinn is more interested in mining the depths of individual moments rather than in bludgeoning us to death with plot contrivances. The New Year Parade<\/em>, in fact, is very different from films by Sean Baker or Aaron Katz. Like these directors, he depends heavily on improvisation \u2013 he reportedly abandoned his 105-page written script in favor of improvised dialogue \u2013 but Quinn\u2019s particular brand of naturalism is far more dramatically inspired, even if he flattens the overall arc of his story. Because the loosely structured story transpires over the course of a year, Quinn provides realistic interludes that are heavily reinforced by pop songs and mood music.<\/p>\n

Quinn\u2019s camera remains remarkably close to his characters during the most intimate scenes \u2013 to the point where it almost seems as if he\u2019s shooting a documentary. He fragments the story into shorter shots rather than relying on extended takes. Quinn mixes together documentary scenes of South Philly \u2013 of real people and situations, such as shots of the neighborhood, the Mummers practicing and preparing for the parade, or locals dancing in the streets \u2013 with scripted scenes. Like Sean Baker, he shoots lots of footage, which is one of the benefits of digital technology. The budget was reportedly a mere $7000, even if it looks like a million bucks. The scenes of the Philly skyline, fireworks, and Christmas tree lights show a rich and poetic aesthetic sense. Quinn gives as much weight to transitions and place as to his major dramatic scenes. The implosion of the venerable Veterans Stadium \u2013 the one-time home of the Phillies and Eagles \u2013 serves as an apt metaphor for the dissolution of the McMonogul family.<\/p>\n

Quinn\u2019s home-grown regionalism and exploration of Mummery represents an intricate part of the story of The New Year Parade<\/em> in which his characters are inextricably bound up with a sense of place. Quinn appears to be quite philosophical about the current state of indies struggling in the marketplace by championing the benefits of regionalism. He told Filmmaker<\/a><\/em>: “If the sky is momentarily drooping for large-scale independent film production and distribution, I find that liberating. The lack of money could encourage a boom in regional voices around the country and a new sense of self-reliance and independence. The tools are available and this generation is primed.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year\u2019s Wisconsin Film Festival features its strongest-ever lineup of independent narrative features. The most notable ones include Ronnie Bronstein\u2019s late-addition Frownland (the director will be\u00a0here in person), Antonio Campos\u2019s Afterschool \u2013 both of which I\u2019ve written about previously andRead More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":155,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4303,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions\/4303"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}