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Review: Hyena Road
Paul Gross situates the film's events somewhere between violent, militaristic fantasy and gentler, anti-war lament.0.5
Matt Stone and Trey Parker once said that they could take the script for Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor, shoot it exactly as written on the page, and turn it into a comedy. One imagines they would see similar potential in Hyena Road, a screed about the toughness of the combat soldier that hustles a drum-heavy, blaring score through nearly every one of its incoherent, handheld battle scenes of shouting Canadian soldiers and perpetually exploding IEDs. In fact, it's as if writer-director Paul Gross took notes during Team America: World Police and tried to pull that film's reverse by omitting any semblance of satire from Hyena Road, so that when a soldier yells, "Kill every fucker that comes through that door!," it's meant to be gripping rather galling.
The film's opening sets a tiresome tone, as a military sniper, Sanders (Rossif Sutherland), eyes an Afghan fighter through his scope and fires a single round, with the camera exuberantly swirling around the slain victim as if servicing an instant replay. Gross situates the film's events somewhere between violent, militaristic fantasy and gentler, anti-war lament, a gap that the filmmakers seek to bridge by placing all of their thematic interests into the mouths of introspective soldiers, who talk to one another as if they've all had a sleepless night writing speeches. Captain Mitchell (Gross) is especially guilty in this regard, as his scenes regularly end in close-up, with him explaining to a fellow officer how much he "believes in this place" or asserting a soldier's "helluva rough road" to safety. The film's title refers to Mitchell's mission, which is to secure the territory long enough to complete construction, though those parameters often dissolve within numerous firefights, which are overlaid with stock Middle-Eastern chants that offer Muslim culture as an uncomplicated harbinger of terrorist doom.
Scenes meant to be surreal or off-beat tritely telegraph the ephemerality of momentary pleasures, like one featuring a platoon dancing in the desert with a few Afghanis to "Play That Funky Music"; that one scene is immediately followed by one that replaces the dance track with ominous chanting, as convoys head into the heart of Kandahar. Ill-conceived subplots abound, including Sanders's relationship with Captain Bowman (Christine Horne), who finds out she's pregnant with their child. Just a few moments earlier, Sanders is seen preparing to masturbate, via webcam, to Mary (Jennifer Pudavick), his girlfriend back home. She asks him if he misses "these," referring to her breasts, as she quickly disrobes to display them, but rather than examine how sexual difference within the military informs contemporary relationships, Hyena Road plays dumb and quickly gets back to the shooting.
On an unlikely side note, Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson were hired to make a half-hour documentary about Hyena Road's production, titled Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, which recasts scenes from Gross's film with lasers and a synth score. At one point in the doc, Maddin walks through the desert, trailed by someone holding a green screen, and wonders, in voiceover, if an "aggressively artificial score" can't "force viewers into intellectual confrontation with the images—force viewers to sort truth from fiction for themselves?" Maddin's deliberately silly, pseudo-philosophical musings suggest more about the burden of suffering, whether physical or psychological, in 15 seconds than Gross manages in two hours.
Cast: Rossif Sutherland, Paul Gross, Christine Horne, Clark Johnson, Allan Hawco, Jennifer Pudavick Director: Paul Gross Screenwriter: Paul Gross Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films Running Time: 120 min Rating: R Year: 2015 Buy: Video, Book
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 upset 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.
Review: Radu Jude's I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
Jude's film is a bitterly comic essay on nationalist mythologies and historical amnesia.3.5
Prime minister of Romania during most of World War II, Ion Antonescu is one of the era's supreme villains: a virulent anti-Semite, Nazi collaborator, and authoritarian dictator whose troops murdered Jews with such velocity and enthusiasm that even Hitler was shocked by their actions. Upon ordering the forced expulsion—and, if necessary, genocide—of the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina, Antonescu proclaimed, "I do not care if we go down in history as Barbarians." Radu Jude borrows that declaration, so haunting in its cruelty and disarming in its blitheness, for the title of his latest film, a bitterly comic essay on nationalist mythologies and historical amnesia that locates the seeds of Romania's currently resurgent ethno-nationalism in the nation's collective failure to truly confront its own past.
For while Antonescu was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death by firing squad shortly after the war, there have been repeated attempts to rehabilitate his image in Romania since the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Take Sergiu Nicolaescu's 1994 film The Mirror, a hagiographic treatment of Antonescu's rule that portrays the leader as a defiant protector of his people. Jude inserts a substantial clip of that film into I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, having it play on a small TV set positioned in the exact center of the frame as we hear the off-screen voice of Jude's protagonist, Mariana (Ioana Iacob), providing sardonic, outraged commentary on the film's distorted presentation of Antonescu as a misunderstood hero. There's an element of desperation in the scene: While Mariana offers an incontestable rebuttal, no one but her boyfriend (Alex Bogdan) is there to hear it. Meanwhile, The Mirror's comforting nationalist lies are being beamed into homes all across Romania.
A headstrong theater director attempting to stage a public reenactment of the Odessa Massacre of 1941, in which Romanian troops slaughtered thousands of Ukrainian Jews, Mariana is obsessed with bringing the full weight of historical reality to her fellow countrymen. She obsessively reads histories of the period and drops quotations from philosophers and historical figures into everyday conversation. The film is consumed by lengthy, probing conversations—mostly shot by a statically mounted 16mm camera that pans back and forth to cover the actors' movements—in which Mariana discusses art, philosophy, history, and politics with her various collaborators and friends.
Her most persistent interlocutor is Movilă (Alexandru Dabija), a local official tasked with overseeing the publicly funded production, who constantly pleads with Mariana to tone down her work's unvarnished depiction of anti-Semitic violence. Movilă is a relativist, content in the knowledge that all memory is willfully selective, while Mariana truly believes in the power of stark historical truth. Though at times didactic and overloaded with quotations from the likes of Wittgenstein and Arendt, Jude's dialogue nevertheless manages to feel remarkably naturalistic. That's thanks in no small part to the powerfully unaffected performances of a cast that finds the subtle humor and neurotic character details embedded in Jude's dense screenplay. Iacob captures Mariana's unrelenting passion while also finding moments of vulnerability and self-doubt in the role, including moments of hesitation and anxiety borne of the fact that she's a petite, cosmopolitan woman attempting to exert control over a large cast of rugged men, many of whom are diametrically opposed to the vision of her project.
Jude's heavy themes are leavened by a self-effacing sense of modesty. Jude isn't attempting to make grand pronouncements about the nature of memory and truth. Rather, I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians finds the director constantly interrogating his own perspective, questioning Mariana's relationship to the wider public. That theme comes to a head in the film's climactic presentation of the artist's reenactment. Here, Jude switches from the warm dreaminess of 16mm to the harsh hyper-realism of digital video. The scene has the feel of a simple documentation of a live public event, but it isn't clear that it's actually any more "real" than the rest of the film. In particular, whether and to what extent the crowd of onlookers' reactions are coached remains one of the film's most intriguing enigmas.
Ultimately, Mariana finds herself perplexed and deflated by the public's response to her work. One senses this reaction may be autobiographical for Jude, whose film Aferim! attempted to challenge Romanian audiences about the nation's historical treatment of Roma people. As one of the few directors of the so-called Romanian New Wave whose work explores the country's unsavory pre-Soviet past, Jude is swimming against the popular tide of revisionism and historical moral blindness. The anti-Semitic violence and hatred laid out in his latest is truly chilling, as is the contemporary tendency to diminish and obscure that dark past. But perhaps most disturbing of all is the idea put forth in the film's conclusion: that one could present the truth to the public in all its brutality and horror, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference.
Cast: Ioana Iacob, Alexandru Dabija, Alex Bogdan, Ilinca Manolache, Serban Pavlu, Ion Rizea, Claudia Ieremia Director: Radu Jude Screenwriter: Radu Jude Distributor: Big World Pictures Running Time: 140 min Rating: NR Year: 2018
Interview: Lynn Shelton on Honing Her Process for Sword of Trust
The filmmaker discusses how she wants viewers to feel like they're paratrooping into her characters' lives.
Lynn Shelton has amassed a formidable body of work between her eight features and countless television episodes. Her latest outing, the comic adventure Sword of Trust, represents her most topical work to date. After pawn shop owner Mel (played by Marc Maron) purchases an old sword, he gets plunged into world of conspiracy culture as the relic attracts legions of online prowlers convinced that the weapon represents proof that the Confederacy won the Civil War. The logline might be Shelton's wildest yet, but the elements that have made her work indelible for over a decade remain intact: realistic conversations, emotional authenticity, and a commitment to multi-dimensional characters.
I chatted with Shelton on Sword of Trust's opening day, which saw the director, writer, producer, editor, and occasional actress in great spirits. Our conversation covered her pursuit of Maron for this specific project, how she developed her unique script-development process, and why she wants viewers to feel like they're paratrooping into her characters' lives.
Last year on Marc Maron's podcast, you mentioned that you liked exploring relationships between people who wouldn't normally interact. Sword of Trust continues in that tradition for you. What keeps bringing you back to these dynamics?
Have you heard of this theory of multiple intelligences, like different types of intelligences we have? I can't remember the names that [Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner] came up with, I think there's eight. I know I'm not the brightest bulb on all of these scales, but one way that I think I'm pretty high is in emotional intelligence. I like to think I am, anyway. I've always been that close observer of human behavior. I also really love humans. I feel like the thing that makes humans human are their flaws. So, on screen, I don't like to see people who are too smoothed out, all good or all bad. I'm interested in characters who are essentially good people, but they may be total fuck-ups and well-meaning who may sabotage themselves. Individual fucking up often happens in relation to other people. We may have a pre-determined need to connect to other people, but we're constantly sabotaging ourselves.
Sometimes, like I said on the podcast, I'm much more interested in unlikely combinations of people because it's not a prewritten script we're handed. It's not like, "This is who would be appropriate for you as a friend. This is the way you should act. This is the box we've already determined for you." Any kind of out-of-the-box way of living one's life or being surprised by a connection you feel to a human being, all those little happy accidents in life are the things I like to explore. To inspire people, not to just go through life in this sort of "this is what someone else had in mind for me, and I should follow that plan"—that feels very depressing to me. It's more interesting to open your heart and your life up to other experiences.
To explore relationships in that way makes the everyday more interesting and exciting.
Yeah, exactly. It gives you a reason to stick around.
Having been a guest of Marc's on his podcast twice, do you see any of his interviewer "persona" having an impact on the person you film on screen? Does training himself to listen and be present have any effect on making him a better screen partner?
Absolutely! The first time I directed Marc was on his TV show Maron, and I was so fascinated by his process. He's raw and a really natural actor. He steps in front of the camera, and he's looking at his scene partner and really knows how to listen and engage. A lot of that comes from sitting across from people and staring into their eyes. That's why he's such a good interviewer and has the top interview podcast, because he has a genuine conversation with people. And that's all acting really is too. He also has this weird ability to let the camera and crew and other extraneous details just fade away for him, and a lot of people find all that really distracting and difficult to shut out. He doesn't know where the camera is half the time. He said to me, "The next thing I want to do as an actor is figure out when the camera is on me." I said, "What?! That camera's right there!" He's like, "I don't see it. I'm not aware of it. I'm just in this scene with the person." I'm like, "That is a gift, my friend. That is incredible that you're able to not see the lights and craziness, just be in the scene." He's really able to do it. I think that definitely comes from that same skill set he's drawing on.
Where does the genesis of your films occur? They usually have some kind of strong conceptual selling point or hook, but they're often like a Trojan horse to get to deep conversations between the characters about something else.
It is, and the genesis of the vast majority of my films is an actor as a muse that I want to work with. Humpday was Mark Duplass, Outside In was his brother, Jay Duplass, this movie was Marc Maron, who I've been really wanting to make a movie with for three and a half years. Then there's other things, like a territory I want to explore or an element I want to return to, like improvisation, which I haven't done since Your Sister's Sister. I've done several movies in between that have been scripted, but I wanted to allow myself a new genre. I knew I wanted to laugh because the last movie was a drama, and I was ready to laugh—and let myself really laugh by going into the outlandish and ridiculous, plot-wise. Go into some comedy-caper territory, which I've never let myself do before. I've been totally real in every moment, and this time I was like, "What if I have real characters who go to a crazy place?" I wanted to make a culturally relevant movie that didn't make you want to slit your wrists. It referred to what was going on and some of the problematic elements of what we're dealing with in society. We're having this peak moment in conspiracy theories. They've always been around, but this is definitely where they've achieved a peak moment that I find very disturbing. So, it's usually a territory I want to explore and an actor I want to work with.
How do you research or prepare to authentically treat conspiracy culture?
Well, there's this thing called a computer and a thing called the internet, and boy, is it all in there! [laughs] We went down a rabbit hole with Mike O'Brien, my co-writer. It's so fascinating because there's little in-fighting. They really bonded over Pizzagate and the Twin Towers being an inside job, but then when it comes to hollow earth versus the earth is on fire, they're at odds and frenemies for life. It's insane, the shit you find.
How do you approach shooting improvisational dialogue? There's a very naturalistic feel to it, but there are hardly any vocal fillers like "um" or "you know."
Well, you get the right cast, so that really helps. I'll tell you, you can do a lot in the editing room. You'll see it on screen, there are these runs of incredible monologues. But if I'm cutting away to another actor for a reaction shot, it's often because I'm slicing out an "um" or an "ah" or a little bauble. The edit room is the most redemptive place in the universe. It's incredible what you can do and how you can carve out the right story. Especially with improvisation, it really is where the actual script is written. Our first cut—it didn't feel fat, it was funny throughout—was two and a half hours long. I was like, "How am I going to cut out five to seven minutes, much less an hour?" And for me, a comedy has to be 90 minutes, so I knew I needed an hour out of there. It was like, "This is hysterical, this is gold, but it's not serving the story. Ultimately, what is the story? It could be this, or it could include this, but let's just hone it down to Mel's emotional arc and make sure we can track it through the craziness." We want to care about these people just enough and balance it. There was so much work in the edit room.
Sword of Trust is definitely a comedy, but the scene I found most striking was Mel explaining his history to your character, Deidre, and in such a matter-of-fact, serious fashion, in the back of the truck. Did you always intend to set off this important part of the story with such a stark tonal contrast?
No, it wasn't. When Mike O'Brien really insisted that I be in the movie, I finally relented and thought I was going to be a random customer who came in for five seconds. But then, I realized she could be a device that helps us track Mel's arc. I was really panicking for a long time because I couldn't figure out how to make her funny. I can be comedic, but she wasn't comedic. She was so desperate and tragic. Then I finally realized that I wasn't going to worry about it. I wasn't going to try to turn her into some kind of laughing-stock. I was just going to be what she feels like she needs to be. That was an indication that this movie is going to have that real element of heaviness to it, but it happened really organically. I wanted you to care about these people, but I didn't realize there was going to be that much depth to one of them, so much poignant heart and humanity. That was a nice surprise.
You've described your writing process as being "upside-down," where the script develops alongside the characters. How did you develop this writing style?
I never went to traditional film school. I had this long, circuitous route to get to what I'm doing. I started as a theater actor, then I went to photography and started doing experimental work, but everything as a solo artist. The most important work of the film, making the process of the acting, is obstructed at every turn by the process of making it. You're out of order. In theater, you at least get to play a story from beginning to end and feel it out. You're at scene 35 on the first day and like, "What's happened before this? Where am I emotionally?" And then you've got to do it 40 times with the camera in different positions and act like nobody else is there. The whole thing is so hard, unless you're Meryl Streep! But if you're not working with Meryl Streep, what do you do as a director? I need real people on screen.
My second feature, My Effortless Brilliance, was a total experiment. I came up with these characters in my head and tried to cast them from a pretty small pool of actors. They were nothing like the characters. I realized, "What if you did it the other way? What if you had a person you wanted to work with…" That was where I started with that idea, and all I cared about was to make it feel like a documentary. I wanted you to turn the TV on and be like, "What am I watching? Am I in these people's lives?" And people have said they've had that experience where they'll turn it on in the middle of Showtime and have no idea what they're watching but that it feels like a documentary. Which is like, "Yes! That's what I meant."
And then I honed it with Humpday. Once I knew I could work in that way, I upped the stakes. I'll bring in a few lights. I had said, "No lights! Me and another camera operator with tiny cameras, a boom op, that's it." I eliminated the crew. But that was where I came up with that initial impulse, to make it feel really real. If the character fits the actor like a glove because it's half them or three-quarters them and they've developed it with me…I want real humans.
I actually had that experience of picking up one of your movies and not missing a beat. I was late to my showtime of Your Sister's Sister in the theater, but I didn't feel like I was lost. Then a few years later I watched it at home from the beginning, which helped it make a little more sense. But I felt I had easily intuited what I had missed.
It's funny because I want my movies to feel like you're paratrooping into somebody's life. We're taking a little journey down the river of their life for a while, and then we leave again. I don't like to tie things up too neatly at the end because I want you to get the sense that they're continuing to live their lives, and who knows what's going to happen in the future. But you just sort of paratrooped in a little bit later! [laughs]
On that note, there's a line toward the end of the film where Jillian Bell's character, Cynthia, takes a deep breath and says, "What a strange experience." Is that line improvised or scripted? In a lot of ways, the line feels like it sums up where characters often net out at the end of your films.
That was all improvised! It's all ordinary people going into crazy land, but yeah, ordinary people having weird dramas in their everyday lives. I mean, it can happen. I've heard stories of shit happening to random people that feel like…you couldn't write that shit!
Review: Into the Ashes Brings Nothing New to the Country Noir Genre
Aaron Harvey is prone to pulling back from any moment that might give greater depth to his revenge tale.2
Aaron Harvey's Into the Ashes is the latest in an increasing string of so-called country noirs set in the dilapidated backwoods of rural America, places ravaged by the opioid crisis and populated by jobless people long ago abandoned by politicians. It has little to distinguish itself, narratively or thematically, from similarly dour films, and it lets generic images of its rundown Alabama locale (rusted trucks, cramped houses, landlines in a wireless world) stand in as symbols of national decline without truly seeping into the complex social rot of the place. Its plot, of a reformed criminal forced to contend with his old gang leader over some stolen loot, is similarly superficial, hitting the typical beats of its genre.
Where Into the Ashes gets a boost is in its excellent cast of grizzled character actors, all of whom vibrantly express varying degrees of weariness and rage. Luke Grimes plays the erstwhile ne'er-do-well and ex-con Nick Brenner with the nervousness of a man who's just learning to let go of his past and give in to hope. The man's gruff, taciturn nature is leavened by his tender relationship with his wife, Tara (Marguerite Moreau), and he projects his faith in normalcy onto her. Nick relies so heavily on Tara for his emotional wellbeing that he anxiously calls home while on an overnight hunting trip just so he can hear her voice.
Equally human beneath a hard exterior is Nick's father-in-law, Frank (Robert Taylor), the local sheriff whose intimidating Tom Waits-esque voice and stiff demeanor belie his fumbling, masculine attempts to welcome Nick into his family. Strongest of all, though, is Frank Grillo as Sloan, Nick's recently paroled and vengeful boss. Grillo is at home playing big-fish-in-small-pond villains, and the actor makes the most of Sloan's thin characterization, exuding psychopathic menace when Sloan confronts Nick in the latter's home, drawing out every oblique threat as he circles the subject of the money that Nick stole from the crew's last job before Sloan was sent to prison. Grillo expertly inflects even the silliest moments of sub-Tarantino dialogue with a disarming venom, such as an extended riff on pie and ice cream.
But if the actors are primed to explore the contours around a basic premise, Henry constantly pulls back from any moment that might give greater depth to his revenge tale. Women exist to be supportive and to become victims, while character-driven conversations between Nick and Frank devolve into asinine ethics debates over justifiable violence. Worst of all, there's just no sense that the film is saying or revealing much of anything. There's one moment where Into the Ashes achieves a touch of bleak grace akin to the work of Cormac McCarthy by skipping over the events leading to a shootout and focusing only on its grisly aftermath: bodies strewn about in puddles of blood that look like reflective pools of black ice in the pale moonlight. Then, not five minutes later, we get a flashback showing the lead-up to that carnage. As with so much else in the film, a haunting moment of elision is negated by literal representation.
Cast: Luke Grimes, Frank Grillo, Marguerite Moreau, James Badge Dale, Robert Taylor, Brady Smith, Jeff Pope, Andrea Frankle Director: Aaron Harvey Screenwriter: Aaron Harvey Distributor: RLJE Films Running Time: 97 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: Sum 41's Order in Decline Presents a Band in Total Control
Review: Radu Jude's I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
Review: Ed Sheeran's No.6 Collaborations Project Feels Like Playacting
Interview: Lynn Shelton on Honing Her Process for Sword of Trust
Review: The Boys Is a Bleakly Cynical Take on the Superhero Genre
Review: In Angels Are Made of Light, a Nation Rebuilds in the Ruins of War
Review: Mike Wallace Is Here Honors a Legend by Arguing with Him
Review: The Boys Is a Bleakly Cynical Take on the Superhero Genre
Review: Season Three of GLOW Offers a Multifaceted Vision of the '80s
Review: Ealing Studios's Dead of Night Horror Anthology on Kino Lorber Blu-ray
- Music4 days ago
Review: Sum 41's Order in Decline Presents a Band in Total Control
- Film6 days ago
Review: Radu Jude's I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
- Music4 days ago
Review: Ed Sheeran's No.6 Collaborations Project Feels Like Playacting
- Features7 days ago
Interview: Lynn Shelton on Honing Her Process for Sword of Trust


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Just a month before the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in London, 24 Hour Fitness, San Ramon, CA, announced today that it is an official partner of the USA Basketball men's and women's national teams.
24 Hour, which has been the No. 1 club company on Club Industry's Top 100 Clubs list for eight consecutive years, first formed a partnership with USA Basketball in 2008, when the men's and women's teams both won gold medals.
"In our 30-year history, 24 Hour Fitness has been fortunate to support many great teams and athletes," Carl Liebert, 24 Hour Fitness president and CEO, said in a statement. "We were there with USA Basketball in Beijing to celebrate their success in bringing home gold medals in 2008, and we are honored to continue this legacy as the teams prepare for the 2012 Olympic Games in London."
To celebrate the partnership, 24 Hour will host a tip-off event in London during the Summer Games with Jerry Colangelo, USA Basketball chairman, and Mike Krzyzewski, head coach of the USA Basketball men's national team and men's basketball coach at Duke University. The event will take place at the United States Olympic Committee's (USOC) High Performance Training Center in East London.
"24 Hour Fitness has a proven history of helping world-class athletes train and perform at the highest levels," Colangelo said in a statement. "By teaming with USA Basketball, 24 Hour Fitness will provide 'best in class' resources for the talented players from the USA Basketball men's and women's national teams competing at the London 2012 Olympic Games this summer."
24 Hour will promote the partnership in its clubs and through USA Basketball games, media and special events. In addition, 24 Hour will conduct an employee contest, awarding top-performing managers with tickets to one of the two U.S. exhibition games for the USA Basketball men's and women's national teams.
24 Hour is an official sponsor of the USOC and is the official fitness center sponsor of the U.S. Olympic Team.
The Summer Games begin on July 27.

subset: commoncrawl


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evtifosi wrote:I have had the 50A OpenEVSE for just about a year, and just started to use the on board timers to great effect.
For a few months I used the Leaf timers, but those became harder to work with when I needed to charge during the day for some reason. I eventually just turned the timers in the car off.
I started playing around with the current options to reduce the amount of charge I was getting, and then finally decided to just use the OpenEVSE timers. I have them set to start at 4:05am - and shut off at 6:55am. This will charge my 2015 SV from close to 20% to 100%, and if I am around 10% or lower it will typically charge it back to around 85%. It seems like a good setting for our limited use. I am on PG&E E-6 TOU rate plan and have Solar Panels...so this guarantees that we are charging off peak.
I got tired of remembering to go out to the garage after 9PM or plug it in when I woke up in the morning - so I love the timer function - just wish I had used it sooner!!!


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Wal-Mart's CEO Provides The Starkest Visual Of The Modern Bread Line Yet
by Tyler Durden
In today's Art Cashin Comments there is a stunning admission by none other than the CEO of Walmart on what modern day bread lines look like. To wit:
Profits And Baby Formula – Our pal, Rich Yamarone, over at Bloomberg picked up an eye-opening statement made by the Wal-Mart CEO last week.
I don't need to tell you that our customer remains challenged…You need not go farther than one of our stores on midnight at the end of the month. And it's real interesting to watch, about 11 p.m. customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items – baby formula, milk, bread, eggs – and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight when government electronic benefits cards get activated, and then the checkout starts and occurs. And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher.
Talk about shopping only for necessities. The mid-night trip for baby formula says it all.
Luckily the NBER said the recession ended. Hurray:
The rest…HERE


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14K Diamond Destiny Band 1/4 ctw
In Stock | STYLE: WB5722W
Available in 7-10 Business Days
Our destiny bands are wedding bands destined to fit almost any engagement ring. Crafted with 14 karat gold and diamonds, the total diamond weight is 1/4 ctw.*Prices are subject to change based on fluctuations in metal prices and currencies
Our Bridal Bells collection is the natural way to show your love for each other. Our engagement rings are like the brilliance of a sunset captured in diamonds that shine like stars in the sky. Each band represents true love, eternal as the sunrise, in every day spent together. Bridal Bells. Inspired by nature, designed for love.


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Lacy Fox of Florence, Ky. the daughter of Samantha and Brian Riley, and granddaughter of Harriet and Tony Colello of Worthville, and the late Delmar and Lena Fox has accepted a Presidential Scholarship from Xavier University.
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I live in San Francisco, and yesterday I discovered that my local market has stopped selling Gulf Coast seafood. Before BP's deep sea oil rig exploded and sunk off the coast of Louisiana, the shop stocked shrimp and blue crab, which make up a big portion of the state's US$2.8 billion commercial fishing industry. But oil deposits and traces of chemical dispersants used to help clean up the spill are appearing in blue crab larvae in Louisiana, a harbinger of contamination making its way into the food chain. Unfortunately for the Gulf's fishing and shrimping economy, many of us will choose not to feed ourselves from its supply for a while, but the decision to stop feeding our voracious addiction to petroleum with deep sea deposits is more controversial. Even as the fishing industry, wildlife, and wetlands that were hit by the Gulf spill remain in a desperate condition, offering a bleak reality check on the consequences of our oil dependence, one can still hear "Drill Baby, Drill!" echoing through the halls of Congress. The United States currently consumes over 18 million barrels of oil per day, making it the largest global consumer of the waning resource. Nearly 60 percent of that oil is imported from other parts of the world. The U.S.'s remaining domestic supply is largely underground and out at sea, and much of it is located in the Gulf of Mexico and other sensitive marine habitats and fishing economies like the Alaskan coast. Our thirst for oil is getting harder to quench, and we are now searching ever deeper into the earth and oceans in pursuit of the last drops. In arctic waters off of Greenland, plans to drill are underway despite the recency of the Gulf's hard-learned lesson. The Greenpeace ship Esperanza is currently positioned off the coast of Greenland to confront Cairn Energy, the first company granted permission to exploit the area. Despite all warning signs, chanters of "Drill Baby, Drill!" are not going to give up until a system-wide societal shift — off of oil — renders their mantra obsolete. But where do we find the tools, know-how, and scalability to transform us from gas-guzzlers into clean energy consumers and thus avoid another environmental and economic catastrophe?
While politicians and oil execs perpetuate reckless endeavors to exploit the world's scant and hard-to-access oil reserves, another powerful industry group is building the tools to end this addiction once and for all. Information Technology solutions can make the U.S. and the world more efficient, less carbon intensive, and less reliant on fossil fuels. With bigger investments, strong political advocacy, and a serious jumpstart to the development of technological solutions, IT companies can help us end our oil addiction. Here's how:
Transportation, oil's greatest co-conspirator, needs an overhaul. Widespread adoption of electric vehicles can get us to gas-free transportation, but not without the help of smart systems built by IT companies. It has been estimated that petroleum use in the U.S. alone could be reduced by roughly one-third, from 20 million to 13 million barrels a day if half of the country's cars and trucks go electric in the next 20 years. But plugging in to cut fossil fuel reliance necessitates a guarantee of renewable energy to power the grid, so we don't trade one fossil fuel (oil) for another (coal). IT solutions to the rescue. An IT-enabled smart grid can ensure that electric transportation is powered by renewable sources of energy, and competitors Cisco, IBM, Google, and other IT giants are already leading the charge. IT companies are building the communication platforms and network management systems for monitoring, analyzing and controlling power consumption for vehicle charging. They are also providing commercial and home energy management technologies. IBM is working on the integration of intermittent energy sources, like wind, into a smart grid system that supports plug-in vehicles, and Cisco has predicted that the smart grid will represent a US$20 billion market over the next five years. Meanwhile, partnerships between heavy hitters, such as Ford and Microsoft and Google and GM, are proving that vehicle manufacturers and IT companies will make good bedfellows in a clean energy economy. As these companies team up to automate vehicle charging and run the communication systems of electric vehicles, perhaps the car manufacturers will enjoy working with IT innovators better than with their old cronies in the oil industry.
Reducing oil consumption can be as easy as joining a car-share program, or even better, learning to ride a bike. Now, IT technologies are making it feasible to thoroughly integrate vehicle and bicycle sharing into transportation systems by powering car and bike-sharing networks that allow consumers to access real-time information about the location and availability of the form of transportation needed. Barcelona's popular Bicing service was recently enhanced by the addition of an iPhone app, which uses GPS to pinpoint the user's location and help them find a convenient bike station for pick-up or drop-off, saving time on both ends. The app also displays Google Maps with interactive navigation. In the first two months alone, the program registered over 30,000 users.
Congestion pricing, deployed primarily in Europe thus far, places a user charge on vehicles entering and exiting the central part of a city during peak hours to reduce congestion and pollution. An integrated IT system recognizes vehicles and bills them accordingly. Stockholm's system was developed in collaboration with IBM, and it reduced 25 percent of the city's vehicle traffic during its first month of operation in 2006. London, Milan, and Singapore have deployed similar systems, and New York and San Francisco are hoping to follow suit, but must first overcome local and state political hurdles.
What was it that Mark Twain said about San Francisco? That the shortest business trip he ever took was to Cisco's TelePresence Suite? Something like that. Remote collaboration using IT videoconferencing like Cisco's TelePresence and Webex or Adobe Connect can replace a significant portion of global business travel. Not only do these technologies make you feel like you're on the deck of the Starship Enterprise, they also seriously cut vehicle miles traveled by allowing business to be conducted face-to-face through virtual meetings. According to analysis conducted by Cisco, the life-cycle energy savings of its remote collaboration product offerings, and found that two meetings per week for an entire year using TelePrescence is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions expended in a single one-way trip from San Francisco to Heathrow or Tokyo. Teleworking, i.e. working from home, is one of the greatest opportunities to cut energy expenditures through the substitution of IT technologies for work-related oil consumption. The Telework Research Network estimates that if just 2 percent of employees in the U.S. worked from home half of the time, over 280 million barrels of oil would be saved.
Energy use for the transport of goods by land, air, and sea represents 20 percent of the world's total energy consumption. The Climate Group's SMART 2020 report calculates the energy savings of software and hardware tools that improve the design of networks, route optimization, and logistics of the global movement of goods. Global emissions savings from IT-enabled transport efficiencies and storage can achieve energy savings worth US$441.7 billion. Rising fuel costs and pressure from initiatives like the Supply Chain Leadership Coalition, a group of multinational companies that require suppliers to track and report greenhouse gas emissions, are creating a market for IT supply chain management and logistics software. Many IT Companies, including Oracle and SAP sell supply chain management software to help companies assess the carbon intensity of their logistics and across all operations.
[Photo credit: Gary Cook]
Renewables is the answer..
Overall renewable energy production increased by 8.3% between 2008 and 2009, for a total share of 18.4% of energy pro...
Renewables is the answer..
Overall renewable energy production increased by 8.3% between 2008 and 2009, for a total share of 18.4% of energy production in the EU. Coal consumption dropped 16.3%.
27 August, 2010 at 12:45
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I agree that renewable is the best solution to the worlds problems. The problem I see is with the government (I am in the USA) not taking action to pr...
I agree that renewable is the best solution to the worlds problems. The problem I see is with the government (I am in the USA) not taking action to promote it. I agree that some weak forms of commitment have been done, but for the most part.......nothing. I believe it is going to have to be the "people" who will have to be pro-active to make governments move in the right direction.
28 August, 2010 at 20:16
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Detective TurtleHolmes wrote:YArr, me ol' china, Anthrobabe! Ye retern! An hupdate: Auntie B's got a nef yoo, an it be Nef Yoo. Jus' slap the blaggard.
Oar whack him wif a hammer.
Sum Beans
Git four beans.
Eat sum beans.
after eatin beans--sleep outside on deck!
Yar matey I do likes a bit o whacken wif a 'ammer now an agin!


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I am discovering that mathematicians cannot tell the difference between "proof by contradiction" and "proof of negation". This is so for good reasons, but conflation of different kinds of proofs is bad mental hygiene which leads to bad teaching practice and confusion. For reference, here is a short explanation of the difference between proof of negation and proof by contradiction.
By the way, this post is something I have been meaning to write for a while. It was finally prompted by Timothy Gowers's blog post "When is proof by contradiction necessary?" in which everything seems to be called "proof by contradiction".
As far as I can tell, "proof by contradiction" among ordinary mathematicians means any proof which starts with "Suppose …" and ends with a contradiction. But two kinds of proofs are like that:
Proof of negation is an inference rule which explains how to prove a negation:
To prove $\lnot \phi$, assume $\phi$ and derive absurdity.
The rule for proving negation is the same classically and intuitionistically. I mention this because I have met ordinary mathematicians who think intuitionistic proofs are never allowed to reach an absurdity.
Proof by contradiction, or reductio ad absurdum, is a different kind of animal. As a reasoning principle it says:
To prove $\phi$, assume $\lnot \phi$ and derive absurdity.
As a proposition the principle is written $\lnot \lnot \phi \Rightarrow \phi$, which can be proved from the law of excluded middle (and is in fact equivalent to it). In intuitionistic logic this is not a generally valid principle.
Admittedly, the two reasoning principles look very similar. A classical mathematician will quickly remark that we can get either of the two principles from the other by plugging in $\lnot \phi$ and cancelling the double negation in $\lnot \lnot \phi$ to get back to $\phi$. Yes indeed, but the cancellation of double negation is precisely the reasoning principle we are trying to get. These really are different.
I blame the general confusion on the fact that an informal proof of negation looks almost the same as an informal proof by contradiction. In order to prove $\lnot \phi$ a mathematician will typically write:
"Suppose $\phi$. Then … bla … bla … bla, which is a contradiction. QED."
In order to prove $\phi$ by contradiction a mathematician will typically write:
"Suppose $\lnot \phi$. Then … bla … bla … bla, which is a contradiction. QED."
The difference will be further obscured because the text will typically state $\lnot \phi$ in an equivalent form with negation pushed inwards. That is, if $\phi$ is something like $\exists x, \forall y, f(y) < x$ and the proof goes by contradiction then the opening statement will be "Suppose for every $x$ there were a $y$ such that $f(y) \geq x$." With such "optimizations" we really cannot tell what is going on by looking just at the proof. We have to take into account the surrounding context (such as the original statement being proved).
A second good reason for the confusion is the fact that both proof principles feel the same when we try to use them. In both cases we assume something believed to be false and then we hunt down a contradiction. The difference in placement of negations is not easily appreciated by classical mathematicians because their brains automagically cancel out double negations, just like good students automatically cancel out double negation signs.
Keeping all this in mind, let us look at Timothy Gower's blog examples.
Irrationality of $\sqrt{2}$
The first example is irrationality of $\sqrt{2}$. Because "$\sqrt{2}$ is irrational" is by definition the same as "$\sqrt{2}$ is not rational" we are clearly talking about a proof of negation. There is a theorem about normal forms of proofs in intuitionistic logic which tells us that every proof of a negation can be rearranged so that it ends with the inference rule cited above. In this sense the method of proof "assume $\sqrt{2}$ is rational, …, contradiction" is unavoidable.
I want to make two further remarks. The first one is that the usual proof of irrationality of $\sqrt{2}$ is intuitionistically valid. Let me spell it out:
Theorem: $\sqrt{2}$ is not rational.
Proof. Suppose $\sqrt{2}$ were equal to a fraction $a/b$ with $a$ and $b$ relatively prime. Then we would get $a^2 = 2 b^2$, hence $a^2$ is even and so is $a$. Write $a = 2 c$ and plug it back in to get $2 c^2 = b^2$, from which we conclude that $b$ is even as well. This is a contradiction since $a$ and $b$ were assumed to be relatively prime. QED.
No proof by contradiction here!
My second remark is that this particular example is perhaps not good for discussing proofs of negation because it reduces to inequality of natural numbers, which is a decidable property. That is, as far as intuitionistic logic is concerned, equality and inequality of natural numbers are both equally "positive" relations. This is reflected in various variants of the proof given by Gowers on his blog, some of which are "positive" in nature.
The situation with reals is different. There we could define the so-called apartness relation $x \# y$ to mean $x < y \lor y < x$. The negation of apartness is equality, but the negation of equality is not apartness, at least not intuitionistically (classically of course this whole discussion is a triviality). A proof of inequality $x \neq y$ of real numbers $x$ and $y$ may thus proceed in two ways:
- The direct way: assume $x = y$ and derive absurdity
- Via apartness: prove $x \# y$ and conclude that $x \neq y$
Note that the proof of $x \# y \Rightarrow x \neq y$ still involves the usual proof of negation in which we assume $x \# y \land x = y$ and derive absurdity.
A continuous map on $[0,1]$ is bounded
The second example is the statement that a continuous map $f : [0,1] \to \mathbb{R}$ is bounded. The direct proof uses the Heine-Borel property of the closed interval to find a finite cover of $[0,1]$ such that $f$ is bounded on each element of the cover. There is also a proof by contradiction which goes as follows:
Suppose $f$ were unbounded. Then we could find a sequence $(x_n)_n$ in $[0,1]$ such that the sequence $(f(x_n))_n$ is increasing and unbounded (this uses Countable Choice, by the way). By Bolzano-Weierstras there is a convergent subsequence $(y_n)_n$ of $(x_n)_n$. Because $f$ is continuous the sequence $(f(y_n))_n$ is convergent, which is impossible because it is a subsequence of the increasing and unbounded sequence $(f(x_n))_n$. QED.
Can we turn this proof into one that does not use contradiction (but still uses Bolzano-Weierstrass)? Constructive mathematicians are well versed in doing such things. Essentially we have to look at the supremum of $f$, like Timothy Gowers does, but without actually referring to it. The following proof is constructive and direct.
Theorem: If every sequence in a separable space $X$ has a convergent subsequence, then every continuous real map on $X$ is bounded.
Proof. Let $(x_n)_n$ be a dense sequence in $X$ and $f : X \to \mathbb{R}$ continuous. For every $n$ there is $k$ such that $f(x_k) \geq \max(f(x_1), …, f(x_n)) – 1$. By Countable Choice there is a sequence $(k_n)_n$ such that $f(x_{k_n}) \geq \max(f(x_1), …, f(x_n)) – 1$ for every $n$. Let $(z_n)_n$ be a convergent subsequence of $(x_{k_n})_n$ and let $z$ be its limit. Because $f$ is continuous there is $d > 0$ such that $f(z_n) \leq f(z) + d$ for all $n$. Consider any $x \in X$. Because $f$ is continuous and $(x_n)_n$ is dense there is $x_i$ such that $f(x) \leq f(x_i) + 1$. Observe that there is $j$ such that $f(x_{k_i}) – 1 \leq f(z_j)$. Now we get $$f(x) \leq f(x_i) + 1 \leq \max(f(x_1), …, f(x_i)) + 1 \leq f(x_{k_i}) + 2 \leq f(z_j) + 3 < f(z) + d + 3.$$ We have shown that $f(z) + d + 3$ is an upper bound for $f$. QED.
I am pretty sure with a bit more work we could show that $f$ attains its supremum, and in fact this must have been proved by someone constructively.
The moral of the story is: proofs by contradiction can often be avoided, proofs of negation generally cannot, and if you think they are the same thing, you will be confused.


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Awards, Agreements, and Orders Made Under the Industrial Relations Act, the Apprentices Act, and Other Industrial Legislation for the Year ..., Volume 86, Issue 7
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Ian Heys
Format: PAL
Duration: 60 minutes
First Pasture Price: £9.95
Status: In Stock
The Great Western Railway's branch from Whitham to Yatton passed through some of the West Country's most beautiful scenery. The railway passed through the rolling countryside around the villages of Wanstrow and Cranmore before crossing over the S&D line at Shepton Mallet. The line then skirted around the south side of the Mendip Hills passing through the Cathedral City of Wells. As well as explaining the city's complicated railway history, some excellent cine film shows the Market Place and the Cathedral in the late 1950s. The line then passed through the dramatic and beautiful scenery around Wookey, Cheddar and Axbridge before dipping down onto the coastal plain to join up with the GWR's Bristol to Exeter mainline at Yatton. Again some superb cine film shows Cheddar Gorge with a wealth of ancient buses struggling up the gradient as well as the pretty village of Axbridge.
Railway highlights from the 25 minutes of archive cine film include a trip from Shepton Mallet to Whitham filmed in the late 1950s and a journey from Whitham along the length of the branch to Yatton filmed during 1963. Scenes taken after the lines closure to passengers show one of the last Strawberry Specials loading up at Draycott and a trip down the remaining stub of the branch to Cheddar on the RCTS Railtour in 1969.
The cine film is complimented by numerous archive black and white photographs and modern film shows what is left of the branch today including scenes inside Foster Yeoman's quarry at Merehead and the East Somerset Railway at Cranmore. A full commentary as well as the memories of the men who worked the branch compliments the film.


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