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Review: Cold Fish
Doggedly determined to capture the midnight-madness audience, the gorehounds, and the fanatics of extreme cult cinema.0.0
"I'm no kibbitzer," Elisha Cook says in The Big Sleep. Those words ring loudly whenever I see something as proudly grotesque as Cold Fish, so doggedly determined to capture the midnight-madness audience, the gorehounds, and the fanatics of extreme cult cinema—a niche market that, like any other, demands quality catering. If you're looking for a movie where a dying woman cuddles with the mostly dismembered cadaver of her husband, if you catch yourself getting nostalgic for Takasha Miike's Visitor Q, if your taste in Japanese cinema falls more on the side of Imamura/Suzuki/Oshima than Ozu/Naruse/Mizogushi, read no further: Make haste to see Cold Fish, because it was made for you and you alone. Don't let me talk you out of it—after all, I'm no kibbitzer.
For the rest, provided you aren't sickened by literal blood and guts, casual misogyny scored to ironically cheerful music, Cold Fish may yet prove a chore—not because of the off-putting images, but because its extremism does nothing to interrogate or mitigate the banality of the story, which is a hybrid of the millionth send-up of the repressed/impotent Japanese patriarch and the "bad buddy comedy" that Barry Levinson held up as exhausted and bankrupt with 2004's Envy.
The film begins with a little misdirection as a woman shops for groceries, apparently in a deliriously apathetic state, her grab-whatever motions scored to marching music. Sono constructs the opening, which then shows the same woman making dinner (in a seemingly equally haphazard manner) for her family, to suggest that the film is about a tamped-down housewife who will, at some point, cut loose and explode. While she has a short and dense list of reasons to unleash her repressed passions (her stepdaughter either ignores or abuses her, depending on the circumstances; she has to hide her smoking habit; and her sexuality remains untended due to her husband's inhibitions), the first act reorients us to focus instead on the husband, the ineffectual proprietor of an exotic fish shop.
After the daughter is hauled in by a grocery store dick for shoplifting, the Envy template seems to take over as the Jack Black (character actor Denden) to our protagonist's Ben Stiller (Mitsuru Fukikoshi) arrives to extract the family from the threat of an embarrassing prosecution. In short order, their benefactor reveals himself not only to be a rival fish shop owner, but forcefully adopts the trio with a mix of coercion, brusque charm, and eager-beaver insistence. The daughter starts working for him, the wife becomes his mistress, and the Ferrari-driving, trophy wife-flaunting maniac, resorting to extreme measures to get his way in a business deal, hijacks the husband as his new business partner and accessory after the fact.
Murder in film is a funny thing. It's both underrated as an element of film that destabilizes the story (it so ruptures the narrative fabric that it skews the perspective of every other idea and emotion), and severely overrated as a screenwriter's balm, a cheap alibi for refusing to deal with thorny, complex issues of social, psychological, and interpersonal dynamics. It's when the husband begins to process the mess he's stepped in, and tries to reorient his life to accommodate (and reassemble) his obliterated innocence, that Cold Fish starts to feel cheap and patchwork as an unfolding drama. The satire of the weak-willed Japanese salaryman has been so thoroughly annihilated that every additional second Sono spends pretending it still matters, as bodies continue to hit the floor, feels less Grand Guignol and more disingenuous, the work of a filmmaker who's painted himself into the corner with congealed blood. The final atrocities feel like just another run around the block.
Cast: Makoto Ashikawa, Denden, Mitsuru Fukikoshi, Megumi Kagurazaka, Hikari Kajiwara, Asuka Kurosawa, Masaki Miura Director: Sion Sono Screenwriter: Sion Sono, Yoshiki Takahashi Distributor: Bloody Disgusting Selects Running Time: 144 min Rating: R Year: 2010 Buy: Video
Jeonju IFF 2019: Coincoin and the Extra-Humans, L. Cohen, & Introduzione all'oscuro
These are three enigmatic, challenging, and weird works of art by filmmakers pushing at the boundaries of the cinematic form.
Shortly after arriving in Jeonju, the mid-sized Korean city about 200 kilometers south of Seoul that serves as the site of the Jeonju International Film Festival, I pulled my bedraggled, jet-lagged body over to the guest center to pick up my press credentials. As I made my way through the carnivalesque open-air city block known as Jeonju Cinema Town, I found myself, to my surprise, in the midst of a rather peculiar, almost surreal scenario as a bunch of white- and black-suited stormtroopers marched in lockstep toward me, weapons at the ready, flanking none other than the Grand Imperial Poobah himself, Darth Vader.
The group maneuvered around me without incident, eager to pose for selfies with the crowd of locals assembled in the area, but after over 20 hours of travel, the encounter took on a vaguely sinister air, as if the forces of Hollywood monoculture had been dispatched to this relatively remote cinephile retreat to ensure that no one here got the wrong idea: Have fun with your cute little art films, but remember who really wields the power in the world of cinema.
I suppose these are the sorts of strange inclinations that strike you when your body's circadian rhythms have been shaken up like a snow globe, but, despite the presence of the Walt Disney Company as one of the festival's premier sponsors, the films I saw—personal, challenging, at times exhilarating work from all across the world—couldn't have seemed further away from the market-tested franchises that clog American cineplexes. Having said that, it's with some irony that one of the first films I took in at Jeonju IFF was in fact a sequel—albeit one whose eccentric sense of humor and repetitive, unresolved narrative mean it's never going to be mistaken for the latest from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The sequel in question is Coincoin and the Extra-Humans, Bruno Dumont's follow-up to Li'l Quinquin. One of the great left turns in the history of auteurism, Dumont's 2014 miniseries signaled his transition from austere Bressonian miserablism to a singular brand of deadpan grotesquerie that gleefully explodes the thin line between the clever and the stupid. Dumont doesn't vary his style too much for the sequel, as it's another bizarre sunlit mystery set in the windswept countryside of Dumont's native Nord-Pas-de-Calais. And Dumont has reassembled the same cast of non-professional local oddballs led by Bernard Pruvost as Commandant Van der Weyden, a twitchy, hapless police detective investigating matters way beyond his depths.
Dumont, though, still finds ways to mess with his audience's expectations, starting with the baffling and completely inexplicable change of the title character's name. If the earlier film felt like Dumont's riff on popular international crime dramas like Broadchurch and The Killing, Coincoin turns out to be his spin on The X-Files, a sci-fi pod-people procedural featuring a mysterious black goo from outer space that inhabits its victims and forces them to give birth to their own uncanny clones. Like many stories about body-snatching, the series is a satire—here on provincial racism, the poor treatment of African migrants, and the rise of the French far right—but Dumont isn't simply interested in topical point-scoring against Marine Le Pen, the anti-immigrant politician who represents Nord-Pas-de-Calais.
Rather, with its ambling, directionless narrative and lackadaisical long shots that perversely undercut the screenplay's gags, Coincoin evokes a deep-rooted spirit of reactionary malaise, of people whose lives are hopelessly circumscribed by their own fears and prejudices. Dumont rigorously resists developing his plot or deepening his characters: They're all trapped in an absurd loop, doomed to endlessly say the same things and reenact the same jokes.
Van der Weyden sums up that mentality in a single line: "Progress isn't inevitable." There's a group of black men who periodically appear throughout the film only to be consistently and summarily dismissed in a fit of racist panic. Each time, we expect the film to create some meaningful interaction between the white townsfolk and these migrants, and each time we're rebuffed—that is, until a final musical explosion of kumbaya-like camaraderie that's somehow goofy, moving, tedious, and invigorating all at the same time.
Dumont is one of the few artists in cinema willing to risk exhausting his audience to induce a particular effect, but he's not the only one, as demonstrated by James Benning's L. Cohen, a 45-minute static shot of a seemingly unremarkable field with a mountain visible in the distance. It's an elegantly composed frame, reminiscent of an American Regionalist painting and whose centrally located peak perhaps coyly refers to the Paramount logo.
After 20 minutes, even the most hardened cinephiles are bound to be squirming in their seat, at which point Benning reveals his remarkable trump card: As the sky quickly darkens and blackness falls over the Earth, we realize that we've been watching the leadup to a total solar eclipse. It's a moment of quiet astonishment and confusion for anyone who doesn't know it's coming, bringing us close to the feeling a caveman might've had when the same event occurred. With typical mathematical precision, Benning has placed the eclipse at the exact center of the film, allowing us to explore the subtle shadows that precede and follow it.
The film, however, isn't just some academic structuralist exercise, as it's also a meditation on death, a fact highlighted by the next startling moment: the inclusion of Leonard Cohen's "Love Itself" on the soundtrack, a stark divergence from the ominous drone (identified by Benning during his festival Q&A as the hum of airplanes flying overhead) that fills the rest of the film. This song and the dedication of the film to the recently deceased Cohen add a deeper layer of meaning to Benning's precisely calibrated study of light and time.
L. Cohen is in essence a meditation on temporality. All things are fleeting, even grand interplanetary ballets. Considering the brief alignment of these celestial bodies puts one in a cosmic mood and calls to mind a cryptic, haunting line from a different Cohen song, "Stories of the Street": "We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky."
One could also find the specter of death looming over Introduzione all'oscuro, an expressionistic tribute to director Gastón Solnicki's good friend, Hans Hurch, the recently departed director of the Viennale, the Vienna International Film Festival. Described by the director not as a film about Hurch, but a film for him, Introduzione all'oscuro dispenses with biography entirely, instead evoking its subject's buoyant, ragtag spirit in an almost subliminal fashion: through music, film, and the city of Vienna. Hurch "appears" in the film primarily through his letters and through his voice, recorded by Solnicki when he provided notes on one of the director's previous films. Solnicki does appear on screen: a comically lonely figure visiting some of Hurch's favorite Viennese haunts—such as the Café Engländer, from which he would periodically steal cups—on a journey that drolly recalls Holly Martins's investigation into the apparent death of his pal Harry Lime in The Third Man.
Like Solnicki's Kékszakállú before it, Introduzione all'oscuro is what might be called "slideshow cinema"—a procession of taut, piquant compositions whose relationship to one another isn't precisely clear but which, when taken together, create an indelible impression of a highly specific milieu. Structured more like a piece of avant-garde music than a narrative work or traditional documentary, the film has a hypnotic yet often dissonant allure. It pulls us into a strange liminal zone where Hurch seems to be simultaneously present and absent, haunting the film like a benevolent spirit. Solnicki simply has one of the best eyes in cinema today, and it's the pungency of his images which makes the film such an endlessly compelling experience, even when the reasons behind Solnicki's individual choices remain obscure.
Abstruseness, though, is no crime. In fact, the greatest pleasures of Jeonju IFF were to be found in grappling with "difficult" films such as Coincoin and the Extra-Humans, L. Cohen, and Introduzione all'oscuro: enigmatic, challenging, and even downright weird works of art made by filmmakers pushing at the boundaries of the cinematic form.
The Jeonju International Film Festival ran from May 2—11.
Review: As Teen Comedy, Booksmart Is Sweet and Nasty in Fine Balance
It's an R-rated teen comedy that proves that you can center girls' experiences without sacrificing grossness.3
An uncharitable way of describing Olivia Wilde's feature directorial debut, Booksmart, is as a gender-flipped version of Superbad. Like Greg Mottola's 2007 film, it concerns a pair of best friends who've spent their high school years as outsiders but, at the end of their senior year, decide to attend the biggest, coolest graduation party imaginable. As in Superbad, getting to the party devolves into an almost picaresque gauntlet through suburban nightlife, consisting of comical encounters with outlandish characters (both films even feature a "creepy car guy"). Booksmart and Superbad also share a ribald, R-rated sense of humor and a sex scene interrupted by vomit—even the same casting director (the venerable Allison Jones).
For all that, Wilde's film is less a derivative of Mottola's teen comedy than a corrective to it. Its exaggerated universe is less mean-spirited than the one depicted in Superbad, where so much of the humor depended on Jonah Hill loudly proclaiming his character's misogyny. Booksmart isn't above getting laughs from sex jokes that land somewhere between honest and outrageous—there's a recurring bit about Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) masturbating with her stuffed panda doll—but it does show that teenage conversations about sex can be funny without being demeaning. And its belief in its main characters as more than just stand-ins for the most distorted beliefs that virginal high schoolers have about sex gives the film a fuller, more satisfying arc.
Amy and her best friend, Molly (Beanie Feldstein), are their elite Valley High School's A-type-personality do-gooders, well-meaning in their ambition and their wokeness, but with streaks of haughtiness and self-righteousness. Beanie is class president, the kind of kid who pushes the school principal (Jason Sudeikis) to arrange a budget meeting with the juniors on the last day of class. In contrast to the brashly assertive Molly, Amy is meek, barely able to eke out syllables when talking to her crush, Ryan (Victoria Ruesga), but she's also intensely woke, adorning her denim jacket with feminist-slogan patches and her car with "Elizabeth Warren 2020" bumper stickers. The pair are so close that they're often mistaken for being a couple (Amy has been out since the 10th grade), and they definitely don't party.
As school is letting out, Molly discovers that her and Amy's monk-like approach to high school life has been for naught. Although the two pride themselves on respectively getting into Yale and Columbia, it seems that virtually all of their classmates have a similarly propitious future lined up. Even the horny goofball Theo (Eduardo Franco), who repeated seventh grade three times, was recruited for a six-figure job with Google. Molly adopts partying as her new project, dragging the reluctant Amy, all the more anxious because Ryan will be at the party, along with her. The problem is that, not being a part of their school's social scene, they have no idea where the party actually is, and limited means of figuring it out.
The obliviously indefatigable Molly is a star-making role for Feldstein, who keeps let her highly dynamic character—Molly can be both very rigid and very foolhardy—from feeling inconsistent, or leading to broad caricature. As the quieter Amy, Devers's role is mostly reactive, but, in the tumultuous climax, she supplies the film's most poignant and relatable moments. As the omnipresent Gigi, a troubled party girl who inexplicably appears at each of the girls' wayward stops on their journey to the party, Billie Lourd channels a chaotic energy, becoming the film's strung-out jester. Lourd is just part of an altogether impressive ensemble that also includes Jessica Williams as the teacher who loves Amy and Molly perhaps a bit too much, and Will Forte and Lisa Kudrow as Amy's super-Christian, super-supportive parents.
For the most part sharply written, and tighter and more consistently funny than the fragmented improv-style Superbad, Booksmart nevertheless has a couple of stretches that don't quite land. There's a claymated ayahuasca-tripping sequence that neither suits the rest of the film nor is followed up on in any way by the narrative. And the film's conclusion is more than a little formally messy, with Wilde relying on a too-rapid succession of non-diegetic pop songs as emotional accents and to fast-forward the plot—at one crucial moment even drowning out the dialogue. But despite these small missteps, Booksmart feels like an innovation, an R-rated teen comedy that proves that you can center girls' experiences without sacrificing grossness, and that you can be gross without being too mean.
Cast: Kaitlyn Dever, Beanie Feldstein, Jessica Williams, Jason Sudeikis, Billie Lourd, Diana Silvers, Mason Gooding, Skyler Gisondo, Noah Galvin, Eduardo Franco, Lisa Kudrow, Will Forte, Mike O'Brien Director: Olivia Wilde Screenwriter: Olivia Wilde Katie Silberman, Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins Distributor: Annapurna Pictures Running Time: 102 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Terminator: Dark Fate Official Trailer: Going Back to the Well with Sarah Connor
Linda Hamilton at least makes a killer impression as Sarah visits fiery justice upon Gabriel Luna's terminator.
Today, Paramount dropped the trailer for the sixth entry in the Terminator series, Terminator: Dark Fate, which promises to deliver…more of the same? With this film, Deadpool director Tim Miller aims to give the series a reboot: by pretending that none of the films that came after Terminator 2: Judgement Day ever existed (sorry, Rise of the Machines fans), maybe even Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. "Welcome to the day after judgment day," reads the poster, promising the badass return of Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor. And on that front, the film looks to deliver, as Hamilton certainly makes a killer impression as Sarah visits fiery justice upon Gabriel Luna's terminator.
But based on everything else that's on display throughout the trailer, we're worried that there's not anything new that a film in this series stands to bring to the table besides running and gunning, with the occasional wink thrown in for good measure. Cast in point: Mackenzie Davis stars as Grace, an "enhanced human" who looks to fill the hanger-on role to Connor that Edward Furlong's John Connor did to Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800, now apparently living in woodsy retirement, and at the ready to give sage advice. In short, we're not impressed, and that also holds true of that cover of Björk's "Hunter" by some zombie man singer.
Watch the official trailer below:
Paramount Pictures will release Terminator Dark Fate on November 1.
Review: Woodstock Offers a New Look at the Three Days that Defined a Generation
Throughout, the era-defining yet problem-plagued music festival astounds in large part for all the disasters that didn't occur.3
According to Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation, the 1969 Woodstock festival seemed fated to fail. But a rare convergence of good luck, good intentions, and good vibes somehow snapped into place and crystallized over a few days in August the aspirations of a counterculture about to hit its peak. The festival's planners, mostly promoters and music-industry pros, talk off-camera throughout this gloriously gleeful documentary about their somewhat spur-of-the-moment concept in a purposefully overlapping mosaic that makes it difficult to determine who's saying what. Their original idea was simply a big concert that would celebrate the opening of a recording studio in the bucolic artist community of Woodstock, NY and take advantage of the musicians living nearby.
That conceit ballooned into a sprawling three-day cultural amoeba of feel-good psychedelia billed as "An Aquarian Exposition" to be held in a bucolic setting. It would ideally seem, according to one organizer, "like visiting another world." Creating that gateway to paradise, however, hit one snag after another. Conservative fears about an invasion of hippies led to much anger among locals and triggered permitting issues. Original desired stars like Bob Dylan, the Doors, and the Rolling Stones all passed on the vent. Months' worth of construction at the original site in Wallkill, NY had to be scrapped at the last minute.
But Woodstock shows also how both lucky circumstances and in-depth planning saved the day. The lineup swelled with a killer roster of acts whom David Crosby defines simply as "everybody we thought was cool": Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, Creedence Clearwater, Janis Joplin, and so on. According to writer Bob Spitz, interest grew as the organizers put the word out through the underground press, and though their top estimates of attendance topped out at 150,000, the eventual total was closer to a potentially unmanageable 400,000. Seemingly foolhardy ideas like hiring Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm commune to handle what they termed "security" and what Wavy defined as trying to "spread grooviness," helped the increasingly massive enterprise maintain an appealingly mellow tone. Then, a Republican dairy farmer named Max Yasgur, who just happened to have a visually gorgeous sweep of land shaped like a natural amphitheater, agreed to host the festival.
Just about everyone interviewed in Barak Goodman and Jamilia Ephron's documentary still marvels a half-century on at the scope and tranquility of what happened, though the potential for disaster provides some dramatic grit to the narrative. Much of the festival's harmoniousnes was a result of on-the-spot empathetic resourcefulness, from Hog Farm's thrown-together Sunday-morning "breakfast in bed" and "freak-out" tents for people on bad acid trips to the previously resentful locals who spontaneously emptied their pantries to feed the long-haired kids who had been tromping through their front yards. The crowds were soothed by the reassuring voice of the festival announcer, whose "we"-focused addresses over the PA system strengthened the communal spirit, which is then echoed in the film's starry-eyed reminiscences of interviewees who all sound as though they wish they could go back.
Woodstock cannot hope to supplant Michael Wadleigh's more symphonic and experiential 1970 documentary. But conversely, its tighter, narrower focus on narrative and context ultimately tells a bigger story at roughly half the length. Co-director Goodman has shown in some of his darker work for PBS's American Experience, like his episode about the Oklahoma City bombing, a knack for building suspense. He deploys that skill here marvelously when showing the sea of humanity converging on Yasgur's farm, balancing a fear of impending disaster (short supplies, last-minute glitches, a crowd many times larger than the highest estimates) with the dawning realization that things might just work out.
That tightrope-walking drama is maintained through the actual concert portion of the movie. The musical highs, Hendrix's squalling "Star-Spangled Banner" and Richie Haven's raucous two-hour jam (filling the gap while helicopters ferried musicians in over the blocked roads), play out while the vast crowd contends with food shortages and an unexpected rainstorm. But even though the attendees rushed past the mostly unbuilt fencing and by default created what organizer John Roberts here terms "the world's greatest three-day freebie," he and his partners appear now happier about the instant community that metamorphosed in the mud than the fact that as a business venture the concert was "in deep shit."
Woodstock hits many of the expected notes about the concert's place in the nation's cultural history. But it's refreshingly less self-satisfied than awestruck at the simple beauty of what happened at the Woodstock festival and the utopian example it provided to the world. Though unmentioned here, the disastrous music festival that occurred four months later at Altamont Speedway, in the hills of Northern California's East Bay, where the organizers' callous indifference to advance planning led to chaos and multiple deaths, shows just how rare the event that occurred in Bethel across three days back in August '69 remains to this day.
Director: Barak Goodman, Jamila Ephron Distributor: PBS Distribution Running Time: 90 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir Is a Knotty Trip Down Memory Lane
Its stylistic fluctuations are a sign of a filmmaker really wrestling with how she became the woman and artist she is today.3.5
True to the mission of its protagonist, a well-meaning student filmmaker working on a thesis feature about a community foreign to her, writer-director Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir is engaged in a running dialogue with itself around the notion of how—and how not—to make a personal narrative. Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is a London-based, upper-middle-class young woman coming of age in Margaret Thatcher's England who feels a moral imperative to transpose her own experiences onto a fictional story set in working-class Sunderland, and she's given ongoing opportunities in her film workshops to try to articulate why that is. Hogg, who based the character on her own early experiences as an artist, views Julie's trajectory tenderly but through the lens of a greater maturity, dotting the young woman's path with interlocutors who challenge and redirect her inclinations. Gradually, Julie's certitude seems to fall out from under her, transforming Hogg's film in the process.
Pivotal among these forces is Anthony (Tom Burke), a spectacularly smug older man with ambiguous professional and personal affiliations who becomes inexorably drawn to Julie, and she to him. When he first appears on screen across a table from Julie at a café, Hogg frames the scene in the kind of spacious, sophisticated master shot that defined her 2013 film Exhibition, snapping The Souvenir out of the close-up-heavy, fly-on-the-wall aesthetic with which it opens. The shift in style registers the exhilarating impact Anthony has on Julie, who is up to that point seen as a wallflower at college parties, taking photos and rolling a Bolex in the corner while bouncing in and out of conversations. Sizing up Julie's film project with suave dismissiveness, Anthony suggests that she might heed the influence of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who were able to express personal emotions free of the constraints of realism, and later proposes that "it's not enough to be sincere or authentic."
Julie takes such counseling in stride even when it comes from her casually condescending professors (also men), giving her a headstrong resilience that Swinton-Byrne beautifully underplays. But Julie's toughness doesn't equate to stubborn pride, and soon The Souvenir turns away from its portrait of early filmmaking ambition and toward the knotty dynamics of Anthony and Julie's strengthening relationship—itself modeled off a fling in Hogg's past. The director orchestrates this formal shapeshift with sly subtlety, first introducing the couple's scenes together as elliptical diversions from the central storyline, then gradually lengthening them until the sequences set in and around Julie's film school take a backseat entirely. Now sharing an apartment, Anthony and Julie go through the growing pains of coexistence—the former posits a "Wall of Jericho" made of pillows in a reference to It Happened One Night to solve his discomfort in bed—but nonetheless find a strange harmony in their dissonant personalities, with his brutal honesty charming her and her placidity disarming him.
In Anthony's case, however, this apparent personality yardstick proves misleading, as it turns out that he's frank about everything but his own life. Talk of a vague government job creates an impression of a posh background belied by Anthony and Julie's trip to visit his parents, and later, an offhand remark made by one of Anthony's friends when he's in the bathroom yields the startling revelation—cued by spatially disorienting mirror shots and the gentle use of Dutch angles—that Julie's boyfriend is a heroin addict. Hogg omits the scene where Julie confronts Anthony about this revelation, but the mark it leaves on their relationship is implicitly, delicately apparent in every part of The Souvenir moving forward. The neatly organized, white-walled apartment where much of the action takes place becomes charged with tension, not only from the threat of dissident bombing that percolates outside its windows (a reality contemporaneous to the film's early-'80s setting), but also from Anthony's frequent, unexplained comings and goings, which starkly contrast Julie's more fixed physicality as she spends her time hunched over a typewriter.
The Souvenir flirts with a few conventional movie premises—the doomed romance, the spiral into the hell of drug addiction, the pursuit of self-actualization—without ever fully engaging one, which doesn't indicate an uncertainty on Hogg's part so much as a supreme confidence in the intricacies of her own material. Likely to some viewers' dismay, Julie's story isn't one that ever comes to hinge on an a-ha moment, a sudden realization that she's strayed from her artistic passion in her entanglement with a toxic partner. Rather, Hogg evokes both the seductive appeal of an irrational romance and the less sexy but nonetheless potent comfort of falling into the role of nurturer, a discipline shown in a few touching scenes to be inherited by Julie from her mother (Tilda Swinton). What's more, it can't be said that Anthony's influence is purely deleterious, as his bouts of real vulnerability, carried off with a persuasive display of wounded pride by Burke, repeatedly push Julie toward greater sensitivity and awareness.
Perhaps ambivalent herself to Anthony's recommendation that Julie seek inspiration from Powell and Pressburger's work, Hogg shoots in a grainy, underlit 16mm palette that has less to do with period fetishism than with draining the sparkle from Julie's privileged upbringing. The Souvenir is shot from a measured distance, often with the camera in rooms adjacent to the actors so that walls and other objects populate the foreground, and the resulting sense is of being simultaneously immersed in the spaces of Hogg's early adulthood and at an intellectual remove from them, a fusion seemingly reflective of the director's own mixed emotions in revisiting this story. In this case, however, that quality of fluctuation isn't a deficiency but a virtue, a sign of a filmmaker really wrestling with how she became the woman and artist she is today, and the mark of a film that's beholden to no recipe but its own.
Cast: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton, Jack McMullen, Frankie Wilson, Richard Ayoade, Jaygann Ayeh Director: Joanna Hogg Screenwriter: Joanna Hogg Distributor: A24 Running Time: 119 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Aladdin Is a Magic Corporate Ride to Nowhere Special
Guy Ritchie's live-action remake is content to trace the original's narrative beats with perfunctory indifference.1
Compared to a few other recent live-action remakes of Disney's animated films, which at least attempted to bring striking story wrinkles or an auteurist perspective to bear on their interpretations, Guy Ritchie's Aladdin is a remake in the most literal sense. Much of the film's first act traces the narrative beats of the 1992 animated feature, and in shot-for-shot fashion: Thieving street rat Aladdin (Mena Massoud) meets and charms the princess of his native Agrabah, Jasmine (Naomi Scott), and ultimately runs afoul of scheming grand vizier Jafar (Marwan Kenzari), before obtaining a magic lamp containing a genie (Will Smith) who has the power to transform the young pauper into a prince worthy of Jasmine's station.
The steadfastness with which every aspect of the original is replicated by this new Aladdin makes Ritchie's film a grueling example of the streaming-era notion of art as content. Because there's no chemistry between Massoud and Scott, the legitimacy of Aladdin and Jasmine's flirtations is largely sold on the basis of the viewer's preexisting knowledge that these two will become a couple. Elsewhere, the relationship between Jafar and the Sultan (Navid Negahban) is an even paler imitation. In the original, Jafar's viciousness was at least partially driven by his hatred of the Sultan, who issued inane commands to his grand vizier in all sorts of parodically infantile and buffoonish of ways. Here, though, the Sultan is a negligible figure, neither callous nor especially influential, thus robbing his subordinate of a compelling motive. The Jafar of this film is evil simply because he's been designated as the story's big bad.
If the dogged faithfulness of Ritchie's film to the original proves consistently stultifying, it's the most noticeable deviations that ultimately damn the remake. In an attempt to give Jasmine something to do other than be the object of men's affections, Ritchie and co-writer John August blend the character's traditional frustrations at being trapped behind palace walls with a newfound resentment over how her capacity to rule as sultan is thwarted by traditional gender roles. Nonetheless, her desires to lead are bluntly articulated and reflective of a broader tendency among the film's characters to express their awareness of their own repression by tilting their heads back and staring off into the distance as they speak extemporaneously about their dreams. Poor Scott is also burdened with the film's big new song, "Speechless," an instantly dated empowerment anthem that suggests the sonic equivalent of that old woman's botched restoration of the Ecce Homo fresco in Borja, Spain.
The film does come somewhat to life during its musical numbers. Though these sequences are marked by simplistic and unengaging choreography, they don't quell the verve of Howard Ashman and Tim Rice's original songs. Less successful is Smith, who, unable to match the intensity of Robin Williams's performance as the Genie in the original film, leans into his signature drawling sarcasm to bring his spin on the character to life, effectively draining the Genie of everything that made him so memorably larger than life in the first place. Even when portraying some of the Genie's more antic behavior, Smith mostly takes the path of least resistance, injecting just enough energy into his performance to hint at Williams's memorable take on the character but without seeming as if he's actually working up a sweat.
Elsewhere, Massoud mostly goes through the motions in establishing Aladdin as a rakish pauper, but the actor comes alive in a comic scene that sees his street urchin, newly styled as a prince by the Genie, presenting himself to the Sultan's court. Having never been trained on any points of social graces, Aladdin can only stammer out pleasantries, using strange honorifics to refer to the Sultan as he curtsies instead of bows. Later, the Genie helps Aladdin perform an elaborate dance by controlling the young man's body in order to wow the Sultan's court. Impressively, Massoud manages to perform complicated steps while looking as if every movement is done against his will, giving Aladdin's flailing motions a slapstick quality.
Such flashes of personality, though, are few and far between in this remake. Certainly there was a lot of room to bring a contemporary perspective to this material—to counter the original's problematic representation of its Middle-Eastern milieu and deepen its characters. Instead, the film settles for telling you a joke you've already heard and botching the delivery.
Cast: Mena Massoud, Naomi Scott, Will Smith, Marwan Kenzari, Navid Negahban, Nasim Pedrad, Alan Tudyk, Frank Welker, Billy Magnussen Director: Guy Ritchie Screenwriter: John August, Guy Ritchie Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Running Time: 128 min Rating: PG Year: 2019 Buy: Soundtrack
Review: Brightburn Is a Soulless Mishmash of Disparate Genre Elements
The way the film shuttles through its 90 minutes, it's as if it's been stripped of its most crucial narrative parts.1
Like a lot of kids squirming through puberty, Brandon Breyer (Jackson A. Dunn) is an asshole. Unlike most, however, he's from outer space and possessed of formidable superpowers. Soon after learning of his abilities, he stalks a classmate, Caitlyn (Emmie Hunter), who consoled him in class after he was teased for his incredible smarts. Brandon makes a show of controlling Caitlyn's laptop before appearing outside her bedroom window, eerily floating in the air. By this point in director David Yarovesky's Brightburn, one is still optimistic that Brandon's creeper tendencies will be the most insidious of his problems. But when Caitlyn calls him a pervert, after letting him fall to the ground during a "trust fall" exercise in gym class, Brandon crushes the bones in her hand after she's forced to help him up. By the end of the film, Caitlyn will prove to be one of the lucky ones.
That Yarovesky and screenwriters Brian and Mark Gunn don't exactly push the link between Brandon's pubescence and his growing self-awareness isn't the first sign that something is amiss here. Right out of the gate, Brightburn reveals itself unwilling to animate its characters' emotional dramas, using visual shorthand to simply hint at them. In the opening scene, set more than 10 years in the past, the camera pans across a bookshelf full of fertility books, informing the audience that Brandon's parents, Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle (David Denman), really want to have a baby. Later, while helping his dad with chores, Brandon accidentally throws a lawnmower halfway across the family farm. This is when he recognizes that he has superpowers, but rather than prolong the kid's doubt across more than one scene, the film zips straight to the moment where he's about to shove his hand into the lawn mower's spinning blades to confirm his suspicions that he's nothing short of invincible.
More genre films—more films, period—could stand to have a lot less fat on their bones, but the way Brightburn shuttles through its 90 minutes, it's as if it's been stripped even of its most crucial narrative parts. Outside of one pulpy hallucination sequence, the film stubbornly refuses to give a concrete sense of the desperation that drove Tori and Kyle to adopt Brandon, just as it can't be bothered to give shape to the mythology of his creation—or rather, his arrival. For a spell, though, this suggests a purposeful show of evasion. Much is made of the red light that peeks out from the floorboards in the family barn and to which Brandon is drawn throughout the film. If you're a fan of Larry Cohen's canon, you may wonder if the kid will be revealed as a kindred spirit of the ever-glowing human-alien antagonist from God Told Me To, here to make sport of our biological urge to procreate in our increasingly decaying world.
No such luck, as Brightburn is a meaningless mishmash of disparate genre elements. The truth of what lurks beneath the floorboards turns out to be of no particular consequence—not exactly a red herring, just a bit of hogwash that confirms Brandon to be a gene splice of Damien and Superman. Maybe a sense of majesty, of mythic grandeur, might have made him feel as if he was less arbitrarily willed into being, though Yarovesky certainly conveys the weight of the kid's killing spree. Not its existential weight, only its repugnant force. At one point, one of his victims struggles to hold up the lower part of his grotesquely shattered jaw, as Brandon pulls off the mask that he wears because, presumably, he understands that that's what someone with superhuman powers should do. Brightburn never shows us how Brandon came to such a realization, but it does let us glimpse the stone-cold delight he takes in erasing human life—a spectacle of violence that exists for its own soulless sake.
Cast: Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, Jackson A. Dunn, Jennifer Holland, Matt Jones, Meredith Hagner, Becky Wahlstrom, Gregory Alan Williams, Steve Agee, Emmie Hunter Director: David Yarovesky Screenwriter: Brian Gunn, Mark Gunn Distributor: Screen Gems Running Time: 90 min Rating: R Year: 2019
The Nightingale Trailer: Aisling Franciosi and Sam Claflin Star in Jennifer Kent's Follow-Up to The Babadook
Today, IFC has released the first trailer for the film, which is set during the colonization of Australia in 1825.
Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale, the Aussie filmmaker's much-anticipated follow-up to The Babadook, premiered way back in September at the Venice Film Festival, and to mostly positive notices. Today, ahead of its U.S. theatrical release in August, IFC has released the first trailer for the film, which is set during the colonization of Australia in 1825 and follows a young Irish convict settler, Clare (played by Aisling Franciosi), who, after finishing her seven-year sentence, struggles to be free of her abusive master, Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin). According to the studio's official description of the film:
Clare's husband Aidan (Michael Sheasby) retaliates and she becomes the victim of a harrowing crime at the hands of the lieutenant and his cronies. When British authorities fail to deliver justice, Clare decides to pursue Hawkins, who leaves his post suddenly to secure a captaincy up north. Unable to find compatriots for her journey, she is forced to enlist the help of a young Aboriginal tracker Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) who grudgingly takes her through the rugged wilderness to track down Hawkins. The terrain and the prevailing hostilities are frightening, as fighting between the original inhabitants of the land and its colonizers plays out in what is now known as "The Black War." Clare and Billy are hostile towards each other from the outset, both suffering their own traumas and mutual distrust, but as their journey leads them deeper into the wilderness, they must learn to find empathy for one another, while weighing the true cost of revenge.
Watch the official trailer below:
IFC Films will release The Nightingale in NY and LA on August 2.
Cannes Review: The Lighthouse Is a Hilarious and Grotesque Genre Pastiche
Robert Eggers loosens the noose of veracity just enough to allow for so much absurdism to peek through.3
Willem Dafoe farts and Robert Pattinson masturbates vigorously in Robert Eggers's creepy and unexpectedly, if grotesquely, hilarious follow-up to The Witch. Set in 1890s New England, The Lighthouse finds Eggers again mining the past for an air of mythic portent but loosening the noose of veracity that choked his meticulously researched yet painfully self-serious debut just enough to allow for so much absurdism to peek through.
From the moment that lighthouse keepers Thomas Wake (Dafoe), an experienced old "wickie" with a shuffling gait and a hair-trigger temper, and Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson), his handlebar mustache-sporting assistant, set foot on the tiny island where they're to spend the next four weeks, they start to get on each other's nerves. Wake is a slave driver who's said to have made his last assistant go crazy, and who ignores any and all regulations, while Winslow, who's on his first assignment as a lighthouse keeper, refuses to drink and be merry with Wake, which causes its own problems. Before long, the two men kick into motion a game of one-upmanship, a raising of the stakes to see who will be the first to drive the other to madness—with flatulence and horniness among the many, many factors fueling that pursuit.
Eggers's willingness to get goofy, and to not worry about humor defusing his narrative's macabre horror—as in, say, the cartoonish pummeling that a devious seagull receives—makes The Lighthouse something of a breakthrough for the filmmaker. Diverging from the formula of coiled tension followed by sudden and jolting release that's favored by so many contemporary arthouse horror films, Eggers parcels out the action in the film, steadily and methodically building toward the psychological breaking point of his characters.
Dafoe and Pattinson are crucial to selling that trajectory, ensuring that every moment here bristles with performative bluster. Dafoe's surly former sea captain is a blowhard who's given to sentimental reverie whenever he gets hammered, while his foil is played by Pattinson with slyly vacillating docile subservience and scheming spitefulness. The veteran character actor and dressed-down movie star play off each other exceptionally well, especially when, as is often the case in a two-hander, they have to pull-off a tricky role reversal.
Taking advantage of a bigger budget than The Witch, Eggers shot The Lighthouse on 35mm film. He's also utilized the 1.19:1 Movietone aspect ratio, which was briefly standardized in the 1920s and is tighter than the already boxy 1.37:1 academy ratio, as a means of emphasizing his vertical compositions and the at times literally stratified relationship between his main characters. At one point, Dafoe's old codger refuses to share lantern duty, while Winslow toils down below, swabbing decks and maintaining the dilapidated station.
Eggers successfully approximates F.W. Murnau's stark and dynamic use of light and shadow in images that ensconce his characters in darkness and place them in geometrically unbalanced positions within the frame. But the quirkiest influence on this film is Night Tide, Curtis Harrington's 1961 supernatural farce of a noir, which Eggers cribs from blatantly in a surreal sequence where Pattinson's character has an erotic fantasy about a mermaid, and in a delirious body-horror montage—realized through largely practical effects—that co-opts Harrington's hybridization of Roger Corman and Kenneth Ager's stylings.
And like Night Tide, a send-up of beach-party movies and cheap '50s sci-fi, The Lighthouse aims for self-aware pastiche and pulls it off without smugness. Unlike Harrington's film, though, it doesn't register much affection for the forms it's working with, and can come off like a calculated exercise. Still, Eggers's ability to take the piss out of his inflated genre movie pastiche, without lapsing into parody, is an impressive and an entertaining feat.
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, Valeriia Karaman Director: Robert Eggers Screenwriter: Robert Eggers, Max Eggers Distributor: A24 Running Time: 110 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Maryland Film Festival 2019: The Hottest August, Donbass, & American Factory
This year's selections exhibit a scope and ambition that should continue to draw adventurous filmgoers for years to come.
Judging from the enthusiasm of the surprisingly high number of New York filmmakers and critics this writer met in Baltimore this past weekend, the Maryland Film Festival isn't seen as a pale shadow of Big Apple filmgoing. Rather, it's a vital supplement to it—a program that compresses many of the festival season's essential offerings into a manageable four-day run in an easily walkable city with comparatively chill crowds.
Those who made the commute to Baltimore for the festival this year had the chance to encounter one of the more trenchant New York-set films of recent memory in Brett Story's The Hottest August, an essayistic documentary made in the intellectually vagrant spirit of Chris Marker. Shot in August of 2017 around a principle of "organized spontaneity," per producer Danielle Varga, the film spans New York City's five boroughs while adhering to a nebulous, difficult-to-define but nonetheless valuable objective: to take the temperature of the times we live in and tease out the collective mood of the country's most densely populated area.
Willfully biting off more than it can chew, The Hottest August features rich people, poor people, scientists, skateboarders, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, barflies, artists, and more waxing extemporaneous on topics including climate change, economic inequality, automation, racism, and the future. The mood is off the cuff, conversational. A pair of women in lawn chairs joke about how their street's rat population has swelled as a result of gentrifying construction in adjacent neighborhoods. Two former cops reframe the term "racism" as "resentment" in a sports bar just moments after demanding that no politics enter the hallowed space of the drinking hole. A loft-dwelling futurist pontificates on what the tax system might look like if the country embraced robotics instead of fearing it as a job killer. Occasionally we hear the filmmaker off screen, tersely prompting her subjects with open-ended questions, but mostly this is an ensemble of eager talkers, their openness running contrary to the old chestnut about closed-off New Yorkers.
Finding form in this seemingly disconnected mass is editor Nels Bangerter, who managed a similar feat with Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson. The film drifts subtly from subject to subject, pointedly using B roll not just to evocatively provide a sense of place, but to extend someone's thought or offer counterpoint. Three streams of information exist at once: whatever opinion is being put forth by the person on screen; whatever in-the-moment perspective Story takes on her subject's response through the questions she asks or the camera angles she chooses; and the question of how that segment ultimately interacts with the film in its final form, where images have been invested with meaning through context.
The Hottest August is a film that's constantly "thinking," and that thought isn't fixed or authoritative, but rather in flux and negotiable. Story isn't setting out to answer any pressing political issues so much as capture the tactile sense of how those issues permeate everyday settings. Hers is a form of ambient reportage that feels very welcome in our contemporary moment, when the daily barrage of information can sometimes make it difficult to recall how one felt about something two days earlier, let alone in that turbulent August of 2017.
Similarly macro in its approach is Sergei Loznitsa's Donbass, which adopts a sprawling, vignette-driven structure as it catalogues the miseries and grotesqueries of the eponymous eastern Ukrainian territory. A region occupied by pro-Russian paramilitary forces (specifically the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics) ever since the Ukrainian Revolution in 2014, present-day Donbass is a morass of conflicting sympathies and ideologies that Loznitsa doesn't so much seek to clarify with this film as reflect in all its muddy complexity.
In fact, Loznitsa goes so far as to call into question the very possibility of the truth of this situation he captures on camera. Whenever reporters appear on screen, they're portrayed as ineffectual stooges waiting to be chewed out as propaganda peddlers by their political opponents, and the film's bookending sequences, set at the trailer park of a movie set, build toward a thesis statement on the dubiousness of contemporary reporting with its tendency to stage and reframe reality according to the mandates of whatever affiliation is being placated.
Cameras, we're repeatedly reminded by the mise-en-scène, are violators, as they merely augment the dangerous power of the person wielding them. Donbass's most harrowing elucidation of this theme comes in a scene on a public street, where a Ukrainian loyalist, tied to a telephone pole by a pair of armed separatists, endures a humiliating beating at the hands of a growing mob of passersby, one of whom decides to record the grisly spectacle with his smartphone. As Loznitsa's camera circles the action, the heckler's phone presses right up into the face of the prisoner, relishing in the man's suffering, and we get the sense that the escalation of violence may have never come to pass in quite this way were it not for the spontaneous idea to turn it into a video meme. Later, the recording gets shown to a hooting crowd of Novorossiya sympathizers at an absurdly overemphatic wedding celebration, assimilating smoothly into the atmosphere of nationalist fervor.
Donbass is fueled by such collisions between the grave and the comic, a tonal oscillation mastered by Loznitsa in his documentaries and carried over here to support a vision of a society cracking under the weight of its own inconsistencies, corruption and mob mentalities. Less tightly structured than Loznitsa's preceding fiction work, the film adopts the immersive observation of films like Maidan and Victory Day with a more active, roving camera but a similar degree of durational endurance. In one scene, Loznitsa even seamlessly integrates an extended use of documentary language into a longer fictional setup when his camera descends into a cramped and overcrowded bomb shelter, where a local host, lit by a camera-mounted source, walks us through the destitution of those living inside. As with the later street scene, the dreariness is eventually spiked by a dash of absurdism, but the counterpunch isn't intended to lighten the mood so much as further disorient, ultimately giving Donbass an unnerving precarity that must come somewhat near the feeling on the ground.
If these two films, content as they are to revel in ambivalence, seek to grasp the experience of the now in all its bewilderment, Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar's American Factory takes a more committed stance on an issue that's equally topical. Fuyao Glass America, an outgrowth of a global glass manufacturer owned by a Chinese billionaire, opened in Moraine, Ohio in the shell of a shuddered General Motors plant toward the beginning of the decade, persisted financially for years while pursuing its awkward goal of unifying Chinese and American work cultures, and then inevitably ran up against controversy in 2017 when safety concerns and low wages encouraged the local employees to vote to unionize.
American Factory charts this entire compelling history with surprising comprehensiveness: When a late scene plays out as an illicit audio recording from an employee over a black screen, it stands out for being one of the only instances when the filmmakers don't appear to have unencumbered access. But this sprawl has its downsides. Though briskly edited and tonally varied, Reichert and Bognar's documentary skims over the surface of some of its most fascinating threads while in pursuit of a rousing decade-long tale.
The American workers depicted in the film, disgruntled by their diminished earnings and recalling a recent past with less bureaucratic oversight, too often blend into one undistinguished mass of Midwestern homeliness, and the few individuals who do get singled out for attention—a woman living in her relative's basement and a rancher who befriends one particular Chinese co-worker—often get neglected for long stretches of time. The Chinese are perhaps even less differentiated, their insistence on dogged work ethic and company allegiance repeatedly emphasized almost to the point of xenophobia. That Fuyao chairman Cao Dewang, who weaves through the film as an amusingly oblivious villain for its majority, eventually gets a moment to fondly reminisce on China's pre-industrial past and contemplate his own complicity in the country's shift to globalized capitalism comes across as penance for the film's occasional treatment of foreigners as misguided corporate drones.
What American Factory ultimately amounts to, however, isn't an exploration of culture clash or a penetrating depiction of rust belt dejection, but rather a rallying cry for worker solidarity (in America, if not across the globe), a message it pulls off resoundingly in the final hour. Reichert and Bognar smartly detail all the insidious ways in which corporate messengers mischaracterize unionizing as a threat to individual liberty, and the populist filmmaking vernacular they employ as the union vote nears—fluid crosscutting between different intersecting narratives, plenty of emotional close-ups, a score of almost Spielbergian grandiosity—gives the documentary a genuine shot at trafficking radical politics to a relatively wide audience. If it's any indication of future success, American Factory was one of the most well-attended screenings I went to during my time in Baltimore, but it's a testament to the Maryland Film Festival's outreach that healthy crowds congregated throughout the weekend. Though modest and inviting, this year's selections exhibit a scope and ambition that should continue to draw adventurous filmgoers for years to come.
The Maryland Film Festival ran from May 8—12.
Game of Thrones Recap: Season 8, Episode 6, "The Iron Throne"
Review: Aladdin Is a Magic Corporate Ride to Nowhere Special
Review: A Hidden Life Lyrically Attests to a Man's Quest for Moral Purity
Review: Zombi Child Radically Grapples with Colonialism's Legacy
Review: In Pain and Glory, Life and Art Are Wistful Bedfellows
Jeonju IFF 2019: Coincoin and the Extra-Humans, L. Cohen, & Introduzione all'oscuro
Review: As Teen Comedy, Booksmart Is Sweet and Nasty in Fine Balance
Review: When They See Us Is a Harrowing but Heavy-Handed Act of Protest
Terminator: Dark Fate Official Trailer: Going Back to the Well with Sarah Connor
Review: Hal Ashby's The Landlord on Kino Lorber Blu-ray
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Game of Thrones Recap: Season 8, Episode 6, "The Iron Throne"
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High School Senior Project Promotes Swimming Skills to Underserved Teens
Jackie Beal, a senior at Mount Rainier High School, created "Teach2Swim" for her Senior Culminating Project. Jackie's goal was to teach swimming to teens in underserved communities so they in turn could teach others to swim.
During the summer of 2012, Jackie worked with five teenagers from the New Futures program at the Woodridge Apartments in Burien. She then supervised the teens as they each taught basic strokes and water safety to two other children.
Jackie also presented her project to the Drowning Prevention Network at Seattle Children's Hospital.
"It was fun for me to be able to pass on some of the skills I've learned, but teaching a few kids to swim isn't enough," Jackie said. "There are 1,200 club swimmers in Puget Sound between the ages of 15 to 17. I hope to challenge these youth to consider a culminating project focused on teaching others to swim."
"I would like to support other teens to develop a Teach2Swim program in their community," Jackie added. "I hope that others will share their knowledge and abilities with kids who are not able to take formal lessons due to financial or cultural reasons. I will provide Teach2Swim program leaders with the course materials that I developed, as well as ideas of how to implement Teach2Swim in their area."
Jackie developed Teach2Swim based on her nine years of experience as a competitive swimmer, and her lifeguard training. The teens were taught water safety, basic strokes, and water rescue. Parents were instructed on how to be a Water Watcher, how to recognize potential drowning victims, and the Reach, Throw, Row – Don't Go approach to water rescue.
Prospective Teach2Swim instructors may contact Jackie via email at [email protected].

subset: commoncrawl


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Events Calendar
Town Council Meeting
Tuesday, November 20, 2018, 06:00pm
Hits : 169140
Contact Town Office 472-3800
The Fort Fairfield Town Council will hold its regularly scheduled meeting in the Council Chambers at 6pm. Town Council meetings are always held the third Wednesday of each month. Citizens unable to attend can watch a live stream of the meeting on our live stream.
Location Town Council Chambers


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Dalish ElfSounds like the origin stories could make for a cool play on fantasy archetypes, no? I guess the process of transforming plain "fantasy" into the "dark, heroic" kind involves transposing some of the more difficult elements of the human experience on your elves.
As one of the last "true elves", you were content to spend your life wandering with your clan... until a chance encounter with a relic of your people's past threatens to tear you away from everything you've known.
City Elf
You have always lived under the heavy thumb of your human overlords, but when a local lord claiming his "privilege" with the bride shatters your wedding day, the simmering racial tensions explode in a rain of vengeance.
Dwarf Commoner
Born casteless in a land where rank is everything, bound as the lackey and thug of a local crime lord, you have spent your life invisible... until chance thrusts you into the spotlight, where you can finally prove whether you will be defined by your actions or your birth.
"Where'd your father go to school?"
Dwarf Noble
The favored child of the dwarven king, you proudly take up your first military command... only to learn that the deadly intrigues of dwarven politics pose an even greater danger than that faced on the battlefield.
Gifted with a power considered a dangerous curse by most, you have spent most of your life secluded in the remote tower of the Circle of Magi to be trained and watched closely by the dreaded templars. Now your final test is upon you -- succeed and prove your strength, fail and you will perish.
Human Noble
Born to wealth and power second only to royalty, you find your training in both diplomacy and war put to the test when your father's castle is betrayed from within on the very night your elder brother is to lead the family's forces to war.
Miguel says: Whenever I see Dragon Age, the person conducting the demo (usually executive producer Dan Tudge) makes mention of the origin stories: how they'll affect dialogue, story branches, and quests. I suppose adding unique intro stories could add a meaningful layer to the characters we settle on these games -- am I the only person who, after a second play-through of a BioWare RPG, is a little bummed when, despite how different I perceive my new character to be, is on the receiving end of the very same dialog as the first? What would be truly interesting is if the designers took this concept way far. If I'm playing a marginalized city elf, totally close quest lines that involve mixing in high society, and open up meaningful alternatives. The way they're described in the press makes them sound pretty stirring. These themes should persist throughout each character's experience, and color the course of the game.


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Cherylh necesitaba un nuevo diseño de otro y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 30 diseños de 10 diseñadores freelance.
Adherus Surgical Sealants
Hyperbranch used this service for our product logo now we want to expand into a general trade show booth. Adherus is the Brand name for a Surgical Sealant. We are trying to indicate the follow items on the booth: 1 Synthetic polymeric hydrogel; 2 Dense crosslinked network for superior strength,; 3 Extended durability; 4 dimensionally stable polymers; 5 bio-compatible for internal use.
Doctors (Surgeons) and hospital operating room staffs.
Adherus is a developed form PEI & PEG which are basically chemistry components. The tag line "CLOSURE WITH CONFIDENCE" must be used on the booth design as well as the Adherus logo and Company logo. The company logo can be smaller and at the bottom or top. 'Adherus Surgical Sealant' logo should be the major focal point. We also suggest using chemical cross link indicators for the background, however if not available to the designers that is understandable. Also attached is a photo of the current trade show booth. There is some wording on the booth that maybe helpful. Please call with questions.


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|Now viewing 1 through 4 of 314 total winner entries..
|Raj Patel, of Spartanburg, won $1,000 playing $100,000 Holiday Jackpot. The first-time lottery winner said he's still thinking about what to do with his prize. He claimed his winnings December 30. His ticket was purchased from Fast Fuel #9 in Williamston.
|Pamela Gregory, of Camden, couldn't believe her luck when she won $10,000 playing the $2 instant game $50 Fever. She said plans to "save some, spend some." She claimed her prize December 28. Her winning ticket was purchased from Food Chief #3242 in Camden.
|Spencer Ham, of Sumter, knows exactly what he'll do with the $660 he won playing Pick 3. His plans for the cash: "Blowing it!" He claimed his prize December 28. His winning ticket was purchased from Hodge Texaco #1 in Sumter.
|Norman Hudson, of Lancaster, said he "jumped for joy" after winning $2,500 in Pick 4. He plans to put his windfall into savings. He claimed his prize December 28. The winning ticket was purchased from The Quick Stop in Lancaster.


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Mar 03 2011
A great sharing experience
A month ago, the Willamette volunteer program Language In Motion (LIM) offered me the opportunity to give a presentation at the South Salem high school. I must admit that I was a bit nervous before the presentation. The teacher wanted me to do the whole talk in French, and I was afraid that the students couldn't understand what I say (first because I speak very fast; then because I didn't know what was their real level). But, actually, the presentation went more than well. It was all in French and the students were not lost at all (I know quite well how to recognize confused faces…). The teacher and the students gave me a warm welcome, they prepared a lot of questions for me about France, about the differences between France and the USA, and I spent almost half an hour replying to all their questions. It was absolutely great to see how interested and involved they were. They took an active part in the presentation and I absolutely loved this morning spent at the South Salem high school. I talked to the teacher after the presentation and she thanked me for what I brought to her students. But, the thing is that they brought me even more than I could ever have imagined. It was great to share my culture with them and to benefit from theirs. I really got quite a thrill out of the experience and I really hope to repeat it soon.
I shared a French song with the class at the end of the presentation and the students told me that they liked it. So, here it is.. M. Pokora, \"Juste une photo de toi\"
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It's always a good idea to have an open mind no matter what explanation works. I myself have a few cases I've investigated here in Florida that defy explanation but I'm not ready to say "hey its ET".ryguy wrote: It's great to open your mind to the possibility of the ET hypothesis, but it's not "debunkery" to open your mind even further to the idea that maybe there are other much more probable and plausible explanations for the phenomenon?
As a matter of fact I just got one from McDill AFB that seems intrigueing so off I go into the wild blue yonder.


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Books, books and books
A quick roundup of some of the coffee books that I have read this year:
The Professional Barista's Handbook, Scott Rao
This book was the inspiration for this post; Shaughan from Five Senses kindly sent me a copy of this book to get my opinion on it. So if you want to buy this book as a result of this blog post, kindly point your web browser here!
Scott Rao is clearly a gifted trainer; watch this clip to see him teach a total newbie how to steam milk and pour latte art in ten minutes. Rao has some rather cool innovations, such as a cheap way of leaning to steam milk (watch the video) and a clever way of affixing thermometers to milk jugs (buy the book). Rao is also not above making reference to the work of others, and it is this that raises Rao's book above being just another training book. The concise and snappy description of the espresso process makes the thinking of the likes of Schecter, Schulman and Petracco - to name a few - accessible to people who don't want to wade through the original articles. The book also includes thoughtful chapters on drip coffee (bulk brew), french press, water and tea. Extracts from the book are available to sample on Rao's site and on H-B.
Rao's book has received a lot of praise, but little attention has been brought to its shortcomings. The two most glaring omissions are cleaning and the relative contributions of the factors covered (eg. maybe using one group at a time results in a marginally better shot, but is this book seriously advocating that one should never use more than one group at a time on their cafe's three group machine?). The chapter on science and theory of espresso extraction is interesting, but not ultimately useful in terms of improving the quality of your cup. A better inclusion would have been some more extensive data on how grind, dose and brew temperature can be manipulated to change results in the cup -- such knowledge currently resides only in the heads of experienced baristi.
Who should buy it: People who want the steps to great espresso laid out in a concise, succinct and comprehensive manner.
The Espresso Quest, Instaurator
Inny's book is an engaging narrative that takes the reader through some of his experiences over twenty or thirty years in the espresso game. The book makes no pretences towards being an exclusive reference on any of the topic covered, but it does provide a lot of interesting information that might otherwise be hidden from the coffee consumer. Stellar photography paired with engaging narrative.
Who should buy it: Anyone who is interested in the coffee industry and, in particular, the Australian espresso scene.
God in a Cup
Apparently both this book and Espresso Quest shared the same title; Weissman's book beat Inny's to the presses by half a length, so the title of Espresso Quest was changed. Weissman brings both the skills and ethics of a professional journalist to bear in writing this impressive book. Set out in novel style, the book chronicles Weissman's immersion in coffee culture as an outsider meeting some of the US's great roasters and travelling to origin. Panama Hacienda la Esmeralda features heavily in the book and I can say from experience that coffee nuts will enjoy reading this book with a cup of that coffee in hand! This book is highly US-centric, as one would expect, and that perhaps makes it an even better read for an Australian audience. You can listen to an interview with the author in CG podcast #62.
Who should buy it: Anyone who is interested in what goes on behind the scenes in bringing a cup of coffee to the table.
The Coffee Cupper's Handbook, Ted Lingle
This is a 'must have' for anyone who cups on any semi-serious level. I would be shocked - shocked - if anyone who purported to call themselves a professional roaster did not own a copy of this book.
The book itself is unashamedly technical and dry. It isn't a thrilling read, nor does it have Promethean tendencies to illuminate the art, but it does make for an extremely useable reference.
Who should buy it: Serious cuppers. And, to borrow a phrase from Derryn Hinch, if you call yourself a professional roaster and you don't own a copy - shame, shame, shame.
Coffee Technology, 2nd Edition, Sivetz et. al.
Published in the 1970s, from memory, this unashamedly dense and technical book is still ahead of the curve. Coffee enthusiasts and professionals constantly lament that 'someone should do a technical study on' the differences in packaging, effects of certain factors on roast, etc, etc. I haven't yet devoured the entire tome, but I would not be surprised if many of the questions facing the current crop of specialty coffee professionals aren't addressed to some extent in this book.
Who should buy it: Professional coffee roasters.
Espresso Made in Italy 1901-1962, Enrico Maltoni
Enrico Maltoni has what must surely be the most jaw-droppingly awesome collection of perfectly restored vintage espresso machines in the world. This bilingual book is light on words, but heavy on photos. For the price, though, buyers should beware that it is soft cover.
Who should buy it: Vintage espresso nuts.
La Marzocco History, Piero Bambi
Ron Cook kindly gave me a copy of this book when I made the pilgrimage to the factory in Florence a few years back. This bilingual book is a surprisingly great read, giving some insight into what it was like to be in the business of espresso machine manufacture in the early days.
Who should buy it: Serious La Marzocco nuts.
La Marzocco 80th Anniversary Collection Book, La Marzocco
This is La Marzocco's equivalent of the Maltoni book; gorgeous photos, light on text, but hardcover. The photos are also available in the 80th anniversary poster set and I put many of them up behind the bookshelves at First Pour, Melbourne.
Who should buy it: La Marzocco and vintage espresso machine tragics. (If you're putting in an order on the LM E-Shop, please let me know - I'd like to get some stuff, but am too stingy to do it without splitting postage!)
Hacienda La Minita, Bill McAlpin
This book has some great photography from the famed Hacienda La Minita in Costa Rica, together with a few speeches from the farm's owner, Bill McAlpin.
Who should buy it: A coffee table book for coffee enthusiasts.
Connecting Worlds - The Coffee Trail, Olaf Hammelburg
Another book with fantastic photography and relatively little text; this one follows Peruvian coffee from seed to cup, from Peru to the USA and Canada.
Who should buy it: People who like great coffee related photography.
Labels: book


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Apr 14, 2011
COOKEVILLE, Tenn. – Despite building a two-run lead, the Tennessee Tech softball team was unable to hold the Western Kentucky Lady Toppers back, as it took the 6-2 loss.
WKU's five-run third inning proved decisive on the day as it used four hits, along with a walk and a Tech error, to score five of its six runs off TTU starter Claudia Harke. The Lady Toppers managed to get an additional run in the fourth off Tech reliever Whitney Cummings, who came in for relief for Harke.
Tech opened the scoring in the bottom of the second on a pair of RBI walks from Kaliegh Gates and Kendall Hooper, to take a 2-0 lead.
WKU relief pitcher Brittanie Albright came in for starter Dana Nathanson, and shut down the Golden Eagle offense as she gave up just one hit and a pair of walks, over 5.2 innings, to secure her first victory of the season.
Harke was saddled with the loss as she fell to 0-5 on the season.
Tech (16-19, 7-11 OVC) travels to Kentucky Saturday, for a non-conference doubleheader, beginning at 12 p.m.


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Tag Archives: Glennda Testone
LGBT Center Congratulates Chelsea Pines Inn; Reflects on Parallel Journeys
By Glennda Testone Glennda Testone is the Executive Director of the New York LGBT Community Center and is a leader in the field of social justice for women and LGBT people. Testone joins The Center from The Women's Media Center … Continue reading
Posted in Anniversary, General Tagged Gay and Lesbian Center, Glennda Testone, Irving Cooperberg, Peter Vogel, Sheldon Post Leave a comment


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I have much to post on this blog when I can find the time... until then quickly sharing something found via twitter on this website:
IUCN, International Union for Conservation of Nature, helps the world find
pragmatic solutions to our most pressing environment and development challenges
pragmatic solutions to our most pressing environment and development challenges
IUCN solutions
IUCN carries out comprehensive research on the status of biodiversity. It runs projects to protect specific species, manage and restore national parks and other protected areas; and promotes the sustainable use of natural resources. IUCN also provides the knowledge, standards and tools for biodiversity conservation for governments, community organizations, the United Nations and business. Learn mor
Facts and figures on biodiversity
01 January 2012 | Article
Discover more about biodiversity and its impact on our lives.
Species - our food and medecine
- While most people depend mainly on domesticated species for their dietary needs, some 200 million depend on wild species for at least part of their food.
- More than 60 wild species have been used to improve the world's 13 major crops by providing genes for pest resistance, improved yield, and enhanced nutrition.
- Since agriculture began about 12,000 years ago, roughly 7,000 plant species have been used for human consumption.
- Amphibians play a vital role in ecosystems, are indicators of environmental health, and are 'hopping pharmacies' being used in the search for new medicines. Yet 41% of amphibian species are threatened with extinction.
- In some countries, medicinal plants and animals provide most of the drugs people use, and even in technologically-advanced countries like the USA, half of the 100 most-prescribed drugs originate from wild species.
- More than 70,000 different plant species are used in traditional and modern medicine.
Nature's services
- Production of at least one third of the world's food, including 87 of the 113 leading food crops, depends on pollination carried out by insects, bats and birds. This ecosystem service is worth over US$ 200 billion per year.
- A square kilometre of coastal ecosystem such as mangroves forests can store up to five times more carbon than the equivalent area of mature tropical forests. But these areas are being destroyed three to four times faster than forests, releasing substantial amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the ocean, and contributing to climate change.
- Wild species are important in pest regulation. Bats, toads, birds, snakes, and so on consume vast numbers of the major animal pests found on crops or in forests.
- A single colony of Mexican Free-tailed Bat eats more than 9,000 kg of insects per night, targeting especially Corn Earthworms and Fall Armyworms, both major crop predators. Yet 18% of bat species are threatened with extinction.
- A single brood of woodpeckers can eat 8,000-12,000 harmful insect pupae per day, helping to maintain the health of forests, whilst in fruit plantations, insectivorous birds can make the difference between a bumper crop or a costly failure.
Human impact
- Overfishing has reduced some commercial fish stocks by more than 90%.
- The Giant Manta Ray is the largest living ray, which can grow to more than seven metres in width. Manta Ray products have a high value in international trade and targeted fisheries hunt them for their valuable gill rakers used in traditional Chinese medicine.
- In China, 78 million dryland cashmere goats supply up to 75% of the world's cashmere fibre.
- Eighty five percent of sturgeon, one of the oldest families of fishes in existence, valued around the world for their precious roe, are at risk of extinction.
Conservation success
- The regal Arabian Oryx which was hunted to near extinction, is now facing a more secure future thanks to captive breeding and reintroduction efforts. Its wild population now stands at 1,000 individuals.
- The Southern White Rhino subspecies has increased from a population of less than 100 at the end of the 19th century to an estimated wild population of over 20,000.
- The status of Przewalski's Horse has improved from Critically Endangered to Endangered. Originally, it was listed as Extinct in the Wild in 1996, but thanks to a captive breeding reintroduction programme, the population is now estimated at more than 300.
- The Campbell Island Teal has benefitted from a massive programme to eradicate rats, plus captive-breeding of remaining individuals. The species has now returned to New Zealand's Campbell Island and the majority of birds are now thriving, resulting in a reclassification of the threat status to Endangered.
Awe and wonder
- Tourists spend billions of dollars every year to watch birds or whales, or witness wildlife spectacles such as the great annual migrations in the Serengeti ecosystem of Tanzania and Kenya where 1.5 million wildebeest, 500,000 Thomson's gazelle and 200,000 zebra cross the plain.
- Visitors to national parks, are drawn by the wildlife they see, and the thriving diving industry is largely based on the species of coral, fish, and other marine species that provide a colourful spectacle.
- King penguins are found in their thousands in the sub-Antarctic Crozet archipelago, which is nicknamed the "25 million bird island". The density of the marine bird population there reaches a staggering 60 tonnes/km².
Into the unknown
- The oceans cover 70% of the planet but we know so little about life within them.
- A team of scientists including from IUCN are exploring seamounts—underwater mountains which rise to at least 1,000 metres above the sea floor. Seamounts are home to a rich biodiversity and act as a type of 'bed and breakfast' for deep sea predators such as sharks but face many serious threats from human activities.
Biodiversity glossary
Here are some important terms which will help you understand biodiversity conservation.


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Mixing classroom and real world experience, a group of students and professors from the College of Mount St. Joseph recently went to New York City where they met with United Nations representatives, and participated in International Youth Day with UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon.
The trip marks the sixth year that Mount students and faculty have had the opportunity to learn more about eight UN development goals to bring more awareness and support for global issues, including universal primary education, maternal health and reducing poverty.
"This trip is an excellent way for our students to have international experience and to become aware of how our actions have an impact on the rest of the world," said Jim Bodle, Ph.D., professor of psychology and honors program director at the Mount.
Mount student Samantha Buschle, a senior English major from Cheviot, said she hopes to use what she learned about some of the development goals into her future career as a teacher. "I want to put some of those goals into action within my classroom," she said. "Things like making sure my students have a lunch every day and that all boys and girls are treated equally. Even if I cannot make a worldwide difference, I can make a difference within the school that I teach."
This year's trip marked the first time Mount students were able to celebrate International Youth Day at the UN. "Celebrating the day gave us an opportunity to hear about primary issues countries such as India, Lebanon and Niger are experiencing, and how the UN is helping assist children in those countries," said Sara Vice, a psychology major from Glendale.
English professor, Elizabeth Bookser Barkley, Ph.D., has been co-leading the group with Bodle since the Mount's program began. "Over the fall semester, students will meet a series of local guests committed to the UN Development goals on issues such as the empowerment of women, international food programs and environmental sustainability. The students will also take part in service learning opportunities that allow them to see the impact of their work."
The group of Mount students ranged from sophomores to seniors with a variety of undergraduate fields of study. Each student was able to apply for a scholarship offered through the Mount's Sister Francis Marie Thrailkill Cultural and Service Immersion Fund.


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Make your own spray baste glue
I am in the process of string piecing a bunch of quilt blocks, and I decided to use up some scrap batting to make the blocks. I glued the batting to the backing, and this is the glue I used.
Spray Glue
Boil 3 cups water, add 1/2 tsp salt. Reduce heat to medium, whisk 3 Tbsp flour into the water, a pinch at a time. Continue whisking to break up the flour, and cook until it thickens to a consistency of egg white, or maybe gravy.
Cool to room temperature.
Fill a clean spray bottle 1/4 full of rubbing alcohol. Add water/flour to fill the bottle, leaving a little room to shake. Cap it. Shake well before each use.
I don't know how big your spray bottle will be, that's why I tell you to use 1 part rubbing alcohol to 3 parts water/flour.
This glue is wonderful for QAYG blocks. I cut my backing, lay my batting, lift the batting 1/2 way, spray the glue lay the batting back down onto the backing, and do the same to the other half of the block. When it's dry I can gently shake the backing/batting block and it stays glued. I am able to lay my top and quilt it on the machine. I Don't Know if it would work on a bigger quilt.


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FORTUNE — When Apple (AAPL) is about to release its quarterly earnings we usually see analysts scrambling to raise their estimates so as not to get sandbagged by numbers that were better than they could have imagined.
But with the company set to report fiscal Q4 results next Thursday Oct. 25, we're seeing the opposite. Three analysts trimmed their estimates on Monday and we could see more of that before the week is done.
Excerpts from the notes we've received so far:
William Blair's Anil Doradla: Tweaking Near Term Estimates Based on iPhone 5 Supply Constraints. "Since unveiling the iPhone 5 last month, consumers have faced significant delays in receiving the phone. In our opinion, Apple's inability to keep up with demand is being amplified by its aggressive global launch schedule and the company reducing its exposure to its traditional partner, Samsung. Checks across North American retail stores to understand the impacts of the delays highlight two interesting trends: first, the majority of customers seeking the new iPhone have not switched brands, and second, pricing cuts lead to better‐than‐expected sales of the iPhone 4 model. Based on the recent delays, we are reducing our iPhone estimates for the September quarter [to 26.5 million from 33 million]."
Gabelli's Hendi Susanto: We are revising our prior estimates to account for iPhone 5 launch, very weak global PC shipment data, and our expectations. "We are projecting revenue of $37.8 billion (34% yoy growth) and EPS of $9.10 per share… We cut our Mac shipment estimate to 4.7 million units from 5.3 million (10% decline in Desktops and 1% decrease in Portables from last year)… We are cutting our iPhone shipment estimate considering the later than expected launch date, early ramp up of iPhone 5 production and potential supply constraints. We are now expecting 29.9 million vs. 32.1 million units."
Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty: All eyes on iPhone with a wide range of potential outcomes. "Backend loaded in-cell display production ramp and shipments en route or in the channel are major swing factors influencing reported C3Q iPhone units. We conservatively model 25M iPhones, 15M iPads, 4.8M Macs and 5.7M iPods for the quarter. We lowered our Mac shipments from 5.2M as preliminary IDC data point to weak PC demand and slow Mac sales ahead of new product launches. This results in revenue and EPS of $33.9B and $8.29 – both below consensus. iPhone units and gross margin are more likely to surprise positively than negatively, in our view."
Note: Huberty's revenue estimate of $33.9 billion is lower any other analyst we've polled this quarter.


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April 25, 2010
LA JOLLA, Calif. -- Scott Finley kept the streak of UCSB record-setting performances going for another week, breaking a 34 year-old Gaucho record in the pole vault at the UCSD Triton Invitational.
Finley cleared 17'2.50" (5.25m), tying for the win. He is the first Gaucho to clear 17 feet in the pole vault, eclipsing the previous school record of 16'7" set by Brady Lock in 1976.
Irene Kujore took second in the shot put with a seasonal best of 49'7" (15.11m), becoming only the second Gaucho to throw over 15 meters in the shot. She also took sixth in the discus with her best throw measuring 168'11" (51.48m).
Tayler Williams continued her strong streak in the triple jump, winning the meet with her best mark measuring 39'7.25" (12.07m).
Out on the track, Danielle Domenichelli was the winner of the 1500m with a time of 4:30.78. The Gauchos took the top six spots in the women's 1500m in a field of over 30 runners. For the men, Ryan Martin won the 800m with a time of 1:50.22.
In the sprints, Grace Esslinger ran 24.94 in the 200m dash to take fifth place. She moves into seventh on the UCSB all-time list. In the 400m, James Martin ran 48.31 to take fourth place.
Finally, the women's 4x400m relay squad of Jenn Carey, Cherise Dixon, Cherrelle McMillian and Amanda Rodriguez ran 3:46.91 to take the win in a seasonal best performance.
Next weekend the Gauchos will travel to San Luis Obispo for the annual dual meet against Cal Poly. The team will also send a small contingent of athletes to the Payton Jordan Invitational at Stanford. Both meets are on Saturday, May 1.
- UCSBgauchos.com -