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Review: Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister
For long stretches in its first two acts, the film is distinguished by a disarming sense of freedom and spontaneity.2.5
For long stretches in its first two acts, Your Sister's Sister is distinguished by a disarming sense of freedom and spontaneity—the feeling that we aren't so much seeing actors skillfully act out a script as we are watching real people interacting with each other, the camera merely there to capture the details of those interactions.
Witness, for instance, the first scene in which we see Jack (Mark Duplass) and Iris (Emily Blunt) together by themselves, after Jack has interrupted a friend's eulogy for his dead brother with his own less-than-glowing tribute. There's such a startling ease to Jack and Iris's interactions that one senses their years of friendship. Are these two people just friends, or is there unspoken romantic tension in some of the pregnant pauses in their conversation? There's a sense, seeing that Iris is willing to go so far as to arrange for a week-long getaway so Jack can figure his life out, that there may be something deeper going on than both of them are willing to acknowledge to each other, much less themselves.
A different emotional temperature, however, animates Jack's first encounter with Iris's lesbian sister, Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), an unexpected houseguest in the cabin Iris has arranged for Jack to stay in during his weeklong sabbatical. But even as Jack and Hannah make occasionally awkward attempts to try to get to know each other, it's possible to see much of Iris in Hannah, if nothing else, in the self-confident way they both carry themselves, especially around Jack. (Perhaps that's why Jack ends up having drunken sex with Hannah that first night in the cabin—a plot turn that ends up having enormous consequences when Iris surprises them both by showing up at the cabin the next day.)
Writer-director Lynn Shelton captures all of this in lengthy scenes in which she evinces a striking alertness to the many details of speech and body language that reveal multitudes about these characters, especially as they interact with each other. In a film like Your Sister's Sister, the things that are left unsaid between these people are just as important as the things that are openly stated. This is the kind of thing that John Cassavetes regularly excelled at in his films—and, like Cassavetes, especially early on in his career, Shelton relies heavily on improvisation to achieve this feeling of life happening right before our very eyes. The effect is often thrilling: Though Shelton's "script" may have dictated certain narrative and emotional beats, one can never quite predict how the actors will get to those points.
Your Sister's Sister is so amiably loose, so warmly observant in its depiction of character interactions, and so beautifully acted that it's a shame it eventually threatens to fall apart under the weight of an excess of plot twists and hedged bets. Up until its third act, Shelton's film is an absorbing look at characters handling, in their own sometimes problematic ways, both various forms of grief and loss (Jack still dealing with the death of his brother, Hannah dealing with the recent end of a seven-year relationship) and unspoken desires (Hannah's desire to be a mother, Iris's secret love for Jack, Jack's own desire for a sense of normalcy).
But then Shelton piles on complication after complication, trying to drum up drama among these three people, and much of it can't help but feel a bit too artificially manufactured after the striking naturalism of what came before. Worse, the third act turns what promised to be a fairly provocative film in regard to its take on (straight and gay) interpersonal friendships and romantic relationships into something disappointingly safe. Like Shelton's last film, Humpday, which used a gay-porn conceit to poke fun at male egotism, Your Sister's Sister ends up sticking the landing, preferring tidiness when the rest of the film suggested something messier and potentially more transgressive in the works.
Cast: Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mark Duplass, Mike Birbiglia Director: Lynn Shelton Screenwriter: Lynn Shelton Distributor: IFC Films Running Time: 90 min Rating: R Year: 2011 Buy: Video
Review: The Great Hack Is an Elusive Look at the Cambridge Analytica Scandal
It seems so invested in a rehabilitation of Brittany Kaiser's image that the filmmakers' own motives end up being its most interesting subject.1.5
Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim's documentary The Great Hack opens with a sweeping and essentially meaningless drone shot. "Somewhere in Nevada" a sole title reads over the image of a city that sprawls across the desert in the shadow of a rather stubby mountain range. Tedium has already begun to set in as ominous strings fade in on the soundtrack and the film cuts to the opening of the Burning Man festival, where Brittany Kaiser—former business development director at notorious data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica—sets out to do whatever it is that privileged white people do at Burning Man.
The Great Hack turns an undeniably important series of political events into a two-hour look at a wealthy criminal lounging in pools and riding in Ubers. The doc fakes its viewers out, though, after its pointless Burning Man prologue, introducing us to Professor David Carroll, an expert in social media marketing whose interest in recovering the data profile Cambridge Analytica illegally compiled of him—as it did of most every American—is meant to form something like the film's impetus. Carroll explains, in terms a tad too elementary for a digital-native audience, that he's concerned with the effect that targeted misinformation campaigns directed at specific users are having on global democracy. Or, in his both too lofty and too simple words, "How did the dream of a connected world tear us apart?"
One of the answers to Carroll's question is that very specific people—people like Brittany Kaiser—decided to use the internet for precisely that purpose. In voiceover, Carroll explains what Cambridge Analytica was and, in broad strokes, how its methods of data collection and analysis helped sway both the British EU referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Carroll's explanation is illustrated with animated visualizations more concerned with appearing complex and sensational than they are with clearly presenting information. The corporate structure of Cambridge Analytica is presented with a conspiratorial air, as if the web of profile photos that the The Great Hack pieces together represents something far more nefarious and mysterious than a company's personnel page.
In its first act, the documentary makes ample use of such CG animations, including a rather repetitive motif in which photographed objects appear to pixelate and float up into the sky. We understand well before the fifth time we see this effect the metaphor that all that's real is moving willy-nilly into the cloud. But after Carroll makes it to London to sue Cambridge Analytica for his data, Amer and Noujaim more or less abandons him and his pedagogical approach for Kaiser, whom the filmmakers track down in Thailand, sipping a Mai Thai poolside. Kaiser is despicable, but The Great Hack appears to never tire of watching her stare pseudo-pensively out of car and airplane windows, or inventing new ways to rationalize her work for Cambridge, even as she turns state's witness in Britain.
The film spends so much time lingering on the mini-dramas of Kaiser's jet-set life—and so little time detailing exactly what it was that Cambridge Analytica did, or investigating how we might stop it from happening again—that one can conclude that in Kaiser the filmmakers believed they had found some kind of key to understanding our ongoing digitally fueled social catastrophe. The Great Hack befuddlingly includes a sequence in which Kaiser panics because she thinks she's lost her passport on her way to Heathrow, only to find it seconds later in her bag. Why include such an insignificant moment—or, for that matter, other sequences of Kaiser simply en route somewhere or waiting for something? What Amer and Noujaim see in Kaiser remains elusive. In fact, this meandering documentary seems so invested in a rehabilitation of her image that the filmmakers' own motives end up being its most interesting subject.
Director: Karim Amer, Jehane Moujaim Screenwriter: Karim Amer, Erin Barnett, Pedro Kos Distributor: Netflix Running Time: 113 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: Skin Confronts White Supremacy from a Dubious Point of View
The film's not-strictly-linear structure and handheld camerawork come to feel like attempts at masking a certain conventionality.2.5
In 1951's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt identifies the early adherents of the Nazi movement in Germany as belonging to a "mob," which she distinguishes from the "mass" as a motley group of the disaffected who felt themselves in various ways betrayed by the dominant institutions of society—in essence, the outcasts from the masses. Guy Nattiv's Skin finds this mob of resentment thriving in the American Rust Belt, where neo-Nazi leader Fred "Hammer" Krager (Bill Camp) recruits young runaways to his organization, baiting them with hot meals and a simulacrum of family warmth. He and his wife, Shareen (Vera Farmiga), indoctrinate young drifters into their disciplinary, Oedipal clan, with Fred as the fearful father figure and Shareen as the mother whose affection they must earn.
A remake of Nattiv's Oscar-winning short of the same name, Skin is based on the true story of Byron "Babs" Widner (Jamie Bell), who grew up under Fred and Shareen's tutelage but is beginning to harbor doubts about the group's cause. The film opens with a confrontation between a march of allied neo-Nazi groups and a counter protest headed by the activist Daryle Jenkins (Mike Colter), in which Babs and other skinheads corner and assault a black protestor, disfiguring the young man and running off. Babs has a conscience, and he slowly comes to regret this assault. Early on, the film gives us another example of his cloaked sense of right and wrong: At a rally where Fred announces his congressional candidacy, another white nationalist verbally accosts a trio of young girls singing a folkish—or rather, völkisch—tune, and Babs defends them, beating up the much larger man with a mic stand.
In Nattiv's film, the face-tatted Babs's practiced, neutral expression becomes an ambivalent mask hiding wounded insecurity, explosive rage, or both. His violent defense of the young girls earns him gratitude from their mother, Julie Price (Danielle Macdonald), a legacy member of the white power movement who's decided to begin to removing herself from her family's milieu. As Julie and Babs's connection becomes romance—and as Jenkins pursues Babs, thinking he might be able to convince the neo-Nazi to become an informant—the couple puts more and more distance between themselves and Fred and Shareen's perverse surrogate family, placing themselves in direct conflict with a dangerous mob.
To symbolize Babs's gradual break-up with his violent family, the film periodically flashes forward to the grueling, years-long process of removing the racist tattoos plastered across his body. Close-ups on ink being pulled out through skin, accompanied by Babs's fraught screams, suggest that the pain his skin causes him in these scenes is just recompense for the crimes he committed and endorsed on behalf of an ideology built around the color of that skin.
Skin offers some insight to the appeal and functioning of white supremacist groupings, but after a while, the film's not-strictly-linear structure and handheld camerawork come to feel like self-conscious signs of "gritty" realism, attempts at masking a certain conventionality. This is, in the end, the story of a bad man being redeemed by the love of a good woman, and it's worth questioning why Babs, rather than Jenkins, is at the center of the film. As Skin illustrates in an early, exposition-heavy scene, Jenkins has facilitated the turning of around a half-dozen Nazis. That a black man would dedicate so much time, at great personal risk, to penetrating the minds of avowed, violent racists seems the much more interesting—and relevant—story here. It's not that anything in Skin runs egregiously contrary to the facts, or that Babs's story isn't moving as presented, but one may be justified in contemplating why his turn away from Nazism is presented primarily as a personal redemption arc, and not primarily one of tireless activism and resistance by the opponents of fascism like Jenkins.
Cast: Jamie Bell, Danielle Macdonald, Daniel Henshall, Bill Kamp, Vera Farmiga, Mike Colter, Louisa Krause, Zoe Margaret Colletti, Kylie Rogers, Colbi Gannett Director: Guy Nattiv Screenwriter: Guy Nattiv Distributor: A24 Running Time: 120 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Odessa IFF 2019: The Cossacks, Queen of Hearts, Monos, & Projectionist
The festival feels like a long-awaited apparition in a place where events of its magnitude might be scarce.
At first glance, Odessa recalls the Algeria of the 1980s as described by playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce, a place where local "currency has no value and there is nothing to buy anyway." Odessa seems coy about offering a fantasy version of itself to those who aren't already confined to it and to whom displaying the city—in the shape of superfluous possessions or souvenirs—would amount to a perverse redundancy. It's a city coherent to the brutal honesty of its human faces, a city virtually without store windows to hawk unessential goods to passersby—unless one traverses its center, where a McDonald's and a Reebok shop appear as reminders of a glossier elsewhere. Perhaps the way Cameroon, as one Cameroonian once told me, is a country without sidewalks, "unless you go to Douala." This is, of course, a respite from the capitalist assaults of places where to experience the city is to stack up on its mementos. It's this context that made the Odessa International Film Festival (OIFF) feel like a long-awaited apparition in a place where events of its magnitude might be scarce.
By the Lermontovskiy Hotel, where the international journalists covering the OIFF stay, only food seems to be for sale. There's a 24/7 supermarket that closes when the security guard sees fit, a "Japanese and Thai Asian Café," and a regal restaurant named Aleksandrovskiy, which sits inside a garden full of Versailles-esque fountains and statues, and where a select few can feast on a scrumptious leg of lamb on a bed of polenta for 12 euros. Perhaps the same select few who show up for OIFF's outdoor screening of the 1928 film The Cossacks at the Potemkin Stairs but don't use the steps as bleachers, like the rest of us, instead taking their seats in the large cordoned-off VIP section close to the live orchestra for a few selfies and then dashing off.
A brief video pleading for the release of Crimean filmmaker Oleg Sentsov from a Russian prison preceded the film, eliciting passionate applause. Those actually using the steps as seats seemed to truly savor the event, which took the shape of what film screenings were probably more like in the early 20th century: raucous fair-like happenings with lots of talking and where the film was only one of many multi-sensorial elements. In many ways, The Cossacks is about how the production of a nation is entwined with the production of gender norms. Lukashka (John Gilbert) is seen as a softie. He's derided as being a fraction of a man, or a half-Cossack, because he would rather spend his time reading than fighting, to the horror of his entourage. He ends up going to war in order to legitimize his status as a man for his family and his beloved Maryana (Renée Adorée). In the world of the film, becoming a man involves killing at least one Turk or two, and becoming a woman means marrying a man who has killed Turks.
The Cossacks was a fascinating selection to screen at the Potemkin Stairs because it wrapped a critique of normativity in some of the most sexist of cinematic languages, female ass shots as gags and all, making it hard to know what kind of selective reading of the film the audience might be making. The men on the screen are always either accosting, harassing, molesting, or trying to rape Maryana, which might be what triggered Rose McGowan, one of the festival's celebrity guests, to leave just a few minutes into the screening.
As much as watching a film such as George Hill and Clarence Brown's silent drama at the place where one of cinema's most iconic sequences was shot feels like the crossing off of a bucket-list item we didn't realize was on that list until we experienced it, the off-screen drama was just as enticing. There was, for instance, the blatant spectacle of Ukrainian income inequality with "the people" huddled up on the uncomfortable steps for two hours eager to engage with a silent film while Ukrainian socialites decked out in animal prints treated the event more like a vernissage. There was also the impossible quest for a public bathroom mid-screening. This involved walking into a half-closed market across from the Potemkin Stairs and interrupting a loud quarrel between a mother and her adult son, who worked at one of the market stalls.
It's difficult to guess where queerness goes in Odessa. Maybe it only lives as disavowal, as in The Cossacks, which ends with Lukashka, after anointing his masculinity by slaughtering 10 Turks, stating to Maryana heterosexuality's mathematical logic in its simplest form: "I am your man. You are my woman. I want you." And the anointing is never final, the film seems to say. Indeed, as his father lies dying in his arms, Lukashka asks him: "Father, am I Cossack?" The question of where queerness might live, in this context, would be finally answered a few days later when I visit the only gay club in Odessa, Libertin, and meet a trans woman name Jalala, who confides that there's a "place" in Odessa where straight men can go to to have sex with women like her. "Is it an app?" I ask. Jalala smiles and says that it's a park. "But it's dangerous," she tells me. "It's very exciting and very dangerous." Because there are skinheads, she says. "Do the skinheads want to kill you or fuck you, or fuck you and then kill you?" I ask her. "I don't know," she responded. "That's why it's dangerous."
The festival main grounds, in front of the majestic Odessa Academic Theatre of Musical Comedy, aren't unlike London's Southbank Centre in the early days of summer, where visitors and locals are both sold the idea that the city is this fun all year long. The atmosphere is cosmopolitan, with Nina Simone remixes or early Erykah Badu playing in the background, food trucks, a Mastercard stall, and outdoor sitting poufs. There's also no stress in the air, no suffocating crowds, and as such no anxiety about being turned away from a screening.
When looking at the festival's program, one may scoff at the apparent lack of diversity and, more specifically, queerness. After a few screenings, though, one may get the sense that queerness does live at the Odessa International Film Festival and, per Jalala's account, in Odessa more generally—it just isn't publicized. In Queen of Hearts, for instance, director May el-Toukhy takes the age-old narrative of the stranger who turns up to disrupt domestic bliss, or ennui, and gives it a daring incestuous twist. Anne (Trine Dyrholm) and Peter (Magnus Krepper) live an idyllic life in a mansion somewhere in Denmark with two young, and creepily angelic, twin daughters (Liv and Silja Esmår Dannemann). There's something eerie about this setup even before Peter's problematic teenage son, Gustav (Gustav Lindh), from another marriage is shipped from Sweden to live with his dad and unsettle everything.
What's uncanny about Anne and Peter's home is, of course, the way it gleams a kind of speckless completion of the heterosexual project, which could only ever be possible as a mirage. Theirs is the home of dreams bound to become nightmares by the introduction of even the most vaguely foreign element. Such as reality, that most irksome of registers, or a long-lost son. The house of Queen of Hearts, whose drama is so latent you'd only have to snap your fingers for chaos to erupt, evokes the house of Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, the kind of immaculate luxury that could only be sitting on top of some macabre bunker full of roaches and well-fed zombies. The drama that links these homes is the notion that the epitome of the heterosexual family bliss borders its very obliteration, with the unruly resurfacing of all the gunk that had been swept underneath, as the very foundation for its habitat.
When Gustav arrives, then, and ends up having an affair with his stepmom, a trench coat-wearing lawyer for young victims of sexual abuse, we're only surprised at how careless they seem to be about being found out. El-Toukhy is smart to avoid sensationalizing the taboo-breaking premise of the narrative with a camera that sides with Anne: her sexual hunger, her contradictions, her stretch marks. This isn't a film about roundabout incest, but one about the impossibility of satisfaction even for the most privileged woman, one with a high-powered and socially engaged job, money to spare, and a mansion by the lake in a Scandinavian country.
Queen of Hearts focuses on Anne's paradoxes: She's a savior and a monster, a middle-aged mother and a horny teenager, unabashedly exposing the inconvenient pores that remain underneath even the most beautifully made-up Nordic skin. And the film is about skin, ultimately. In the way Anne and Gustav have raw sex and the marks on Anne's stomach are filmed with purpose, sincerity, and no apology. The affair begins when Anne walks into Gustav's bedroom and gives him a handjob without bothering to lock the door. This comes soon after he brought a girl his own age home and Anne had to sit in her living room, staring at her laptop and drinking a glass of wine, while listening to the teenagers having sex. By the time Anne goes to the lake with Gustav and one of her twin girls, and Anne decides to get in the water, we know the deal is done. "But you never swim," says the girl. Water in Queen of Hearts bears the same prophetic sexual force that's appeared in many films, queer or not, from F.W. Murnau's Sunrise to Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake.
The affair isn't about love, of course, or passion. It's not even about the sex itself. The affair is a settling of accounts, a vampiric attempt to deny the passing of time, which, by virtue of having passed, feels like it's been wasted. For Anne, the culprit is Peter, who becomes a cock-blocking nuisance. The film, a melodrama with a superb final shot that offers no closure, at times tries too hard to provide a cause for Anne's passage à l'acte. When Gustav asks Anne who she lost her virginity to, she answers, "With someone it shouldn't have been," which makes it seem like the film is suggesting that predatorial behavior is a sort of damned inheritance. The Queen of Hearts is much more successful, and courageous, when it follows the logic of sexual yearning itself, not worrying about rational justifications.
The first few sequences of Alejandro Landes's Monos evoke Claire Denis's Beau Travail, except it isn't only men training in the deserted landscape. A few young women join them, which, inevitably takes the narrative elsewhere, even if the films' basic premises are similar. In Monos, teenage guerilla fighters are supposed to guard a foreign hostage, Doctora Sara Watson (Julianne Nicholson), and a conscripted cow named Shakira. Intrigue and sexual tension ensure that nothing goes according to plan. The only thing that never finds any respite is the flow of violence, which increasingly loses its metaphorical sheen, becoming gratuitous toward the end. What starts out like a social critique gains the aura of an unnecessarily grisly horror film, more about overtly visible chains than the allegorical slaughtering of cows by paramilitary children named Rambo, Lady, Bigfoot, and Smurf.
It turns out that queerness lives even in the faraway mountaintops of the Colombian jungle, as one of the guerilla girls makes two boys kiss at the start of the film, which brought a discrete discomfort to the screening room I was seated in. By the time Nicholson's character shares a brief lesbian kiss with a reluctant fighter who's supposed to watch over her, later in the film, queerness is no longer a conceptual surprise hinting at meaningful registers beyond the narrative's surface, but a kind of desperate attempt to make the plot seem cryptic. Like The Cossacks, Landes's film is also about the impossibility of maintaining complete control over one's claim of masculinity, or power more generally. In moments of crisis, the line between predator and prey get very thin, and even the most well-armed warriors have a way of becoming disarmed, naked, and sentimental.
Yuriy Shylov's Projectionist follows the frailty of all flesh, hawkish accessory in hand or not, through the portrayal of the end of a film projectionist's 44-year tenure at one of Kiev's oldest movie theaters. It's an end that coincides with the crumbling of projectionist Valentin's own coughing body, and that of his bedridden mother. It turns out that the movie theater, too, is reaching its expiration point. Soon, its doors will close and its employees will be fired, and there's a sense throughout Shylov's documentary that analog cinema will be dealt a major blow with the theater's closure. What will become of the space? Perhaps a Reebok or a McDonald's. Perhaps a derelict muse for a Nikolaus Geyrhalter portrait of decay.
"You think you're loud, but in reality you can only hear yourself," Valentin tells his mother at one point. Her futile yelling of her son's name from her bed is one of the most haunting motifs in the film. An uttering for uttering's sake, a demand without expectations of an actual response, a mantra to remind oneself that one is, for now, still alive. Valentin has installed a whistle next to the bed, which he would actually be able to hear when she called if only she'd use it. But the mother mostly refuses to blow in the pragmatic apparatus, instead finding solace in the calling that won't be heard and, thus, will need to be repeated ad nauseam.
Projectionist can feel a bit aimless, but it's a welcome reminder of how the materiality of film, and thus its finitude, has something in common with our own—a kinship of frailty that the flawlessness of the digital image erases. Analog is the only technology that Valentin knows, whether he's sewing, as he's seen doing in the film, fixing a neighbor's straightening iron, or projecting old home videos on filthy kitchen tiles. There's pleasure to be found, for Valentin, not just in the stories, concepts, and metaphors of cinema, but in the very stuff that supports his craft, the paraphernalia of cinema that's bound to crack, to dry out, to turn to dust, to disappear forever: film stock, Movieolas, spools, and so forth. Cinema, we're reminded, is necessarily a tool of exposure, not just of the human condition in the face of death, but the human condition as an always gendered affair. It's a tool that's never settled, never comfortable, and never forgotten. "Men are cowards, didn't you know that?" is how Valentin puts it toward the end of Projectionist. In his world, one would know, by looking at the projector, at the very stuff of cinema, how much longer a film would last. The remainder of the film's "life" is perfectly real, perfectly tangible, and alive because it's in constant danger of being jammed up and torn by the very engine that ensured its running.
The Odessa International Film Festival runs from July 12—20.
Review: In Angels Are Made of Light, a Nation Rebuilds in the Ruins of War
The film is an intimate portrait of a nation terminally anxious about who will see fit to rule it next.2.5
Early in Angels Are Made of Light, a voice breaks through a sea of chatter in a classroom teeming with young boys: "I only know about the time since I was born. What's history?" The child goes on to explain that history isn't taught at the Daqiqi Balkhi high school in Kabul, Afghanistan. The question's poignance is self-evident, particularly because the building itself appears to have been disturbed by the city's recent trauma. The opening shot of James Longley's first film since Iraq in Fragments captures splotches of sunlight entering through holes in the school's exterior. Later, one of the building's walls collapses, and the children relocate to a location supported by American funding.
Though it inevitably gestures toward American occupation, Angels Are Made of Light is rare in its nearly undivided attention to civilian life in a region fundamentally altered by the U.S.'s so-called war on terror. Much of the film is composed of footage Longley shot at Daqiqi Balkhi from 2011 to 2014, with a particular focus on three brothers: Rostam, Sohrab, and Yaldash. The trio speak in voiceover throughout, and seem to define themselves by their relative interest in work and studying. Sohrab excels in school and doesn't see himself as fit for manual labor, while the older Rostam works closely with their father. Yaldash, the youngest, works at a tin shop and is anguished when his job interferes with his educational aspirations.
The documentary's classroom scenes exude a tone of controlled chaos, shot mostly at eye level with the students as they struggle to hear and be heard over the din of their classmates. (This is particularly true at their school's first location, where numerous classes are taught outside right next to one another.) The passage of time is marked by changes in seasons and the repetition of certain ceremonies, like a teacher appreciation day featuring musical performances by students. Concurrently, there's a Malickian quality to the near-constant voiceover of the brothers, whose concerns veer from the quotidian (earning money for the family, achieving in school) to the philosophical. Though their voices are profound, their limited perspective yields lengthy stretches of repetitive, meandering sentiments that are inflated by John Erik Kaada's sometimes intrusive score.
If the children aren't taught about their country's history as a site of hostile takeover by other countries, the Taliban, and groups of mujahideen, they have clearly internalized the trauma their homeland has endured. "Death is coming. Doomsday is coming. Everything is coming," one says. All seem to agree that learning about computers (none of which are seen in the documentary) is the only sure ticket to an escape or a successful career.
As Angels Are Made of Light proceeds, its chorus of narrative voices expands, adding a number of teachers (including the boys' mother) and another schoolboy who sells hot food at an open market. The teachers add flashes of historical context, which Longley plays over archival footage of Kabul and its ruling governments over the previous decades. Cuts between the city's past and its present are stark: The contemporary skyline is pockmarked with absent buildings that have been replaced by makeshift structures, and the city's center is now cluttered with billboards advertising mobile phones and alcohol produced in NATO countries. Eventually, Longley shows current political action in the streets, as mujahideen gather to flog themselves in public, other groups march for democracy, and all focus their attention on 2014 presidential election where Hamid Karzai democratically transfers power to his successor, Ashraf Ghani, as rumors swirl about the Americans' sway over the vote.
Longley's decision to avoid addressing Afghani politics until the latter half of his film is sound, perhaps a signal that his young characters are becoming more attuned to the corruption that pervades daily operations in their city, but Angels Are Made of Light lacks the sort of structural framework that can properly sustain its lack of plot and rather confusing array of editorialists speaking in voiceover. The closest the film comes to a guiding focus is the recurring image of a large, ghostly white blimp that looms over Kabul, a blot of menace as children and other citizens look to the sky in hope or prayer. Presumably an observational surveillance craft, the blimp is an ironic mirror of the documentarian's predicament—a totem that reminds everyone who sees it of the West's influence on their lives. Longley is aware that his camera serves a similar function, and it's admirable that he's able to achieve an intimate portrait of a nation terminally anxious about who will see fit to rule it next.
Director: James Longley Distributor: Grasshopper Film Running Time: 117 min Rating: NR Year: 2018
Review: Mike Wallace Is Here Honors a Legend by Arguing with Him
Much like its subject, Avi Belkin's documentary knows how to start an argument.3
Much like its subject, Mike Wallace Is Here knows how to start an argument. Avi Belkin's archival documentary begins with the legendary broadcaster (who died in 2012) interviewing Bill O'Reilly at the peak of the latter's influence as a Fox News blowhard. "That is not an interview, that's a lecture," Wallace moans before O'Reilly calls him a "dinosaur" and then really twists the knife: "You're the driving force behind my career," he tells Wallace. The exchange is riveting and, in some ways, inscrutable, as both of these TV personalities are so skilled at performance it can seem impossible to know if their dialogue is in earnest or some knowing fight among titans happy to march into battle.
Though it's almost certainly fair to say that Wallace set the stage for an era of ostentatious and increasingly dangerous "personality journalism," the breadth and quality of Wallace's work is rich enough to lend some tension to Belkin's exploration of the reporter as celebrity. Assembled with a propulsive momentum from dozens of televised interviews of and by Wallace, Mike Wallace Is Here portrays its subject as a self-made man, or, as his colleague Morley Safer calls him, "an invention." Born Myron Wallace, he adopted his broadcast name while working as a performer on radio and then television, a decision made with no shortage of anxiety due to Wallace's self-consciousness about his acne scars from childhood.
Ironically, Wallace's breakthrough as a broadcaster (after a series of acting and promotional gigs) came with a show that revolutionized the television interview through its intense lighting and use of invasive closeups. Clips from his show Night-Beat—the first of two Wallace-led interview programs sponsored by cigarette companies and cloaked in smoke—reveal that the media personality was already aware of the showmanship innate in his brand of journalism. He introduces the show by saying "My role is that of a reporter," and hones his skill for unsettling his guests with obnoxious editorial comments before asking questions. ("Many people hated your husband, and you," he once said to Eleanor Roosevelt.)
Belkin weaves Wallace's personal story into the documentary's parade of interviews in a manner that's unsurprisingly superficial, glossing over his many marriages, the death of his 19-year-old son, Peter, in a mountain-climbing accident in Greece in 1962 (Wallace cites the tragedy as a pivotal moment in the creation of 60 Minutes and the revival of his career), and a suicide attempt circa 1986. In interviews where Wallace is the subject—with the likes of Barbara Walters and other 60 Minutes colleagues—he's alternately open and evasive about these flashpoints in his life, often demonstrating the very behavior he has no patience for as an interviewer. Belkin shrewdly reveals Wallace's hypocrisy through editing, cutting to, for instance, a clip of Wallace grilling Larry King about his string of failed marriages.
Mike Wallace Is Here only suffers in its treatment of the broadcaster's time at 60 Minutes, dispensing with cleverly edited commentary in favor of a swift survey of the major news of the second half of the 20th century. These include necessary digressions, such as General William C. Westmoreland's libel suit against a CBS Reports special that Wallace anchored accusing the Army general of falsifying the American military's analysis of the strength of the Vietnamese army in order to keep the war in Vietnam going, and the tumultuous process of televising Wallace's interview with the tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (the subject of Michael Mann's The Insider). But this extensive highlight reel seems to forget that the documentary is scrutinizing Wallace as it's celebrating him.
At its nerviest, Mike Wallace Is Here uses the words of other celebrities to psychoanalyze Wallace. The film argues (and at times Wallace acknowledges) that his success is a product of his sense of shame, first about the way that he looked and then about the way that he behaved, loved, and parented. When Wallace is coy, Belkin effectively imagines a more honest response by cutting to someone else saying what he believes is true. After showing Wallace dancing around his lack of pride for a while, he cuts to Barbara Streisand talking about how "fear is the energy toward doing your best work." In the very same interview, she calls Wallace "a son of a bitch," and Mike Wallace Is Here is at its best when it seems to be in direct debate with this journalistic legend. The film honors Wallace best when it seems to be arguing with him.
Director: Avi Belkin Distributor: Magnolia Pictures Running Time: 94 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2019
Japan Cuts 2019: Demolition Girl, And Your Bird Can Sing, & Being Natural
Japan Cuts has established itself as the definitive Japanese film festival in the United States, thanks to the scope of its programming.
Japan Cuts has established itself as the definitive Japanese film festival in the United States, thanks to the scope of its programming. The 2019 edition is no exception, with over 30 events over 10 days, among them talks, screenings, and Q&A sessions with filmmakers as diverse as Macoto Tezka (The Legend of the Stardust Brothers) and Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo: The Iron Man), the latter of whom is this year's recipient of the festival's Cut Above award, which is given to a defining figure of Japan's cinema, and will be awarded before the East Coast premiere of his latest film, the samurai action-drama Killing.
Lest you think Japan Cuts is only a showcase for genre exercises, the festival abounds in works that explore the struggles that erupt from the Japanese capitalist system, and are felt in different ways across generations. Demolition Girl, Genta Matsugami's feature debut, is among the strongest of recent films to bluntly speak about class difference. It follows 17-year-old Cocoa (Aya Kitai), who, in the wake of her mother's death, has decided to forgo a university education and get a job. But as her shifts at a local amusement park only pay so much, she starts to perform in adult fetish videos that see her stomping on cans, trash, and balloons.
At his best, the film taps into the heightened experience of the poorest of the people living on the edge. For one, whenever Cocoa's father (Yota Kawase) has some money on hand, he yearns for instant satisfaction, spending it on expensive sushi. As for Cocoa, who's isolation is emphasized through shots that see her alone in corridors, or studying late at night in her room, it's almost as if she's destined to fail. And, indeed, when her school finds out about the adult videos she's been making, and just as she was beginning to realize her promise of going to a Tokyo university, her life falls apart. When confronted by friends about why she made the videos, all she can do is yell at them: "You wouldn't understand, you're rich, you wouldn't know. Will you pay for my expenses?" In this moment, Kitai's triumph is making her character's wail against a cruel economic system feel as if it could be our own.
And Your Bird Can Sing, directed by Sho Miyake, is focused on two late-twentysomething slackers: the unnamed protagonist (Tasuku Emoto) and his roommate, Shizo (Himizu and Parasyte star Shōta Sometani). Both work crappy jobs, and they try to stay sane through copious amounts of drinking and pointed mockery of the economically fraught lot they've been handed in life. The protagonist's attitude could be summed up by one early sequence, when he meets a co-worker and convinces her to go on a date, only to later miss the date, fall asleep, wake up, and decide to spend his night drinking with Shizo.
A love triangle between the roomies and one of the protagonist's co-workers, Sachiko (Shizuka Ishibashi), brings some solace to the men's lives. There's redundancy to the way that Miyake frames these characters, showing their faces up close rather than the screens they peer at as they text each other, but his wide shots speak to how they all work to fill empty spaces. Miyake's style is relaxed, almost as if his camera has absorbed everyone's slacker vibes. Especially of note is a sequence that lingers at length on Sachiko paying for groceries while the two men in her life try to hold their laughter, saying to each other that she's going to regret her purchase. Miyake's gaze is empathetic, and there's truth in his understanding that you have to sometimes laugh at your underprivilege in order to prevent yourself from screaming.
More tonally varied, and operating on a larger scale, director Tadashi Nagayama's satirical Being Natural broaches the subject of gentrification as it immerses viewers in the daily routines of a middle-aged man, Taka (Yota Kawase), who lives in a small town in the countryside of Japan and works with his cousin, Mitsuaki (Shoichiro Tanigawa), and their friend, Sho (Tadahiro Tsuru), at a fishpond inherited from his deceased uncle. Everything starts to derail for the three men when a family arrives on the scene from Tokyo with the hopes of opening up an old-style café that will only sell natural and locally grown products. At the start of the film, the still-grieving Taka doesn't fully understand what he has until someone tries to take it away from him, and by the end, a spectacular show of violence will see him finally realizing the nature of the economic system he's trapped within.
The film's style is initially sweet and mellow, with the softest of songs dotting the soundtrack. Taka plays bongos, and the sounds of the instrument are also heard throughout. At first, this sound creates a calm atmosphere that's in sync with the bright cinematography. But as the film introduces a series of sinister twists, those bongos come to take on an almost murderous bent. The sounds of the instrument point to the encroachment of a capitalist economy on a place relatively untouched by it. In its final minutes, Being Natural takes a turn toward the supernatural, and it's satisfying for giving the main characters the reprisal they want, but also poignant for the way it has us understand that it only occurs in the realm of fantasy. The film, in the end, acknowledges that it's difficult to go against the system, and that to stay sane means finding a little pocket of happiness in the world and enjoying it while it lasts.
Japan Cuts runs from July 19—28.
Review: David Crosby: Remember My Name Sees a Legend Carrying On
The film captures a man haunted by his past mistakes and nearly certain that he doesn't have the time left to begin making up for them.2.5
One gets the sense when hearing David Cosby perform that, like many naturally gifted vocalists, he was born to express himself through song, and given his tumultuous personal and professional life, the act of singing may be the only means through which Crosby can briefly maintain an equilibrium amid so much chaos. Womanizing, drug abuse, and band breakups are certainly par for the course for countless musicians, especially those who came up in the late 1960s, but Crosby is an extreme case even by those standards. It's difficult to think of another living musician more strongly and uniformly despised by his former bandmates and collaborators and, aside from Keith Richards, another whose continued survival is more shocking in light of what he's put his body through.
Aided by Cameron Crowe, who, as a Rolling Stone writer, interviewed Crosby various times and is on hand here to again pick the musician's brain, A.J. Eaton's David Crosby: Remember My Name opens with a fairly standard music-doc overview that traces Crosby's productive early years with the Byrds and his ascent to fame with both iterations of Crosby, Stills & Nash. There's no effort made to hide Crosby's thorny personality or the chaos he brought to each of these early projects, but Eaton and Crowe seem initially content to butter Crosby up, joining him in waxing rhapsodic about his widespread influence and lasting importance as a musician.
The hagiographic tone slowly fades as the film moves past the perfunctory career retrospective and begins delving into the nitty-gritty details of Crosby's bumpy road to stardom and his rapid descent into disgrace, spurred on by his decades-long battle with drug addiction. While Crosby often proves a tough nut to crack, rarely willing to linger too long on the painful moments of a life eventful enough to fill several documentaries, Crowe and Eaton eventually disarm him enough to tap into the frustrated, damaged, and regretful man hiding all those years beneath his patented walrus mustache and wispy, long hair. As Crosby discusses the petulance and rage he often unfairly directed at fellow bandmates and his mistreatment of many of his girlfriends, several of whom he got hooked on cocaine and heroin, one can sense not only the depth of his remorse and anguish, but also the resigned helplessness that little can be done in his twilight years to repair the many bridges he's permanently scorched.
Throughout Remember My Name, archival interviews with Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young make it abundantly clear that Crosby has alienated each of his former bandmates to such a degree that none of them will talk to him again. Only former Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn appears in a newly recorded interview for the film, and he does so presumably only to describe how "insufferable" Crosby was as a fellow bandmate.
At nearly 80 years old, Crosby is happily married and in the midst of a creative resurgence with a string of acclaimed solo albums, but even these small joys are mitigated by his admission that he's only touring, and thus often away from his wife, because he needs the money. During a leisurely drive with Crowe, Crosby visits his old stomping grounds in Laurel Canyon and the Sunset Strip and recounts those halcyon days when he lived with Joni Mitchell and sang his first song with Nash and Stills. But the magic of these locales has long since faded, leaving Crosby in an uncharacteristically introspective state and all too aware of how close he is to the end of his life. As he wistfully tells Crowe that he already has eight stents in his heart and will likely die in the next couple of years, the film captures a man haunted by his past mistakes and nearly certain that he doesn't have the time left to begin making up for them.
Director: A.J. Eaton Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics Running Time: 95 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Cassandro, the Exotico! Shoulders the Strange Burden of Empathy
Marie Losier's empathy, if not love, for Cassandro hinders her from examining his wounds with much depth.2.5
Queerness isn't just about the relationship between bodies: the ones we desire, the ones that will never desire us back, the ones we wished we possessed. It's also very much a matter of cloth, color, and adornment. Many a pop-cultural figure has manifested this queer sartorial drama, from Liberace to David Bowie, from Leigh Bowery to early Lady Gaga, from Pepper LaBeija to Shangela Laquifa Wadley. And with her new documentary, Cassandro, the Exotico!, Marie Losier introduces us to a lesser-known, yet just as subversive, purveyor of that drama: Mexican luchador Cassandro, a Universal Wrestling Association winner and former junkie with a penchant for gaudy garments.
Ridiculous stage wear is, of course, fundamentally associated with professional wrestling, but Cassandro's textile-informed camp isn't compensated by violent machismo or a heterosexist mise-en-scène. Instead, this exótico is unapologetic about the seamless kinship between his queerness and that of the clothes he wears. And the continuum between queer sexuality and fashion places him simultaneously as the exceptional gay figure in a supposedly macho sport, the Mexican lucha libre, and as the element that outs wrestling writ large as an already queer affair. Cassandro, né Saúl Armendáriz, is, then, a ready-made cinematic character, bearing the contradictions of his world from the inside—a world where, much like ours, heterosexual male violence is performed through patently homoerotic means.
Although skin, bones, and fabric are all—to various degrees of visible and invisible discomfort—stitched into the gendered body, the film is precisely concerned with the moment when these connections come apart at the seams. After decades of fighting for a living, Cassandro's body is giving out. This is a moment of desperation for someone who turned to wrestling as something between religion and therapy. We see him literally hanging his flamboyant costumes to dry on a clotheslines as he speaks about retirement, about how quitting would appease his body but demolish his ego. As the film progresses, his dislocated chin, limited hand movements, and multiple head concussions will seem like the belated embodiment, if not the psychosomatic scream, of a childhood marked by molestation and sexual abuse. A history of spectacular violence catching up to years of a much less visible brutality.
Cassandro, the Exotico! is largely observational, with occasional interventions from Losier. It wouldn't be fair to call the film hagiographic, but the director's empathy, if not love, for her subject hinders her from examining Cassandro's wounds with much depth. When faced with Cassandro's misery, Losier's response is to console him as if wanting to change the subject. She cuts one moment of candidness short, when Cassandro is addressing his fears via Skype, by telling him, "I wish I could give you a kiss." It would have served the documentary better had Losier granted her subject the possibility to work through his pain in front of the camera.
Visually, the documentary, which is shot on 16mm film stock, recalls canonical diaristic works that expose people's troublesome feelings in raw and unbridled fashion (think Jonas Mekas, Sadie Benning, and Su Friedrich). Which makes the juxtaposition of Losier's visual language and her reluctance to examine Cassandro's frailties feel particularly displeasing. Perhaps afraid that scrutiny would shatter Cassandro, Losier fails to realize that it's precisely through such shattering that redemption can emerge, maybe even reparation.
Director: Marie Losier Screenwriter: Marie Losier, Antoine Barraud Distributor: Film Movement Running Time: 73 min Rating: NR Year: 2018
Interview: Marc Maron on Sword of Truth, WTF, and the Possibility of Change
Maron discusses modern media discourse, the communicative bridge linking his acting with his podcast, and how he likes to be directed.
Marc Maron is presently enjoying one of the most unlikely and inspiring success stories in Hollywood. Once known as a bitter "comic's comic" who was eclipsed in success by contemporaries such as Louis C.K. and Jon Stewart, Maron has been reborn into a poster boy for empathy, starting with his blockbuster podcast, "WTF," and continuing with roles in the hit television series Maron, Easy, and GLOW. With each role, Maron has rapidly evolved from a "comic who acts" into a first-rate character actor capable of subtly altering his charisma to fit a variety of oddballs who, like himself, struggle with self-doubt while attempting to walk a straight and sober path.
Now, with Sword of Truth, Maron makes his debut as a cinematic lead, playing Mel, a pawnshop owner who ends up on a road trip that stirs long-festering feelings of estrangement, which parallels the forms of isolation gripping a variety of other characters, and which the film's director, Lynn Shelton, links to the reactionary myths and politics currently gripping this country. The role marks another career high point for Maron, who talked to me last week about the communicative bridge linking his acting with his podcast, how he likes to be directed, and the "mind-fuckery" currently gripping modern media discourse.
Given that you've previously worked with Lynn Shelton on Maron and GLOW, did you two have a kind of collaborative shorthand going into Sword of Trust?
Well, I'm generally filled with anxiety and resistance. I don't know if there's a shorthand, but Lynn knows how to get the best out of me and works with me pretty well. I like directors who're hands on with me and guide me.
Do you like to receive a lot of explicit direction, or is your process more intuitive?
Well, I do what I do. I definitely welcome suggestions, because I'm certainly not going to think of all the possibilities of a scene. Most of my choices are not necessarily correct. I usually come in pretty intense and hot, and there's subtleties that can be coaxed out with minor tweaks. And I like working like that. I wouldn't have the confidence to assume that my take is the "right" one necessarily.
There's a stillness to you in Sword of Trust that I'm not sure we've seen before.
Your weight as a performer is really felt here, especially in that scene when Mel first see Lynn's character in his shop. I love how you enter the room from the closet, and how one can feel the emotion bubbling up in Mel.
Thanks, man. I think this is a heavy-hearted guy who's sort of surrendered to his lot in life. He also has a certain amount invested in his own. I don't know if it's heartache, but he's definitely a broken dude who's making the best of whatever time he has left. I don't know if the other characters are really like that. They are always in forward motion.
You also inform Mel's appraising of objects with all these lovely emotional textures. He's not only talking about a sword.
The guitar too. As I act more, I try to take some of the space that you're talking about. With acting I feel that I've been learning on the job in a way, and over time I've started to explore different possibilities with owning whatever my space is, whether it's a movie or on stage. Certainly, over decades of doing stand-up, I've figured out my space on a stage, but being on a set and pacing yourself and taking the time to engage with what's around you I think makes a lot of difference in how a performance comes off. It's about being present in an environment.
Has your ascending acting career changed how you relate to actors on your podcast?
Over the last few years, since I've started acting more, I've had more actors on. I tend to try to pull a nice acting class out of that. I think a lot of what my guests say makes sense. Once again, a lot of acting is about listening and being present. In another time in my life, I saw certain actors as mythic. Now that I've talked to so many of them, I've started to realize, not in a disappointing way, that…what's the word I want? That these are people doing a job, all in their own way. Once you get on set with people, you realize, "Well, that's how they're approaching this job," and when you get into the ring or the scene, you're in it.
That inside knowledge gives "WTF" an edge too. For many interviewers, like myself, art-making is basically theory. But you have your feet on the ground so to speak.
I think that happens over time. I don't think I ever set out to interview. I've framed what happens on my podcast as conversations, and they either go somewhere or they don't. There's a few points I may get hung up on, and there are places I go to fairly regularly in interviews, but I generally don't see these conversations as question-and-answer situations. I don't have any expectations really other than to feel a connection or to sort of be enlightened. I think those of you who have a job to interview, for an outlet, for the content and the word count and everything else, might have more restrictions. I don't have to answer to anybody and I don't know what I'm looking for half the time.
Yeah, and a challenge I've found with interviews is that one doesn't always entirely know what is and isn't in bounds, which can lead to an impersonal vibe. By contrast, your podcast has such an intimate layer throughout.
You have to feel that stuff out, you know I'm not necessarily intuitive about that. I'm not really in the business of sandbagging anybody.
Usually you get somebody comfortable and things come out. If people are comfortable and engaged it doesn't really matter what they're talking about. Audiences will say, "Oh, wow, I didn't know that." These conversations don't require information, but an emotional connection. I'm so happy about that, especially considering the never-ending torrent of garbage that we have to move through every day.
I think about politics. Politics online are rarely civil, but when you get someone in person, and start slowly, and are willing to have a conversation, you can normally get farther than you might expect.
Online culture isn't civil and there's a momentum to everything that's based on mind-fuckery. I know for myself—as somebody who was relatively disinterested and uninformed about the functions of government and why politics and leadership make a difference—that people are perfectly willing to volunteer their brains to these strange flashpoint reactors that trigger them emotionally. People live by these black-and-white decisions. It's not good. We need to consider what we really know and how we know it and what we're telling other people.
People are so empowered by garbage information that's being related in a relatively shallow way, which doesn't take into consideration the influence and context of the rest of our lives. It's sort of a disaster. I try to stay away from that stuff in terms of the conversations that I'm having. I'm trying to deal with something more human and experiential. Most people are regurgitating talking points on both sides without thinking of how someone feels and how to affect change. I got an interview with Geena Davis [who stars in the new season of GLOW] coming up, about her work with her foundation and her work in this documentary about women in show business. It's called This Changes Everything. I tell you man, when someone's that personally invested in something they believe in, and it's righteous, and they lay it out for you and it makes sense, that's what heartens my belief in this possibility for change.
To change gears a bit, is it cathartic for you, as someone who's long been in recovery, to play characters who're either reformed or have drug issues?
Yeah, sure. Most obviously there's the last season of Maron, where my character has a relapse, which frankly didn't happen in real life. When you really understand the nature of addiction, and you've seen it from the inside, and know the powerlessness and the struggle to live a life that's not in the throes of it—I mean, it's such a common struggle. And what's amazing to me is how many people don't find a way out of that or don't seek help. Or are ashamed of it or don't know how to get the help. I never set out to do this, but I'm thrilled and humbled by the effect my work has on people who're isolated by this sickness. It's really one of the more satisfying results of the podcast: how much mail I get from people who're struggling and who want advice, or who feel less alone from what I've said. The great thing about recovery, and about playing these parts, is that it gives you a context that's very specific—a way to legitimately help people that can change their entire lives.
American Demons: Martin Bell's Streetwise and Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell
Bell proves uncannily adept at capturing moments that seem to encapsulate a subject's entire emotional temperature.
Decades after its original release, Martin Bell's Streetwise remains a boldly empathetic work of vérité portraiture. Throughout the 1984 documentary, Bell, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and journalist Cheryl McCall follow a motley group of kids on the streets of Seattle as they panhandle, dig food out of dumpsters, and prostitute themselves to much older men. These scenes are accompanied by voiceovers from the young subjects, who describe their actions with a heartbreaking casualness that communicates two almost contradictory meanings: that they're seasoned hustlers, having bypassed childhood for an everyday form of hell, and that they're desperate to be seen precisely as said hustlers. To show emotion is to be vulnerable, and these subjects can't afford to be seen as weak, yet the filmmakers capture more here than the street children may have suspected. Streetwise is charged by a deep, subterranean yearning to be loved, or even merely felt.
A plot hasn't been imposed on Streetwise, as the audience is allowed to feel the numbing monotony of life on the fringes. People swing in and out of prison, crash in and out of secret hovels, most notably an abandoned hotel, and practice their grifts, while struggling with overlapping tides of addiction and depression. We also learn, startlingly, that not all these children are homeless. Streetwise's most famous subject, Erin Blackwell, a.k.a. "Tiny," lives with her mother, a waitress and alcoholic who rationalizes her daughter's prostitution as a phase and who seems to be impressed with Erin's ability to make a few hundred dollars on a good day. It's little wonder that Erin captured and continued to command the filmmakers' attention for decades after filming Streetwise ended. She has a squinty yet expressive glare that suggests both a deep reservoir of pain as well as intense fierceness.
Bell, Mark, and McCall take Erin and her cohorts, most vividly a skinny boy with potential tonsillitis named DeWayne Pomeroy, at face value. Streetwise is pointedly devoid of the sermonizing that might allow audiences to comfortably distance themselves from these people, regarding them simply as elements of a civics lesson. The film forces us to confront the obviousness of these children's circumstances, as people walk by them just as we all walk by the homeless on a daily basis. This sense of culpability informs Streetwise with an uncomfortable texture that's familiar to documentaries concerned with poor or mentally and emotionally challenged people, so you may wonder how the filmmakers shot what we're seeing without stepping in and helping these people. Particularly disturbing is when Erin, 13 years old at the start of filming, is seen getting into a car with an old man who's obviously a john.
If Streetwise was just a portrait of damnation and delusion, it would be an important document. But the film is also haunting for Bell, Mark, and McCall's attention to the transcendence than can be felt even in such extreme circumstances. After Erin has gotten into trouble, DeWayne tells her of how he will rescue her, and his attempt at gallantry is poignant as well as devastating. When DeWayne visits his father in prison, the old man lectures the boy about keeping his smoking down and laying off the hard drugs, commanding DeWayne to roll up his shirt sleeves for a track-mark inspection. As brutally sad as this confrontation is, one feels this father's love and wonders if DeWayne, clearly a sensitive and lonely boy, can feel it too. Retrospectively, it hardly matters: DeWayne hung himself not long after this visit.
Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell, a 2016 sequel to Streetwise that's been in the works for thirtysomething years, offers a variety of unmooring contrasts from its predecessor. Erin is no longer the slim spitfire of Streetwise, but an overweight fortysomething mother of 10 who understandably appears to always be on the verge of exhaustion, and who takes methadone in an attempt to keep her drug addictions at bay while wrangling with her children's own skirmishes with the law. Looking at Erin now, one sees the scars and weariness left by a hard life, part of which was documented by Streetwise, and one can implicitly feel Erin's need for atonement. Though Erin's gotten off the streets, living in a large home with her partner, Will, and several of her children, the streets have never left her.
Formally, Tiny is much different from Streetwise. The 1984 film abounds in seamy noises and textures, with roving camerawork that seems to be uncovering a new lurid discovery every few seconds; it feels palpably dangerous, and probably inspired films such as Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho and Larry's Clark's Kids. Set predominantly in Erin's home, Tiny is slower and more polished, reflecting the (comparative) stability that Erin has achieved since appearing in Streetwise. Tiny also has a fancier structure than Streetwise, with a framing device in which Erin watches footage of herself over the years, including unused outtakes from the first film, with Mary Ellen Mark. An autumnal tone seeps into the new film, which offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the unending legacies of crime and addiction.
As in Streetwise, Bell proves uncannily adept at capturing moments that seem to encapsulate a subject's entire emotional temperature. There are frequent shots in Tiny of Erin sleeping with a little dog close to her face, which suggest rare moments of repose for a woman who's used to running her chaotic family like a hostage negotiator. Erin frequently calls the cops on her own children, especially the headstrong teenager Rayshon, which Bell unforgettably rhymes with footage of a younger Erin visiting two of her children in foster care. One of the foster care children, Keanna, is now a mother herself, and resents Erin for abandoning her and for continuing to struggle with drug use.
Which is to say that Tiny is as charged with turmoil as Streetwise, and Bell proves equally capable here of rendering full relationships with only a few images or seconds of running time. As in Streetwise, our sympathies are rarely overtly directed, as Tiny is somehow on every character's contradictory wavelength at once, illustrating how difficult understanding can be to achieve, most notably in the face of disaster. Though it runs a trim 87 minutes, Tiny offers an epic and piercing portrait of a large biracial family that's plagued by essentially every demon known to American society. Erin escaped the streets only to fashion a home that's rife with the very issues that drove her away from her own mother. Like most people, regardless of social stature, Erin is stuck in the temporal loop of her own inherent nature.
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text:
The preacher yelled from the pulpit. His voice resounded in the sanctuary as church members echoed him with their own shouts of �Praise the Lord� and raised their hands for healing.
This was the scene filmed at Clay-Barnette Funeral Home in Shelby last weekend.
Lisa Barnes, director of the independent film �Misguided Trust,� brought the crew to Shelby for the revival scene. After a few hours, the filming was done. �That�s a wrap,� someone said. The filming is expected to be completed fully by Sept. 7, as The Star previously reported.
The Star talked to two of the main stars of the film and asked them what they thought about filming in Cleveland County. The Star also talked to area residents who performed as extras in the scene.
Here's what they said:
Joel Gross, character of the Rev. Jones
�Being around here and being around the people has helped me a great deal. We�re staying up in Bat Cave and it�s just peaceful. We went out in Shelby and we sang a little karaoke in Sasser�s in South Carolina.�
Sarah Elizabeth Grace, character of Elsie May
�Well my character is someone who�s been born and raised in western North Carolina. I was born and raised in the Midwest. Being here has allowed me to very quickly become a local. We went to Red Bridges Barbecue and I got some sweet tea and some peach cobbler.�
Eric Bester, owner of Clay Barnette Funeral Home, extra
�It�s been very enjoyable. We had an opportunity to provide the funeral scene and revival scene. It�s been kind of nice to see the behind-the-scenes work. The whole staff of Clay Barnette has been fortunate to be in the movie.�
Becca Hood, Kings Mountain resident and extra
�I was in the funeral scene as well. I like the experience; I like the behind-the-scenes view of stuff you don�t get to see in the finished project.�
Julie Walker, Forest City resident and extra
�This was my first scene. I very much enjoyed it and I made a few friends. I did research on the film and I really was drawn into the story line about it. I loved the story line.�
Jeannie Murtagh, Asheville resident and extra
�I came because we�re friends with Hunter (actor who plays one of the main characters). I had a blast. I let my creative juices flow.�
About �Misguided Trust�
-The film is a thriller and suspense film about a young, psychotic mother who returns from a mental hospital to seek revenge against a preacher who adopted her son.
-Barnes, the director, will be entering it into the Sundance Film Festival and other independent film festivals.
-It was filmed in the Broad River area, rural areas of Cleveland and Rutherford counties, and in western North Carolina.
-See the trailer for the film on the Facebook page: www.facebook.com/MisguidedTrust
-Contact Lisa Barnes at firstname.lastname@example.com

subset: commoncrawl


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Raw Footage: Milwaukee Cop Beating Handcuffed Man In The Back Of A Police Car Who Needed To Use The Bathroom! + Deputy Gets 18 Months In Prison For Punching This Man In The Face!
"A former deputy will spend a year and a half behind bars, for beating a man in the back of a squad car."
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By LISA CAPOBIANCO
Southington High School inducted four local individuals from different walks of life into its 2013 Wall of Honor Monday night.
State Representatives Dave Zoni, Rob Sampson, and Al Adinolfi, presented plaques to honorees Rosemary and Jim Champagne, Karl Pytlik, and Christopher Jones—all graduates of Southington High School. The Wall of Honor committee chose the inductees based on four criteria: humanitarian work, community service, lifetime achievement or significant awards received.
"I think this is the most wonderful thing we do," said Bob Brown, the chairman of the Wall of Honor Committee. "It is what makes me feel good as a teacher to see the people that have done amazing things in life."
After the inductees received their own plaque to cherish at home, Brown presented each plaque that will appear on the all outside the auditorium, reading aloud the inductees' contributions to the community as well as to other parts of the world.
Karl Pytlik, an environmental activist in the Virgin Islands, worked in California on the Clean Air Act, volunteered with the National Park Service in the Virgin Islands, running education programs and providing funds for museums. He also helped start The Caribbean Oceanic Restoration and Education Foundation (CORE), which runs a program to control the population of lionfish, an invasive species. Named the Virgin Island's Person of the Year in 2011, Pytlik also leads a campaign to stop hunting endangered sea turtles.
Pytlik said he hopes his work will serve as an inspiration to all students of Southington.
"It means so much," Pytlik said, referring to his plaque. "It is things like this that make all my work worth it."
Christopher Jones, a biomedical research chemist, also hopes his work will inspire students to make a difference. Named co-author in over 20 scientific publications, Jones designed and synthesized antibiotics for the livestock to research treatments in diseases like arthritis.
"It is nice to have body of work that spans for two-and-half decades recognized," Jones said. "All it takes is a little focus and motivation."
Rosemary and Jim Champagne, who remain active in local community service projects including Relay for Life, felt overjoyed to be on the Wall of Honor. A veteran of the U.S. Army, who also became a national sales manager for the automobile industry, Jim has served as the festival coordinator for the Apple Harvest Festival. He also owns and operates Champagne Financial Services. His wife, Rosemary, a breast cancer survivor for over 20 years, has served as a chairperson for the Southington Relay for Life. She even wrote a book about receiving a stem cell transplant to treat her cancer, and has donated hair for "Wigs for Kids," a look-good, feel-good program for cancer patients.
"I feel very happy and honored," Rosemary said.
Four inducted onto Wall of Honor
By LISA CAPOBIANCO


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We've entered the phase of the season — roughly March 31 to September 28, give or take stray illusory weeks devoted to the reflexive heightening of fleeting false hope — where we're less concerned about winning baseball games than simply getting them over so another season of not winning baseball games can commence (but just you wait for the year after!). Now that we're in the reality lap…again…anything goes where the product the Mets put on the field is concerned. It's May on the calendar but August for solution-groping. For example, why wait for the cusp of mathematical elimination to bring up the guy it is assumed can hit but nobody thinks can field to take on the most daunting defensive challenge on the diamond when we can do it now? Hell, why not? It's not like anybody named Andrelton, Ozzie or Ordoñez was blocking his path.
When it feels like nobody is going anywhere, anything should go and does go, save for most of the runners who reach base. They go nowhere. They are a microcosm of their team year after year.
On Friday night at Citi Field, where a pair of capable lineups would have spun a dizzying 8-7 merry-go-round of action from 19 hits, 16 walks, 2 hit batsmen and 1 error, home plate remained mostly undisturbed. The Mets left 15 runners on base during 11 innings when they scored 2 runs. Those bases must be pretty nice places to kick back and just chill, for the Phillies were reluctant to leave first, second and third, too: 17 runners on in the same 11 innings, except they scored 3 runs.
The Philadelphia scoring sum proved slightly more effective than that of the True New Yorkers in the area of results, but nobody particularly outexecuted anybody else. Nevertheless, at the conclusion of the four hours and thirty-nine minutes in which each club participated — it would be hard to say "played," for there was little playful about this foggy, sloggy morass of inertia — the Phillies emerged as the victors, 3-2, appropriately forging a tie with the Mets for the worst record in their shared division.
Neither team appeared good enough to claim it is better than the other. Or anybody. Despite the presence on the field of a handful of worthy professionals, the agglomeration of Mets and Phillies we witnessed engage in a gripping staring contest for an average of 12 minutes and 41 seconds per half-inning claimed dual possession of fourth place in the National League East on merit.
Encouragingly, the Phillies, who not long ago loomed as the unreachable star of our sector, seem as unremarkable as us now. Their immediate prospects appear as slight as their payroll commitment is hefty: $180 million, or more than twice as much as the Mets are distributing. It is indisputable that we are getting more whimper for our buck. But it should be said that the $8 million they're paying Marlon Byrd is getting earned. Byrd, who was replaced by Curtis Granderson ($15 million), is outperforming Curtis Granderson and most Mets. Last night he fought off a very good eleventh-inning pitch from Carlos Torres and turned it into the go-ahead double that signaled this endless game would, in fact, end.
That was contingent on the Mets not scoring a matching run in the bottom of the eleventh, a contingency that did not occur. It was already a fifteen-inning affair in form if not substance. These two teams had participated enough for one night. Or week.
The bright spot of the long night's journey into loss— besides Jeurys Familia looking extremely sharp and Keith Hernandez (sighmoan) sounding hilariously disgusted — was Wilmer Flores manning shortstop and living to tell about it. Flores replaced Omar Quintanilla on the roster but his real leapfrog target was Ruben Tejada. If Wilmer could suit up, stand convincingly between David Wright and Daniel Murphy and pick up most of the balls hit within 18 inches of either side of him, he'd be hailed as the greatest positional upgrade since Lincoln took over for Buchanan.
After one game, Wilmer Flores seems a provisional improvement over whatever we were getting from the indifferently conceived science fair experiment known as Rumar Tejntanilla. He hit the ball hard. He recorded two hits. He didn't range particularly well to his left or his right but he didn't embarrass himself, which, after you listened to all the assurances that all Tejada had to be was "adequate," could be interpreted as a triumph of the Metropolitan spirit.
The suiting up may have been the kid's only problem, given the throw from Travis d'Arnaud that bounced up and pinged Wilmer in the ol' Elio Chacons. As Flores writhed in pain, Keith earnestly invoked "that song from The Wizard of Oz," presumably the one that starts "Ding-Dong!" (though "If I Only Had A Brain" might have sufficed as well).
Fortunately, Flores was not dead after absorbing that wicked one-hopper and he hung in there the rest of the game. Everybody hung in there the rest of the game. It was a game designed for hanging in there, at least when your favorite team was batting. Endurance replaced offense on both sides. After a while, it didn't much matter who won. It mattered that it ended.


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Dunn homers twice to help White Sox down Blue Jays
Chicago, IL – Adam Dunn went 4-for-4 with two homers and five RBI to help the Chicago White Sox past the Toronto Blue Jays, 10-6, in the opener of a three-game set at U.S. Cellular Field.
Alejandro De Aza had two hits and drove in a pair of runs, while Alexei Ramirez, Hector Gimenez and Paul Konerko added one RBI apiece for the White Sox, winners in three straight games.
Nate Jones (2-4) worked 1 2/3 scoreless innings of relief to pick up the win. Starter Dylan Axelrod was tagged for six runs on eight hits over four-plus innings.
Jose Bautista clubbed a pair of homers and drove in five and Colby Rasmus added a solo shot for the Blue Jays, who have dropped their last two games.
R.A. Dickey (5-8) surrendered seven runs on 10 hits over five innings to absorb the loss.
Bautista crushed a two-run homer in the first inning to give the Blue Jays an early lead.
The White Sox answered with three runs in the second. Gimenez scored Dunn with a sacrifice fly. De Aza then singled home Jeff Keppinger and Gordon Beckham to put the Sox on top.
During the top of the third inning a dense fog rolled onto the field and the game was delayed 70 minutes in the home half.
Once play resumed, Dunn launched a solo shot to center to make it 4-2.
"It was damp. The moisture really got to me with the knuckleball. It was leaving my hand good, but just wasn't doing anything at the plate," Dickey said of the adverse conditions.
Bautista clobbered his second homer of the contest, a three-run shot to left, in the fourth to put Toronto ahead 5-4, but Dunn crushed a three-run blast of his own in the home half for his second four-bagger of the night to give Chicago a 7-5 edge.
The White Sox added some breathing room after pushing three runs across in the eighth inning. Beckham came around on Emilio Bonifacio's fielding error, and after Alex Rios struck out, Konerko and Dunn followed with back-to-back RBI singles to account for the final margin.
"Tonight was good. I felt good, but it feels better to get that win," Dunn said.
Game Notes
Chicago is 3-2 against Toronto this season ... Chicago reliever Jesse Crain has made 26 consecutive scoreless appearances, the second-longest streak in White Sox history. J.J. Putz made 27 scoreless appearances in 2010 ... Dunn (422) is four home runs shy of tying Billy Williams for 46th place on the all- time list ... Chien-Ming Wang, who signed with the Blue Jays on Friday, will start on Tuesday.


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GIB Dispo-Cockpit Controlling (DCC)Maximizing service levels while minimizing inventory and operating costs is a delicate balancing act. Balancing service levels and inventory levels requires product segmentation and replenishment planning algorithms to fully optimize supply chain performance within SAP.
GIB Dispo-Cockpit Forecasting (DCF)Accurate demand planning is critical for meeting customer commitments at the lowest total cost. Your business requires robust, intelligent forecast procedures that can automatically detect, predict, and measure the varied buying habits of your customers. Inventory is a proxy for information. Improve your information, lower your inventory, and be more profitable.
GIB Dispo-Cockpit Operations (DCO)Standard SAP MRP functions are adequate, but lack a central interface for a planner to quickly assess and prioritize the material requirements for that day.
GIB Dispo-Cockpit Planning (DCP)Production planning and scheduling is a fluid, dynamic process. Schedules are always being adjusted to meet changing customer requirements, changing priorities and shifting capacities. Managing schedules and resources in this dynamic environment requires flexible, real-time and easy-to-use tools within your core SAP system.
it.approvalMany companies still handle document approval processes manually. This frequently leads to a slow approval processes, with total lack of overview of documents in process. Furthermore the manual steps often leads to lack of compliance to company rules, and lost documents during approval process.it.approval is a solution for approval of business documents, which optimizes the approval process, and gives end users an intuitive user interface with exactly the information needed for the approval.
it.archive for SAPSAP, with its business logik, is the leading systems for your enterprise. All your business relevant objects and dependencies are managed within the system. The important functional area of digital archiving is not supported by the SAP system itself. Thus SAP provides a certified archiving interface, with which documents, data and transactional data can be stored externally. We enhance your SAP system with ECM (Enterprise Content Management) with our solution, which supports dif-ferent archiving and document management scenarios along the whole transactional process.
it.captureMany scanning systems cannot process invoices received in recent PDF versions, which leads to the use of a great deal of time on error analysis and processing. Everyday users often find it difficult to visually recognise received invoices in scanning systems. it.capture processes all invoices in their original colours, which saves on countless reprocessing of invoices, because users avoid converted formats, illegible invoices and manual typing and checking.
it.configure - Dependency WorkbenchThe VC Dependency-Workbench from itelligence it.configure solutions simplifies and extends the maintenance of dependencies and variant tables. All dependencies can be maintained within one central Transaction.
it.dematIn France as of January 2014, a new legal requirement (ie. ''arrêté du 29 juillet 2013 ») imposes French firms to submit accounting document records for the closed fiscal year in a dematerialized format, the so-called FEC ("Fichier d'Ecritures Comptables", Article L47 A I). Non compliance can be fined with 0,5% of yearly revenues.
it.EWMWith it.EWM you will be able to implement faster the Extended Warehouse Management solution of SAP. In this accelerator itelligence has pre configured processes and packaged the required documentation to safeguard your warehouse management project.
it.Financials Upload ProgramBusinesses like yours are too often dependent on IT departments for routine changes to upload files, such as adding and deleting fields.
it.HCM TransformerThe it.HCM Transformer simplifies copying, comparing and anonymization of personnel data. This leads to higher quality processes and minimizes the project costs, while you can also act faster and more secure in the conflict area of human resources. Additionally, this solution enables an automatic comparison of payroll accounting and time analysis.
it.mds (Master Data Simplified)With master data it is said that everybody needs it, but nobody wants to handle it. Too often master data rules and procedures are opaque, leading to unstructured, complex data distribution and consolidation. Data maintenance frequently lacks ownership or is reliant on key employees. Unfortunately poor master data quality leads to costly error-prone processes and reporting.it.mds is all about making things simpler and at the same time providing a better overview. With it.mds errors are minimized and quality can be maximized time-effectively.
it.mobile CustomerFocus ProThe "it.mobile CustomerFocus Pro" App enables the mobile use of your existing SAP CRM system - efficiently and on the way to Customers. At any time relevant information can be requested on an iPad device, and results of a customer meeting are recorded. The tracking of all relevant Activities and Opportunities at Customer level gets simple from now on.
it.mobile InfoCollector AppThis application provides an easy to use interface to capture leads and contacts in one central location. Companies have the ability to pre-configure forms that act as templates to consistently collect information and ensure an easy transfer of structured data into existing backend systems. Additional features including offline capabilities, photo integration, and timed appearance of forms ensure that users are provided with everything they need to capture important information on contacts and leads anytime, anywhere.
it.mobile Sales-Kit AppSales materials and SAP data appear up-to-date and attractive on the iPad. If a salesperson or manager is preparing for a meeting, he or she can use the it.mobile SalesKit App to access the latest media files and crucial SAP reports. The backend content manager provides an interface to the SAP system where the media data is structured and maintained. This is also where user permissions and roles are defined. Every time the app is launched on the device, a request is sent to the SAP system to receive any updates. Companies can be assured that the information transferred during this request is secure and protected.
it.password managerit.password manager enables users to request a password reset on-premise, remote or using any mobile device.
it.vendor portalVendor portal is a web based application which has multiple display and transaction functionality. Purchase Orders in different stages like new, goods Receipt etc can be seen by vendor. Invoices at different stages of processing can be monitored. Both short term and long term requirements from customer can be viewed by vendor to ensure better on-time supply. Certain Quality Management functionalities like inspection lot creation and processing quality notification task is possible from the portal itself. Vendors can send PO confirmations and they can even create Inbound Delivery from the portal.
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it.x-EDIconnectit.x-EDIconnect ensures the integration of your customers and suppliers to exchange electronic messages (EDI). Therefore it.x-EDIconnect provides the technical basis for the typical channels of communication (eg. OFTP ISDN or Telebox / X.400) and supports industry-standard data formats (eg. VDA or EDIFACT). Moreover it.x-EDIconnect harmonizes with any ERP system.
it.x-press - shipping process within SAPDoes your company work with courier, express and parcel service providers (CEP) and Freight forwarders? it.x-press allows you to integrate your business processes with your CEP service providers and forwarding agencies within your SAP system in a simple and effectiv way. This can include calculating freight charges, selecting service providers, assigning and tracking shipments, as well as checking incoming invoices.
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Material Short Text GenerationOften, the Material Short Text is not supposed to be arbitrary in the master data. This solutions automatically derives the material short text from a number of classification characteristics.
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VAT registration number checkThe Add-On enables the check of VAT registration numbers through the MIAS service of the EU, the Federal Tax Authorities (BzSt), as well as the Federal Finance Authorities (BMF, FinanzOnline).


text: Our inspiring story of the day concerns Sensei Keiko Fukuda, who was just promoted to 10th degree black belt, judo's highest level. The 98-year-old overcame gender discrimination that kept her at a lower rank than less skilled men for decades. Fukuda still teaches judo and is now one of only three people in the world to reach the rank of 10th dan. [Via The Daily What]


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Welcome to My Personal Page
Personal Progress:
Please Sponsor Me ...
I hope you'll support my efforts to help homeless pets at the SPCA of Wake County by sponsoring me in the 19th annual K9-3K Dog Walk & Woofstock.
This event is an annual tradition that brings animal lovers together for a fun walk and day of festivities with a very important purpose: Helping the SPCA care for thousands of lost, abandoned, abused and unwanted pets, and giving them a second chance at happiness in a forever home.
This is a cause I believe in and a mission that is close to my heart. I am asking for your help in my effort to save lives. If animals have brought you as much joy as they've given me, this is your opportunity to show some love to homeless pets and change their lives for the better. Thank you so much for helping me make a difference to homeless pets. I appreciate your support!
Giving a gift is easy! Click the round "Donate To My Walk Goal" button to help me reach my fundraising goal. A gift of any size is greatly appreciated ... and needed.
Why you and I can make such a big impact ...
The SPCA of Wake County is supported by donors, like me and you, who care about animals in need. The SPCA receives no funding from any national charity, plus they do not get any government funding. The SPCA of Wake County is the Triangle's largest private no-kill, managed admission animal organization. Every single animal they save is because of people like us who care about homeless pets. Let's make a difference together!


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Last week's expanded marketing report pushed the ground work for this week, as we launch into October with moves toward social network marketing and infographic marketing ! Come on along with our latest marketing update :
* Study: The state of social marketing — vision, purpose, value drive a new era of digital engagement
* Content Marketing Sweetens the Mix [Infographic]
* Design Emails With a Mobile Mindset: Five Tips
* If content is king, what would be queen?
* Measuring PR: Indicators of quality
* 6 AP Style rules for press releases
* Go Boldly Where Your Members Are
... and more
Study: The state of social marketing — vision, purpose, value drive a new era of digital engagement
In an era when media is largely created and broadcast by the few to the many, social media emerged to facilitate the co-creation of media in addition to creating it. While difficult to trace its origins, the philosophy of social media dates back to the mid-1990s. It wasn't until the mid-2000s however, that businesses would encounter the idea of a new medium where brand democracy prevailed over brand dictatorship.
Suddenly the voice of the customer took on an entirely new meaning and the promise of customer-centricity and engagement was thrust into the spotlight. But after all these years, businesses remain confounded. Even though most are experimenting with social media, how it improves relationships while impacting important business metrics is persistently elusive.
Full story : LinkedIn
Content Marketing Sweetens the Mix [Infographic]
How popular has branded content marketing become this year?
In a recent article, Direct Marketing News reported that 66% of brands and 65% of agencies consider branded content marketing to be very important or most important to their overall marketing efforts. http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2013/10939/content-marketing-sweetens-the-mix-infographic
Full story : marketingprofs.com
Design Emails With a Mobile Mindset: Five Tips
With nearly half of emails now opened on mobile devices, are companies designing emails with a mobile mindset?
Most companies have only a basic mobile optimization strategy, if any at all, so here are five tips for taking your email to the small screen.
Careful, this one has a pop-up ad splash screen and other stalker links and screen spam
Full story : www.marketingprofs.com
If content is king, what would be queen?
Marketing of any kind builds on content. Good marketing builds on different content for different people. But with a huge influx of different articles, is content a fad? Or is it a linchpin in the best marketing programs?
Ask the companies who are hiring reporters to produce content to get readers to their websites. The answer is, content is king. However, the King has to have a capable queen—in this case, she's "distribution," to build a kingdom.
Full story : American Express OPEN Forum
Measuring PR: Indicators of quality
Author Bana Jobe writes --
I got my start in PR during what I'll call a cusp. Seasoned folks still followed "tried and true" methods, but warmed up to new ideas, emerging technologies, and, generally, the nontraditional. A few years later, they'd call it the "digital disruption," but back then—it was an unnamed, but profound, change in business.
Full story : Bana Jobe for Ragan's PR Daily
6 AP Style rules for press releases
There's more to writing a press release than you might think. Not only is there a format to follow (headline, summary, date, content, section about the company), but a set of standard procedures to adhere to -- AP Style.
Read on to learn how to make sure your press releases follow commonly-held stylistic procedures.
Careful, this one has a pop-up ad splash screen and other stalker links and screen spam
Full story : Ragan's PR Daily
Go Boldly Where Your Members Are
Sharing its own strong results, the Masons of California makes the case for associations promoting publications across multiple channels.
Members constantly list your organization's publication as one of their top benefits, yet you are struggling to get your publication known. While this may be true for many organizations, what may not be well known is that you can do something about it: Cross-market across multiple channels.
Full story : By Christine L. Avery
More: Media and Marketing Updates
And that wraps it for this edition of Marketing Update from DTG. Don't forget ... we encourage you to share your discoveries from the world of publishing, media, online and creative. Just give me a shout!
And, thanks for reading
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