Lovely voice, great style. Her guitar playing skills really blew my mind. Very much in the storytelling folk/country/songwriter style, each song pictured a whole world for you. Some sad and thoughtful, some sassy and upbeat. Totally enjoyable!
Daily Archives: October 8, 2007
Chicago Film Festival: Blackout
Dir: Jerry LaMothe
Actrs: Mostly unknowns (to me) but a few familiar faces such as Jeffrey Wright, Zoe Saldana, and Saul Rubinek.
This movie was EXCELLENT. Completely compelling. I turned in my ballot with a 5 and I hope it gets a major distributor. Excellent even though the print we watched had a HUGE time code along the bottom of the screen (blocking about the bottom fourth of the screen) and no credits at the end.
Focuses on the New York City blackout of August 2003*, details the events in one Brooklyn neighborhood, particularly focused on the tenants of one apartment building and the workers at one hair salon. (Based on true events from the blackout, but believe the specific particulars are fictional.)
Really really great. Great acting, great pacing, great suspense, great passion and concern… Loved it. Both thumbs way up.
*hello, I was there! that was my last night in New York and I wound up sleeping on a couch in Manhattan unable to even get to my apartment in Queens!, and walking up and down many sets of stairs in complete darkness, and going for a very scary walk on the dark streets trying to find Amy…
Chicago Film Festival: The Walker
Dir: Paul Schrader.
Actrs: Woody Harrelson (main lead), Kristen Scott Thomas, Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin, Willlem Dafoe, Ned Beatty.
This was a bit of a mess. We were down with it for the first half and then things started to unravel. Had a very 80s/90s feel to it, hard to believe it was filmed recently. Full of Washington DC “high society” (oh sweet monkey sundae, are those people pretentious or what) and supposed intrigue. The attempt to make Harrelson’s character BOTH a gay dandyish society fop AND a gay in a serious relationship with a trendy political artist didn’t really work for us. The two sides of his personality never melded and the contrast of the scenes was choppy.
Some good acting, not terrible, but would be very surprised if this film ever really sees the light of day.
Big Screen: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Very, very moody and melancholy and slow and drawn out. Really really beautiful photography (cinematography?), particularly during the narration. Lots of Midwestern winter shots, snow covered wheat fields, sun dappled groups of trees. Empty rooms with wooden floors and empty rocking chairs and streaks of sun shooting across them.
Oh and yeah the acting? Brad Pitt is progressively manic (eventually becoming an actually intelligible version of someone similar to the character from Snatch) and Casey Affleck really grows on you, after seeming sort of idiot-savant like at the beginning. Mary Louise Parker was excellent in a (very!) small role, as was Zoey Deschanel. Wished Frank (Sam Shepherd) had made another appearance at the end.
At the end you realize the story isn’t necessarily about what it seemed. Thought the narration would be annoying, but came to love it (gives it a very storybook feel, kind of like the narration in Pushing Daisies, although in a very different genre of storybook).
And as I said, the photography was beeeeaaauuuuuuuuutiful.
Fiction: “Tolstoy Lied” by Rachel Kadish
A love story about an academic, sort of a shoo-in to my book pile, don’t you think. The narrator has a very similar tone and feel to the narrator of Love Walked In, but a few years older, wiser, and more jaded. It’s literate and witty, and the compare-and-contrast overlap between problems with the boy and problems with work colleagues is done really well.
Nice friendship moments, nice relationship moments, good realizations.
I didn’t like some of the choices at the end, however. Doesn’t stop me from thinking it was very well-written and worth reading. But I’m a little irked with at least one character. Shows you how involving it was, eh? 😉
Fiction: “The Used World” by Haven Kimmel
Just as insightful and heartbreaking and tender and comic and genius as you should expect from a Haven Kimmel book. A story of three woman, connected and disconnected in ways only known to one of them. Spirituality, and friendship, and family, and love. And pain, and guilt, and when can one forgive, and when is forgiveness off the table. Small-town America, with all its aches and pains. And particularly the pangs of those more worldly who live in it.
Quite, quite lovely. Kimmel is an automatic “buy in hardback” for me at this point.