BIFF: August

Indy filmmakers seem to share Hollywood’s contempt for the supposedly evil businessman, but if there is one exception to the stereotype, it is the tech guru. Internet start-up wizards who created business plans with no appreciable stream of revenue are not typically portrayed like the crass capitalist. A fresh example would be Josh Harnett’s Tom Sterling, a one-time Wired magazine cover-boy with an ugly neck tattoo, whose spectacular fall is told in the upcoming film August (trailer here), which screened at the Brooklyn International Film Fest.

Sterling capitalized on his younger brother’s innovations to create Landshark, the last of the tech start-ups to get Wall Street’s blessing. What they do is kept purposefully vague. Harnett tells a potential client: “We’re not the e-commerce, we’re the e.” So how is that “e” working out? Not well. After a blockbuster IPO, Landshark has come crashing down to Earth and desperately needs an infusion of capital to stay afloat.

Harnett’s Sterling is portrayed as a snake oil salesman without any oil. His brother’s breakthroughs are the real deal, but their revenue projections are not. There simply is no market for whatever Landshark has to offer—at least not yet. All Sterling really has to sell are image and rhetoric, running the company in his words: “on fumes.” When Sterling finally gets his comeuppance at the hands of old school moneymen, personified by David Bowie, it is stone cold business.

Sterling might be self-important, but he is also self-destructive, as witnessed by his sabotage of a second chance with Sarrah, an ex-girlfriend, played by Naomie Harris, who brings a distinct charm to a thankless role. He also has issues with his parents, former sixties radicals who sold out to academia, but cannot understand his dreams of capitalist glory. (They do listen to John Coltrane and Benny Goodman, so they can’t be all bad).

August moves at a lightning quick pace as the Landsharkers scramble against time to save the company, but it is hard to fully sympathize with Sterling along the way, due to the limitations of its lead. For his part, Hartnett is totally convincing as an arrogant jerk, but less so expressing more complex emotions, so director Austin Chick wisely plays to his strength.

When Landshark crashes, it is pretty dramatic, but August seems to keep it all in perspective. The title refers to the specific time in which it is set, August 2001, a month before September 11th. The implication seems to be that in a September 10th world, the doings of Sterling’s start-up could considered quite important, but in a post-September 11th world, much less so. In effect, August depicts an innocent time that thought it was cynical, as evidenced by clips of the moron media’s celebrity coverage and manufactured controversies.

August is pretty smart in its portrayal of the death rattle of the internet boom. Much of it will ring true to those who first heard constantly about stock options from friends at dotcoms, and then suddenly nothing, when their company’s stock certificates became cheap souvenirs of the late 1990’s. It effectively recreates a specific time and place, as well as the attitude that went with it. It opens in New York at the Village East on July 11th.

BIFF: Shorts

Film festivals are just about the only venue left for short films, aside from the occasional theatrical round-up of the year’s Oscar nominated shorts. Last week, BIFF held up its end with an extensive selection of shorts, which varied widely in every discernable measure. Three were particularly memorable, again for very different reasons.

The best single film of the festival had a mere thirteen minute running time, but each minute counted. In German director Jochen Alexander Freydank’s Toyland (Spielzeugland), an Aryan mother cannot bring herself to explain to her young son that his Jewish best friend will be imminently transported to a concentration camp. Instead, she tells him that friend is going to Toyland. Naturally, her son wants to go too, as the mother’s white lie leads to complications she had not foreseen. It is difficult to reveal much of the story given its brevity, but it well earns the emotional payoff of its elegant conclusion.

Toyland handles the subject of the Holocaust with respect and dignity. Unfortunately, The River of Copsa Mica, simply uses WWII and the Holocaust as window dressing for an allegory about environmental pollution and the military-industrial complex. Making a statement on current controversies is perfectly legitimate, but using such a significant event as a rhetorical device borders on the offensive.

Thabo Wolfaardt’s surprisingly intense Joburg (trailer here), though certainly self-contained, would be the one short film of the festival that most cries out to be expanded into a full feature. Filmed entirely in Johannesburg, it effectively captures the danger and squalor of the city. Tshepo, a newspaper hawker desperate to pay for his brother’s medicine and overdue rent, carjacks a pregnant woman having a very bad night. The relationship between these two characters is deftly handled, leading viewers to speculate about further dealings between them.

The best short films require the discipline of the short story and the imagery of poetry. Making a really good one is hard, but Toyland and Joburg are excellent examples.

BIFF: Panman

The drum has always held great spiritual significance beyond its ostensible role making music, particularly in the Caribbean. It inspired Duke Ellington to write A Drum is a Woman, the story of Carribee Joe and his personified drum Madam Zajj, for an installment of CBS’ the United States Steel Hour. It was a program that probably would have appealed to the lead character of Panman, Rhythm of the Palms (trailer here), which screened at BIFF this weekend.

The drum in question for Panman is the steel pan drum, which originated in Trinidad, but spread throughout the Caribbean, including the Dutch Antilles. It is the instrument that has given meaning to Harry Daniel’s life, but as the film opens, his traditional style of music has fallen out of favor. He labors through a demeaning resort gig, before his deteriorating body collapses, which cues a flashback of his musical rise and fall, told through the narration of his estranged student Jacko.

Though fictional, Daniel’s career follows a path recognizable to those who have seen a lot of musical biographies. As a young man, his musical talent initially makes him a star, but his business concerns are damaged by his troubled brother’s incompetence. Along the way, he meets the right woman, but his obsessive dedication to his music leads him to neglect his family.

Oddly, there is not a lot of steel pan in Panman. It seems more interested in using the instrument as a symbol—representing both the traditional music losing popularity to modern electronic forms, and African culture, as opposed to the Dutch, which many on St. Maarten persist in identifying with. Fortunately, Panman is relatively restrained when addressing issues of cultural identity. (It is considered the first film to be produced by St. Maarten, though directed by the Dutch Sander Burger.)

As a result, the individual drama has to carry the load in Panman, and to that end, screenwriter Ian Valz is quite credible as Daniel, giving the audience both rage and nuance. Frankly, the entire cast holds up well, considering there are not a lot of musical interludes to leaven the script’s trials and tragedies.

Although Valz’s Daniel avoided the cliché of self-destructive substance abuse, there is much in Daniel’s story arc which seems predictable. In a sense though, the lack of faith shown in pan music by the filmmakers undercuts their lionization of Daniel. However, things never get irreparably bogged down in melodrama, and Panman does convey a good sense of life on St. Maarten. Highly watchable, it still might disappoint hardcore steel drum enthusiasts.

BIFF: Blue Hour

The Los Angeles River is probably best cinematically remembered in James Cameron’s Terminator 2. It plays a role of even greater significance in Eric Nazarian’s independent film, The Blue Hour (trailer here), a completely different undertaking altogether, which screened at the BKLN fest.

Nazarian’s film is a painfully personal examination of individual tragedy and alienation as seen through the eyes of several characters whose paths cross but lives do not intersect, in the Pulp Fiction style of overlapping narratives. Blue Hour in contrast, unfolds in a deliberate pace, making John Sayles look like the Wachowski Brothers.

Emily Rios plays Happy, an essentially unsupervised young teen, who uses the river embankment as her canvas. Avo and Allegra, played by Dutch actor Yorick Van Wageningen and Alyssa Milano, still mourn the death of their young daughter, as their relationship frays. Derrick O’Connor plays Humphrey, an old man going through the motions of life, still mourning his wife’s death. In an inspired act of casting, Clarence Williams III plays Ridley, a blues guitarist, staying in a low rent hotel while he tends to his dying mother wasting away in a hospital. These lonely, disparate lives are tied together by a few locations: the river, the cemetery, and a blues-rock bar, and a doomed homeless man.

This is not a talky picture. Nazarian’s isolated characters go for long stretches without speaking, but music does play an important role in the film. Happy takes inspiration from hip hop, and the blues supplies Ridley’s living, such as it is. Various characters drift into a lounge where Eric Burdon of the Animals leads the house blues-rock band. Their take on “Motherless Child” perfectly suits the film’s melancholy.

Burdon actually had personal significance to Nazarian, who was in fact named after the British invasion star. In the production notes he explains: “Burdon’s music was an escape for my father’s ‘Soviet hippy’ generation in the USSR. ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’ and ‘They Can’t Take Away Our Music’ were their anthems and battle cries against the oppressive years during Brezhnev’s era.”

Nazarian is a patient director, with a painter’s eye for composition. His cast is uniformly good, especially the great Williams. His character do experience redemptive moments, but they are subtle and fleeting (as in some Russian literature). Elegantly crafted, Blue Hour is a demanding film, which wins the respect of those who stay with it. Like the makers of The Collective, also screened at BIFF, he conveys a strong sense of his subject city, but unlike the dangerous (and by extension seductive) New York of the former film, it is a city of sadness that Nazarian portrays on- screen.

BIFF: Pang Nat Det (Punk Not Dead)

Given the political corruption of Indonesia’s political system and its traditional Islamic society, it is understandable how its younger generations, feeling repressed, would be so receptive to punk rock. Punk might be little more than a nostalgia trip in the West, but evidently Indonesia’s scene is thriving, which is why the long-in-the-tooth German punk band Cluster Bomb Unit periodically tours there. It is one such tour that Andreas Geiger follows in his documentary, Pang Nat Det (Punk Not Dead a.k.a. Punk im Dschungel), screening as part of the Brooklyn International Film Festival (trailer here).

Cluster Bomb Unit never really became huge, so do not be alarmed if you weren’t previously hip to them. Still, despite living quiet suburban and rural lives, they periodically get together for shows and tours. Before leaving Germany, they play a gig for a few hundred uninspired listeners. During the tour they play for thousands of Indonesians moshing and rioting in front of them, which explains why they come. It is not for the money. During the tour, they crash at local punk collectives and receive no upfront guarantees, but they get rockstar treatment, of a sort, from their loyal fans and friends.

We hear a whole lot of Cluster Bomb Unit in performance. If you are a German punk enthusiast, this is the film for you, but if you are not already a fan, their music might not win you over. In German, punk sounds even more severe, and translated for subtitles, their lyrics read like self-parody. However, the band members seem very down-to-earth and good-natured when interacting with Indonesian punks when off-stage. They also appear genuinely interested in all aspects of their host country’s culture, like guitarist Werner Nötzel, who buys some campy, but intriguing looking Indonesian pop on vinyl.

The initial set-up for Pang shows a lot of potential. Indeed, the visual images of big, grizzled German punks making their way through sleepy Indonesian villages are undeniably intriguing. Unfortunately, the film never really gets beyond the basic travelogue. Rather late in the film, Geiger does try to establish the local punks’ credentials as political activists, particularly as advocates of an anti-consumerist D-I-Y campaign. (Ironically though, the punks seem quite enterprising, coordinating ambitious tours for clueless European bands.)

Geiger also seems to want to position punks within the Indonesian mainstream, recording one punk’s Imam pronouncement that: “punks are good people.” It is great that he is so accepting, but one wonders what kind of responses Geiger would have received had he polled twenty or thirty more Imams.

It is definitely fascinating to see this Indonesian sub-culture based on western music survive and even thrive. It is also encouraging to see Cluster Bomb Unit can still bring it loud and rude, but once you have those points, you largely got the entire film. It screens again as part of BIFF on Saturday at the Brooklyn Lyceum.

BIFF: The Collective

A thriller that starts with a quotation from Reinhold Neibuhr deserves some kind of style points. In this case, it is a particularly apt quote: “Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity,” foreshadowing the sinister nature of the cult at the center of Judson Pearce Morgan and Kelly Overton’s The Collective, and supplying its title. Screening at the Brooklyn International Film Festival, The Collective (trailer here) is a surprisingly effective thriller that really captures the feel of life in New York City.

Tyler Clarke has rushed to New York City to help her sister Jessica after receiving a disturbing late night phone call. A stranger to the City, Clarke finds her sister has quit her job and moved out of her apartment. Her only initial lead is the number of the cell phone her sister called from, which automatically goes to voice mail in a foreign language. Eventually, she meets some of Jessica’s creepy new friends, who tell her Jessica is fine, but cannot see her right now, so please go home. For obvious reasons, she is not buying it.

Soon she discovers Jessica has fallen in with the Collective, a bizarre hipster cult based in a deconsecrated cathedral, inspired according to the filmmakers, by the notorious Limelight club. Informed by such City lore, Collective is a real New York film, with locations ranging from the immediately recognizable Times Square, to Chelsea, Gramercy Park, and Brooklyn. (Of course, it must have been happenstance that while shooting a film about an evil cult, the directors briefly caught some footage of the Scientology building.) While viewers will probably see at least one of the big plot twists coming down Park Avenue South, the film’s great strength is capturing the sense of alienation felt when alone in New York—the menace beneath the bright lights.

Co-writer-co-producer-co-director Overton is also on-screen for at least ninety percent of the film as the responsible Clarke sister, and she carries the film well. Her Tyler is likable and believable, aside from occasionally not asking a few obvious questions. The supporting cast is also strong, particularly Laura Allen, as the Collective’s ruthless Clare. Consisting of working New York actors largely known for television and theater work, the cast has been all over the Law & Order franchise. Overton also appeared in the Kathleen Turner production of The Graduate and Donnie Keshawarz, who was also appearing in Disney’s Tarzan during filming, plays the evil cult master Rost.

While very New York savvy, The Collective says much about the importance of family during times of crisis, as well. The film is also notable for casting its villains as cafeteria New Agers, rather than fundamentalist Christians, making this a film that both evangelicals and downtown denizens could probably enjoy. The HD cinematography actually looks great and it is briskly paced, but what really makes the film is its sense of the City. So far, it has been the surprise of the festival. It screens again at the Brooklyn Lyceum on Thursday. The co-producers also announced at the festival that they had reached a distribution deal, so those outside of New York may eventually have a chance to see it too.

BIFF: Apollo 54

No publishing house will ever crank out a book about the science of Apollo 54. That is because anyone with a third grade education could tell there isn’t any. Embracing its low budget with crude but inventive effects, director Giordano Giulivi’s Italian sci-fi spoof Apollo 54 (trailer here) is not exactly going for realism. Screening this week at the Brooklyn International Film Festival, A54 is an odd little film in search of a weird cult following.

As A54 opens, the Earth’s television and computer screens have been taken over by a mysterious signal broadcasting cryptic symbols (except for the television set showing the news broadcast which provides this exposition). Walking through the countryside, slovenly scientist Bobby Joe discovers a giant interstellar cable, which might be the source of the disruptive signal. Instead of telling somebody, he fashions an interstellar sky-gondola to follow the cable, evidently adapted from his house. Together with his sidekick Jim Bob, they set off to find the source.

Frankly, it is unnecessary to go any further into the storyline, and don’t even waste your time poking holes in the plot. Yes, the whole orbit and rotation of the Earth would make it impossible for it to be attached to other planets by a taut line of cable. Just like opening a spaceship’s hatch while in hyperspace would probably not be a wise idea. A54 is for those who want to revel in its grade Z goofiness, without the constraints of killjoy logic.

At times A54 is very funny, with a bizarre eye for detail—the table lamp on the spaceship dashboard is a particularly homey touch. However, it gets a little repetitive in the second half, and the final revelations borrow heavily from the Matrix trilogy. Yet for a certain geek audience, this film can’t miss. You already know if you are one of those people.

Adventurous but not demented audiences might enjoy A54 too, if in the proper mood. It screens again as part of BIFF on Saturday at the Brooklyn Heights Cinema.