The ninth edition of the Maryland Film Festival closed Sunday night with a triumphant stammer. Johns Hopkins rsquo; creative writing grad Jeffrey (Spellbound) Blitz returned to his college town to present his debut fiction feature, Rocket Science, an engaging and innovative comedy about a stuttering central New Jersey high school student (Reece Daniel Thompson) who joins the debate team out of love for the team rsquo;s star (Anna Kendrick). There rsquo;ll be plenty of opportunities to discuss the film before it opens in August, and even afterward; like Little Miss Sunshine, it should be around for a long time.
What made it an ideal capper for the festival was its Baltimore-ness. Blitz shot the film in Homeland, Dundalk, Timonium, East Baltimore and other nearby locations; about 15-20 members of the company and crew sat scattered through the audience. Blitz thanked the packed house in the big theater at the Charles for being the one audience in America not seeing Spider-Man 3.
He said when he was a student at Hopkins he came of age watching movies at the Charles, and it meant a ton to him to come back into that space with his own film. He asked the Baltimore-based workers on the picture to stand up for thanks and applause, and quipped that all the things wrong with the movie were [Spider-Man director] Sam Raimi rsquo;s fault. But the crowd found little wrong.
The clapping at the end was loud and sustained.
Gov. Martin O rsquo;Malley, who introduced Blitz, supplied a little-known fact: Not only did Blitz get his B.
A. and Master rsquo;s from Hopkins, but he also worked as an intern in Mayor Kurt Schmoke rsquo;s city hall in 1988. O rsquo;Malley has been a vocal and active supporter of moviemaking in Maryland as well as the Maryland Film Festival; Rocket Science was made here in the summer of 2005, under his mayoral watch.
Blitz told me before the screening that the incentives provided by Maryland rsquo;s wage-rebate program were decisive in bringing Rocket Science to Baltimore. Otherwise he would have gone to Portland, Ore.
Of course, industry insiders in the audience knew that Maryland rsquo;s incentive packages for filmmakers no longer compete with those of states like Louisiana.
But Rocket Science was good enough to dispel, for the moment, any gloomy thoughts about the lack of funding in Annapolis for an expanded program to lure moviemakers. Festival director Jed Dietz said, You can rsquo;t plan for friendliness, but when it happens, it supplies a competitive advantage. One of the state rsquo;s biggest weapons in the campaign to snag productions may be the Maryland Film Festival, which shows off Baltimore at its most sophisticated and most amiable.
It's too bad there's no good one-hour anthology series on TV anymore. If there were, Craig Zobel's Great World of Sound, a drama set in the sleazy world of fly-by-night record producing, would be a perfect candidate.
But padded-out to nearly two hours, the film spends way too much time revisiting the same scenario -- thrice, the two principals, high-pressure salesmen played by Pat Healy and Kene Hoilliday, sit and pretend to be interested while talentless, if sincere, singers audition for their recording company, Great World of Sound.
The idea, of course, is that the people doing the auditioning have to put up money to prove their sincerity, which leads to lots of scenes of people with dreams but little money looking anxious as they hand over what little cash they have to these two con artists.
Plus, the film's conclusion is obvious almost from the start, and it's hard to believe even the two sad-sack characters played by Healy and Holliday don't see it as well.
That said, the film features a charming performance from Tricia Paoluccio, as a bartender who comes to one of the auditions, shows off genuine talent and heart, and leaves Healy's character suffering from a crisis of conscience.
Nappy is just super-curly hair, a young girl says at the opening of Regi Kimbell and Jay Bluemke's My Nappy Roots: A Journey Through Black Hair-itage. You just can't control it.
Don Imus notwithstanding, hair has long been a subject of great concern and highly visible pride among African-American men and women, a point brought emphatically home in this thoughtful and documentary that is half history, half sociology and entirely a joy.
Employing both a scholarly eye and a puckish sense of humor, My Nappy Roots traces the history of black hair all the way from slavery (Africans bound for America often had their heads shaved, as a way of taking away their identity and sense of self-pride) to TV's Hair Wars, highlighting elaborate hairstyles that look as uncomfortable as they appear aerodynamically impossible (the show already has introduced a new performer to the culture, the Hair Entertainer ).
From women's wigs, locks and braids to men's Afros, curls and shags, rarely has so much hair come across looking so good.
Among the movies best moments were a pair of stories from George E.
Johnson, founder of Johnson Products (which manufactures the best-selling Ultra Sheen and Afro Sheen hair products). The first dealt with the company's beginnings when, as a young man with a vision, Johnson approached a Chicago bank for a $2,000 loan, tp start the business. He was summarily turned.
A few weeks later, he returned and asked for $2,000 to finance a trtip to California for him and his wife. he got the money, and so Johnson Products was born.
The second story involves Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. On a tour of the Johnson building, which at the time housed one of the country's most successful African-American businesses, he turned to Johnson and said, Now, this is black power!
Christopher Cannon Mapp, 22, traveled with Chris Kazi Rolle, his mentor and the core of both the film and the art-outreach program known as The Hip Hop Project, down from New York Saturday to introduce the film to the MFF audience along with the Project's current director, Diana Princess Lemon (in effect, the documentary's female lead).
The next day Cannon sat down with The SUn to discuss the Project's role in persuading high school students that rap can be a way of articulating real experience instead of indulging in gangsta fantasies.
Q: When the Don Imus controversy broke, and pundits were blaming hip-hop for degrading the national vocabulary about race and women, were you thinking you and the Hip Hop Project were ahead of the curve?
A: Definitely.
They didn't hear about what we've been doing for years, using hip-hop to speak about real values and real feelings. Most people just see the negative or derogatory aspects of hip-hop, because that's where hip hop is commercially viable right now. People have to base their perception of hip hop on what they see -- and what they see is the the bling, the misogyny, the violence, the materialism and all the money that's at stake in the industry.
And they don't see hip hop as a vehicle of self-expression that can be useful in the therapeutic sense. They're don't understand that a lot of rappers do what they do just because it is their livelihood and a lot of them feel this is the only way they can make money -- speaking about certain things.
When Busta Rhymes was at the premiere in New York City, he made a comment that this movie couldn't come out at any better time: It will force people to see that hip hop is our culture, and it isn't one-sided.
It's just that the negative is outweighing the positive right now. We in the Hip Hop Project are not knocking anyone -- we just want to create a balance and persuade the media to write about how hip hop can be a positive motivational force.
Q: Did you see hip hop that way before you entered the hip hop project?
A: I was always moved by music, and I used to think I could be a visual artist -- I loved comic-book characters, I wrote songs, and I loved, and still love, alternative rock, soul, pop, jazz, everything as long as it sounds good.
My mom was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1996, three years before I entered the Hip Hop Project. I used to write about my mother, but I never shared it with anybody, I was just expressing my internal anger on paper, in a journal-like way.
I never felt at liberty to disclose something so personal to me. And I never had the platform for it. The only way it seemed you could be successful in the hip hop realm was to speak on things you saw people relating to and be entertaining.
Not all entertainers have to be personal; you can just make good songs. But once the Project gave me the platform to speak on something as personal as the illness of my mother, the outcome was so rewarding. It showed me people can share what you think is personal only for you.
They'll come up to me after I perform and tell me they have multiple sclerosis or have a relative with it. And I can be in a position to tell them to hold on.
I had anger because my mom was such a powerful woman, so driven and accomplished, and she loved me and my sister Ashley so much.
To see her deterioriate and not be able to do what she used to do tore me down. A lot of anger came from confusion: Why did this happen to her? What did I do to bring this on or deserve this?
I was 11 when she was diagnosed, and as a child you don't know how to interpret those feelings. I felt no one else could really grasp them. Before I entered the Project I never saw the reasoning in why I should take the personal writing I had been doing and put it in song form.
Q: How did you hear about the Project?
A: Kazi is an alumnus of my high school, P.S.
Repertory Company for Theater Arts; I got there partly because of dumb luck, and partly because my grandmother was heavily involved with my life as well as being my mother's caretaker. I used to cut my old high school and go to Barnes Noble because I never felt challenged. My grandmother got me a social worker who connected me to one of the P.
S. Repertory counselors who got me an interview, and I made the cut. There I was exposed to many types of music and theater, so it was great.
I graduated in 2004.
Anyway, Kazi posted some fliers there in 1999, the year I began at Repertory. They said if you'd like to write, perform and produce your own hip hop, come to the Project.
I saw the flier, and the rest is history. It was a bit misleading; most of the kids showed up thinking they'd go right into a recording-studio environment. Instead we got classes where we would speak on personal as well as creative development.
As in the movie, he presented all of us with the challenge to write something that was personal and could touch someone's heart -- write something about what you were feeling. And my mother's illness was something I was dealing with on a daily basis. So it made sense to use the opportunity to speak on that; that same day I wrote the song.
And after I performed it, everyone said Wow -- they never knew what I was dealing with. Kazi posing that challenge has been life-changing. It's therapy each time I perform the song.
And when people tell you they've been penting up similar feelings, it gives you a sense of purpose. And you never know until you jump out the window artistically bare-naked, like Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan, people I admire who are great writers becaus they know how to introspect and write about personal as well as social ills, and compose music that allows people to heal as well as be entertaining.
Q: In the movie you also deal with the prospect of being evicted from your mother's apartment after her death.
How did you get to stay?
A: Because my grandmother took over and said, I won't have you and your sister thrown out into the street. We fought with the landlord for three years, and the only reason we got the lawyer you see in the film was that she was a good friend of one of my grandma's friends; my grandma is a real gym rat, and one of her gym friends referred her to Dawn Kelly, who worked for a minimal fee because she wanted to see justice done.
Q: And did working with Kazi help you through this time?
A: After we worked on business principles, Kazi got us to work on personal principles: integrity, punctuality and keeping your word -- these were foreign concepts to us. And he said you'll see how far these principles can take you, how many people will want to maintain relationships with you because of your character.
Q: What have you been doing since high school?
Last Friday was my last day of working as a music editor for AOL Music; mostly that means I've been interviewing celebrities for AIM Features and coming up with ideas for new features with artists that would be more clicky [interactive] and keep people coming back and showing them to their friends. I still work as a mentor and instructor with the Hip Hop Project, and the Project's album comes out May 8.
Through the soundtrack, if other opportunities come up to produce and songwrite -- I'm open to that. That's what I've been striving for, anyway -- to create a name for myself in the recording industry. But the passing of my mother made me want to use all opportunities to help other people.
So in the process I'm starting Hot Hearts, which will raise awareness as well as funds for causes such as MS, cancer and HIV-AIDS.
MFF 2007: Americans on the fringe, in debt, and in the ghetto
Fringe Americans who see themselves as the true Americans are the subjects of Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa, a daring and satisfying 64-minute documentary about a group of individualists living without public services or utilities on a 15-square-mile block of New Mexico desert. At a Saturday-afternoon screening, codirector Jeremy Stulberg, who made the film with his sister Randy Stulberg, said the members of this loose collective of macho war veterans, aging hippies, earth mothers and runaway teens sometimes go by the name hippabillies.That set me to thinking not only about the unexpected ways that seemingly opposite subcultures conjoin in these United States, but also about how much fun it would be for movie-lovers if theater-owners could be this individualistic too. Off the Grid would make a great double-bill with Off the Map, the 2005 dramatic feature (starring Joan Allen) about a family living off the grid outside Taos, N.M.
, in 1974. Back then a counterculture, back-to-the-earth dream was less fraught with violent risks ndash; partly because there were no gangs of teen-punk youths like one in Off the Grid called the Nowhere Kids.
D.
C.-born alt-rock and punk legend Henry Rollins, host of the IFC rsquo;s Henry Rollins Show and an award-winning spoken-word artist, proved to be a good pick for this year rsquo;s sole guest host. The American way of debt gets eviscerated in Rollins rsquo; smart selection, James Scurlock rsquo;s documentary Maxed Out, a film that Sun personal-finance columnist rightly called an eye-opener for exposing how financial debt has become an industry benefiting credit-card companies and debt collectors and victimizing the gullible, unlucky and unwary.
Rollins himself came off as a winner Saturday evening, both in his choice of film and in his simultaneously exuberant and sardonic introduction. He said he saw Maxed Out because the female editor, Alexis Spraic, told him to ndash; and he rsquo;s made a habit of caving in to the women in his own company. And he noted that he agreed to attend the festival only if he didn rsquo;t have to be a member of a jury, because after making so many bad movies himself (Jack Frost?
Johnny Mnemonic? Bad Boys II?) he was in no position to hold judgment over anyone.
Charles Burnett rsquo;s Killer of Sheep continued its conquest of Baltimore with a prime-time screening Saturday night, highlighted by an after-movie Q A with the film rsquo;s star, Henry G. Sanders. As Sanders explained, Burnett drew this picture of L.
A. rsquo;s Watts ghetto in the early 1970s from sparsely scripted scenes filled out with improvisations often performed with non-actors from the neighborhood. At the MFF, one audience member after another testified to the truthfulness of Burnett rsquo;s portrait of a long-gone, rough yet communal street life: boys passing the time throwing rocks at trains; men persevering with their families instead of running away.
These viewers were fulfilling Burnett rsquo;s dreams. As he recently wrote me in an e-mail, I hope people look at the film as a kind of time capsule.
Just got back from opening night of Baltimore Opera Company's production of Puccini's 'Tosca,' which ought to generate a lot of box office action this week.
(My full review is scheduled to run Monday.) Saturday night's performance had a lot going for it, especially from the male leads and dynamic conductor Andrea Licata.
Baltimore native James Morris, long one of the finest bass-baritones on the world scene, gave a fiery, yet often remarkably subtle, portrayal of the evil Scarpia.
And Antonello Palombi, who got his 15 well-deserved minutes of fame last December when he rescued an 'Aida' at La Scala in his street clothes after a pouty, booed tenor stormed offstage, made a sensational local debut as Cavaradossi. A big, beefy sound and a fully involved acting style added up to a very hot performance by this Italian singer.
Ideally, of course, 'Tosca' is fueled by the soprano in the title role.
Gerogina Lukacs was pretty much a one-volume, one emotion singer. It was a decent but underwhelming effort. Still, the Hungarian singer deserved better than the absurdly botched presentation of a bouquet during her curtain call.
The woman bearing the flowers actually strode onstage BEFORE the star did, a mistake in itself. But it got worse. The presenter practically collided with a startled Luckas and clumsily tried to present the bouquet before the soprano could properly bow.
Hard to believe a professional opera company would let something that amateur-ville happen. My guess is there was some serious cursing -- in very colorful Hungarian -- when the curtain came down.
Checked in with festival head Jed Dietz (who's sitting right next to me) for a quick report on how things are going, with two days down, the third almost over and closing night just around the corner.
Q: So, any pleasant surprises so far?
A: Certainly for (Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's) Syndromes and a Century, the response was very strong. It's a film from Thaiand, from a director that not everyone knows.
And it's beautiful. It was great, that audiences came to it.
In general, I think there's been more exploring of different types of films than we've ever seen, people using the notes in the program, or something that had been written in the press, and just plunging in.
That's when you'll really find something exciting.
I just came from Henry Rollins introducing this wonderful documentary that he chose, Maxed Out. Big crowd.
He talked about how he found the film, how he feels about it. People were very excited when the film started.
Q: Any disappointments?
A: There was one 35-mm print that didn't arrive, the Guy Madden film (Brand Upon the Brain!). We could project it digitally, but that wouldn't work in the main theater.
We did show it once yesterday (on a smaller screen), at least.
On the positive side, (director) Jeff Blitz is coming for Rocket Science tomorrow, and two days ago, he wasn't coming.
Q: Any attendance figures?
A: No, but anecdotally, it sounds like things have been going very good.
Q: How about the Tent Village? Have people been showing up and engaging the filmmakers?
A: Yes. The two good things are how well they've been attended, and that the interchange between the filmmakers and the audience has been so great. The fimmakers have been wonderful -- they're just very eager to share with each other, for sure, but also with the local film community.
Q: Any new ideas come into your head for next year's 10th anniverary festival?
A: Certainly, the 10th anniversary is something I'm thinking about. We'll start working on that almost literally on Monday.
Certainly, we will do more with the Opening Night shorts, and more with the filmmaker Tent Village
Is a really bad film any less bad because it set out to be a really bad film? Or because it set out to be an homage to really bad films? Those are just two of the questions raised by Anna Biller's Viva, a dead-on homage to early-70s sexploitation films that gets so much right, the film is hard to sit through.
Viva stars Biller (who also wrote the script, designed the sets, composed the soundtrack and assembled the costumes) as Barbie Smith, a hottie housewife tired of being neglected by her husband, Rick (co-producer Jared Sanford). Feeling especially liberated, this being the nascent days of women's lib, she signs on with a call-girl service (although her heart's clearly not in it) and spends the rest of the film being ogled at by guys with really ugly haircuts who are constantly trying to get her to take her clothes off (which she does frequently, though not often enough for their satisfaction).
The film looks great, all bright colors and cheesy sets, and the whole movie is true to its early-70s roots.
Unfortunately, that means the score -- a constant stream of mercilessly peppy elevator music -- is annoying at best, the acting is amateurishly exaggerated and the pacing is plodding. There's also the matter of length; the typical film of the sexploitation genre at least had the merciful sense to end quickly, but Viva stretches out to just over two hours. Cut down to no more than 90 minutes, the film would be a lot more entertaining.
In the Q A afterward, one audience member thanked Biller for making the kind of movie she was never able to watch as a little girl. That counts as praise, I suppose ..
. but hey, there are plenty of copies of Myra Breckinridge out there, waiting to be watched, not to mention a scazillion other similar films that are of the period, not pretending to be.
A Sun first: a live interview with a director, Andrew Semans, 30, fresh from the worldwide festival premiere of his short movie, .
He came down from New York last night (where he's working in a production company) and is scripting and trying to raise money for his next short.
Q: Andrew, All Day Long tells a universal story of a teen couple not quite living up to each other's dreams. Autobiographical?
A good way to show off your sensitivity and humor as a director? Or both?
A: The film is not directly autobiographical, but it certainly reflects certain experiences and feelings I had as a frustrated, confused, sullen teenager.
Hopefully by tapping into the traces of those feelings, I can show off my sensitivity and humor in a true-feeling way.
Q: The MFF has become a center for short-film exhibition. How did you hear about it?
How big a deal was it to get your movie into the festival?
A: I don't recall exactly how I first came to know about MFF, but I was lucky enough to show a short film (I'd Rather Be Dead Than Live in This World) at MFF in 2005 and I loved the experience, so I was very pleased to be invited back. Everyone is tremendously friendly and the fest is extremely well-run.
I would have been heartbroken if I didn't get in.
Q: Is there a chance that short-film culture will become extensive and beloved enough (it certainly is at this festival) that future filmmakers can make careers out of shorts?
A: Perhaps with the advent on YouTube and other such websites, short filmmaking may become a financially viable vocation, but I think it's naive to think anything like that will happen soon.
Making shorts is tough! You really have to scrape and shout to get your film shown, to get press etc. It's not a medium for the weak-willed or those yearning for the spotlight.
Unfortunately, shorts are still considered a lesser form than features.
For the sixth year, I got to host the festival's annual 3-D screening, and as has always been the case, the audience showed up ready to have a good time. This year's film, 1953's Man In the Dark, wasn't up the standards of many past 3-D offerings: It wasn't as iconic as House of Wax, as giddily fun as Gorilla at Large, as rousing as Fort Ti or as cheesy as The Mad Magician.
Still, it had its moments (some great lines from the script by George Bricker and JacK Leonard, including one where the hero remarks that polygraph sounds like something a parrot should eat ), decent acting from Edmond O'Brien and noir stalwart Audrey Totter, and some decent 3-D effects, including a bird flying at the camera, a guy jumping through a window and -- best of all -- brain surgery.
O'Brien, who would go on to win an Oscar two years later for The Barefoot Contessa, stars as Steve Rawley, a hardened thief who gets paroled on condition he get experimental brain surgery designed to remove his criminal element. It works, but his former partners aren't buying it, especially since he never told them where he hid the $130,000 from their last job.
Unless he tells them where the cash is -- which he honestly doesn't remember -- there's going to be heck to pay. Totter plays his moll, Peg, who's come to appreciate her newly honest boyfriend.
The Charles' theater one was only half full, but that may be because some 3-D fans may have shown up at an earlier promotional screening, sponsored by The Sun.
Those who were there seemed to enjoy the 3-D experience, funny glasses and all. The print was in great shape; The Charles' status as one of the few theaters in the U.S.
capable of showing dual-projector 3-D is just one more reason to appreciate the presence of this wonderful theater in the heart of Baltimore. Kudos to theater co-owner John Standiford and festival programmer Skizz Cyzyk, who know all the necessary rocks to look under when it comes time to finding the few existing 3-D prints available to be shown each year.
With luck, maybe next year we'll be lucky enough to find a 3-D print of Jane Russell in The French Line, a chorus-girl film that, I've been assured, must be seen to be believed.
A good-sized Saturday-morning crowd that included Martin Luther King Jr. biographer Taylor Branch and his wife Christy Macy turned out for a 10:30 screening of a movie set in Northern Uganda -- and was roused to applause as well as tears. War/Dance follows three children from the Patongo refugee camp as they prepare for a national song and dance competition a two-day trip away, in Kampala.
The power of this film's portrayal of an African war zone in which families are ripped apart and boys turned into killers dwarfs the melodramatics of Blood Diamond, just as the movie's tumultuous and joyous sights and sounds of kids reclaiming their humanity through art go beyond any hyped-up Hollywood inspirationalism. The filmmakers, Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine (they are husband and wife), who won a directing award for War/Dance at Sundance, pull off such an empathic feat of juxtaposing traumatic loss with ecstatic music they erase any distance between their subjects and their audience.
Sean Fine grew up in D.
C., the son of husband-and-wife documentary-makers and the grandson of a Washington Redskins photographer; Sean and Andrea now live in Chevy Chase. Though it's heartening that the MFF snagged the film for this Maryland premiere, it was a tad dismaying that Fine couldn't say for sure when the film would open theatrically in Baltimore.
(ThinkFilm will open it elsewhere in November.)
Well, do anything you can to make sure it comes here! a wowed Branch told me afterward.
And Macy, who recently traveled to Uganda with the International Youth Foundation, said, To me this film does everything you want any film to do that depicts the abuse of children [in world trouble spots]: It shows they have the strength to change their own lives if they're given a chance.
20/20, DC Madam and Al Capone's Vault
After a week of relentless May-sweeps hype from ABC News for Friday night's 20/20 report on the D.C. Madam's list of client phone numbers, it had to be just a bit of letdown to some viewers to hear investigative reporter Brian Ross tell viewers he did not have any new names to reveal Friday night.
There are no members of Congress, no White House officials, he said, adding that most of names of the men on the list are just not newsworthy. This after a week of on-air promotion on such shows as Good Morning America and online at abcnews.
com that repeated the tagline: Who will be the next to fall?
The answer: No one -- Friday night anyway. Shades of Geraldo Riviera's infamous 1986 TV sweeps special, The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault, which featured live prime-time coverage of workers breaking into the alleged hidden vault of the late Chicago gangster only to find -- nothing.
Stay tuned, to this blogs, folks, for more on this story.
ABC News and Ross should be ashamed of the way in which they are ignoring facts and shading the story to serve the interest of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the D.C.
Madam, not the public's.
The most pure fun I had last night was at an ebullient screening of Sean Meredith's deliciously impure Dante rsquo;s Inferno, an 800th anniversary depiction of Dante rsquo;s 1307 classic done as cardboard-puppet theater. At the Q A, a fifth-grade teacher appeared with her own Dante hand puppet.
I'll talk to you later, Meredith quipped to the red-felt Dante in front of him. It was a bit like seeing indie filmmakers Matthew Porterfield (Hamilton) and Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs) at the screening of the Mumblecore movie Frownland. As Mario Puzo once told me, ldquo;I don rsquo;t care if you rsquo;re a novelist or a movie critic, everybody rsquo;s faithful to his own racket.
rdquo;
Meredith, master puppeteer Paul Zaloom and artist Sandow Birk, three political lefties of varying sensibilities and temperaments, agreed on staying true to Dante rsquo;s own propensity for score-settling and scatology. They also jointly embraced the chaos inherent in bringing Dante rsquo;s journey through a 14th-century Christian rsquo;s Hell into the current millennium. Aesthetically, the most beautiful bit is the central conceit that modern times are an imaginative construct in an antique puppet theater.
It supplies an elegant framework to a cavalcade of daring off-the-cuff hilarities that include God nailing Hitler on a technicality and throwing Dick Cheney into eternal damnation while he rsquo;s still apparently on earth. Meredith doesn rsquo;t try to explain away why some of the men and women guilty of love-crimes still seem to be having the time of their after-lives. And he turns the Catholic condemnation of homosexuality into a nonstop techno-dance.
The dialogue is a ceaselessly amusing mixture of Mad-magazine-demotic and high-flown diction, the former delivered mostly by Dermot Mulroney as a dauntingly slow-to-learn Dante and the latter by James Cromwell as a Virgil who rsquo;s long-suffering in more ways than one. The equivalent to Dante's poetry comes in the combination of inventive filmmaking and puppetry, which manages to encompass every kind of marionette playfulness and cartoon goofiness from bobble-head figures to silhouettes and string toys -- and then bring it riotously up close and personal. Final score: Dante 10, Meredith 10.
Bob Hieronimus, a fixture of Baltimore's art scene since the 1960s (I remember him being escorted from the wedding of Spiro Agnew's daughter in 1968, even though he had an invitation; they eventually let him in) and host of 21st Century Radio on WCBM-AM, has high praise for Albert Birney's short, Atari. Featuring rock music from and starring the Spinto Band, Dr. Bob says, the film is made to resemble what you'd see on an Atari video game from the 1980s.
But that description, he assures, doesn't nearly do the four-minute short justice. The visuals were so intense and brilliant and creative, he gushes, I wish the thing had gone on for hours. The visuals were the best I've seen in any short film.
Atari will be presented again Sunday, as part of the Sound Vision Shorts, set for 5:30 p.m. at The Charles.
John Waters continued his efforts to expand Baltimore's cinematic vocabulary last night by with his presentation of Bobcat Goldthwait's Sleeping Dogs Lie, easily the sweetest disgusting movie you'll ever see. The plot is simple, though unprintable on this web site; suffice to say it's about a woman who, while in college, did something to a dog (relax, you don't actually see her do anything), and years later wrestles with whether to tell her fiancee about it. It's a movie about truth and forgiveness, about family and understanding.
Those who offend easily, or even near-easily, should stay far far away. But the rest of you could find yourselves surprisingly charmed.
Waters, as always, was a crowd-pleaser of the first order.
Labeling Sleeping Dogs Lie the only romantic comedy I've ever liked, he marveled at the packed house that came out to see the film solely on his recommendation. Thank you once again for believing in my taste, he said.
Goldthwait was supposed to be at The Charles last night but had to cancel after hurting his back.
In an email read by the film's star, Melinda Page Hamilton, he thanked Waters for his endorsement, saying it was a little like Picasso saying, 'Hey, I like your painting.'
Hamilton, who deserves some sort of award for cinematic bravery, won the crowd over with both her acting and her disarming candor. She told the story of when her proper Virginia mother first read the script.
She didn't say anything afterward, according to Hamilton, but later emailed a suggestion that she reconsider signing on. Make a movie like this, she warned, and you'll never have a career in public office, or marry anyone who aspires to a career in public office.
Mom was probably right.
Ran into Doug Sadler, whose wonderfully introspective and and elegaic Swimmers closed out the 2005 Maryland Film Festival (it also got a brief theatrical release last year and made my list of the Top 10 films of 2006). Sadler says he's working on a new script, for a film called Jealousy, a dark comedy centering on a guy who inherits the family business and gets everything he wants, and learns it's not what he wants.
Sadler also says he's doing some teaching near his home in Easton; is preparing to host a film series at the Maryland Institute College of Art, centering on maverick movie directors (beginning with Orson Welles and Citizen Kane); and is also involved in launching the Chesapeake Film Festival, which is planning a series of film screenings at Easton's Avalon Theatre in anticipation of next year's inaugural festival.
The first screening, set for September, will be Sean and Andrea Nix Fine's War/Dance, a documentary focusing on three Ugandan children who find relief from the tragedy surrounding them by singing and dancing.
(War/Dance is screening at the Maryland Film Festival at 10:30 a.m.
Sunday at The Charles.)
Just two films into this year's Maryland Film Festival, and already I've seen what assuredly will be a weekend highlight. The 65-minute documentary Charlie Obert's Barn is a funny, wise, cogent and passionate tribute to a whole host of things, including hard work, family ties and a healthy respect for your personal legacy.
Directed by former Baltimorean Kurt Kolaja, it's primarily the story of his efforts to move his grandfather's century-old barn from northeastern Pennsylvania to a 20-acre parcel in Kent County. But that only tells half the story. It's also Kolaja's tribute to his grandfather, a dairy farmer who died in 1983, and the way life is lived in Crawford County, Pa.
, where residents get defensive when people talk about the dirt roads (they're gravel, not dirt). That, and you get lessons in the value of hard work (the guy who agrees to help Kolaja take down the barn is a gem), love of family (Kolaja's mother, who grew up on that farm, goes from agony to ecstasy in the course of the film), and even a little Maryland history, as Kolaja tries to identify the Indian arrowheads he finds on his Kent County property.
This is an incredibly resonant film, that touches on an amazingly wide variety of issues in its brief running time -- not in a heavy-handed way, but with a dexterity and reserve that Charlie Obert would appreciate.
The film screens again, at 9 p.m. tomorrow in the Maryland Institute College of Art's Brown Center.
It's not to be missed.
It seems that cops in Los Angeles got carried away during a May Day immigrant rights march this week and, while trying to disperse a crowd, roughed up some journalists who were there to record the event. One of the images of the melee has already seen steady traffic on YouTube; it shows Christina Gonzalez, a reporter for Fox's KTTV-TV, Channel 11, screaming, You can't do that!
as she was manhandled in the maelstrom of baton and foam-bullet-wielding cops, Paul Brownfield wrote in today's L.A. Times.
All things being equal, Brownfield wrote, KTTV might have led its 10 p.m. newscast Wednesday with the breaking news that Phil Stacey and Chris Richardson had been eliminated from American Idol a few minutes earlier.
Instead, it devoted some 10 minutes off the top to the melee in MacArthur Park, having already cut into The Montel Williams Show that afternoon to air Police Chief William J. Bratton's news conference live. As Bratton indicated mdash; in that disarming and folksy Massachusetts accent that says the guy couldn't possibly run a rogue force mdash; he's a friend of the working journalist, who had a legal right to be there, Brownfield wrote.
Yes, even if journalism isn't normally the local news' forte.
Today's New York Times reported that, in addition to Fox's Gonzalez and several others, the police also manhandled Patricia Nazario, from KPCC-FM, a National Public radio affiliate, who said she was talking to her editor on her cellphone when an officer struck her in the back with a baton. Nazario said she faced the officer and told him she was a reporter, the story recounted.
But the officer struck her again with the baton on her left thigh. it said. It happened so fast and I was on the ground, rdquo; Nazario told the paper.
ldquo;It was like they were robots, on autopilot. rdquo;
Every year a documentary jumps out early from the pack, and this year it's Crazy Love, a movie so rich in surprise a reviewer should be sent to some journalistic gulag for giving anything away. Directed by Dan Klores (he made the great boxing documentary Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story), it centers on a sensational acid-burning case from the late 1950s and uses the best storytelling traditions of nonfiction journalism to wring every bit of tragic and comic complexity out of the tale behind the headlines.
The result is an astounding saga of warped passion and dashed dreams that encompasses everything from the New York State prison system (Sing Sing and Attica) to the perils of prefeminist ideals of beauty and womanliness. In the Q A afterward, Klores mentioned that he was drawn to this real-life drama of obsession (on the part of the psychopathic antihero) and survival (on the part of the brutalized semi-heroine) because he vaguely remembered, as a 9-year-old, being conscious of the crime as it swept through what used to be called not the tabloids, but 'the papers.'
I was 7 years old and living in New York when the case hit Page One, so I too remembered the screaming news graphics and found myself amazed at Klores' illumination and continuation of a tale that could only horrify me as a kid.
Next up for Klores is a 4-hour, two-part documentary for ESPN called Black Magic, which looks at the Civil Rights movement from the perspective of black basketball players from traditional black institutions like Howard, Tuskegee and Fisk. One of his prime characters is Baltimorean Woody Sauldsberry, who was NBA rookie of the year in 1958.
I dashed to Crazy Love from Frownland, my first exposure to the cutting-edge indie movement called Mumblecore.
Ronald Bronstein's movie follows a stuttering and impossibly needy character through a demeaning dead-end job and his attempts to connect with a hostile roommate, an indifferent non-friend and an even needier teenage girl -- then reveals almost everyone else to be as crazy as the burbling sad sack at the center of things. It offers a frightening, funny-sad vision of urban loneliness, but all through the picture I kept thinking about what Pauline Kael said about the British kitchen-sink movies of the 1950s and 1960s: the real subject of the film seems to be the terribly ugly spaces in which people live. I was relieved to hear Bronstein say that audiences had strong regard or hostility to it; I'm of two minds about it myself.
Congratulations to the winners of the 2007 screenwriting competition sponsored by the Baltimore Film Office. The winners, announced this morning in the festival's Tent Village, were Steven Sullivan, for Neighborhood Watch, the story of a cartoonist who loses his muse when he moves from the city to suburbia. Second prize was given to Harrison Demchick's The Reappearance of Sam Webber, a drama centering on a middle-school boy, while third place went to Dennis Robinson's The Sons of Daniel Fells, a drama set in Southwest Baltimore.
Prizes for the winners, all of whom hail from Baltimore, included cash, festival passes, screenwriting software and association memberships. And possibly the encouragement and visibility that could result in one or more of these screenplays showing up at a future festival.
The first full day of the ninth annual Maryland Film Festival began with Ry Russo-Young's Orphans, a a study of two sisters, reunited at the family's New England farmhouse five years after their parents' deaths, struggling to re-establish connections with their youths and with each other.
Stars James Katherine Flynn, as chronically dependent Sonja, and Lily Wheelright, as the more free-spirited Rosie, exhibited a natural rapport; as sisters, they were entirely believable. Which means, of course, that they frequently didn't get along, but always stayed connected.
Orphans is beautifully shot, and the performances of both women seemed heartbreakingly real, with a tentativeness that seemed straight from the heart.
In the Q-and-A afterward, Russo-Young mentioned Ingmar Bergman as an influence, and it showed, in both the quietly conflicted relationships and the seductively sensitive cinematography. True, the conflicts occasionally seem forced, but the relentless honesty of the film more than compensates. An early sequence, in which the sisters are happily doing each other's hair one minute, displaying an intimacy only siblings understand, then sitting far apart on a couch, as though they barely know one another, says more about familial relationships than most filmmakers can manage in 90 minutes.
The films ends without any real resolution, which may frustrate some, but anyone who has ever had a trying relationship with a family member -- and who hasn't? -- will understand that a more concrete resolution would be impossible.
Russo-Young, who knew both actresses from grade school, dedicated the film to Wheelright, who died of a drug overdose not long after the movie's premiere at this year's South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.
Wheelright was only 24.
Hats off to the lovely ladies meandering about Mount Vernon today. Every year, the choice of Flowermart headwear gets bigger and better -- rivaling even the fantastic hats at Preakness.
With a few exceptions, the blooms and buttons, beehives and bows, ribbons, feathers and dangling odds-and-ends at Flowermart are far from fashionable. But they sure are fun.
And this year's Flowermart-goers are right on time with their magnificent crown-toppers.
Everywhere you look, it seems, fancilful hats are all the rage.
Queen Elizabeth II started her 6-day tour of the United States yesterday in a jaunty pink number. It was a fresh color for the 81-year-old monarch -- hot pink usually being reserved for the less staid set.
But it worked for the Queen, who was in town in honor of the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, the first English colony here. The hat's cheerful hue projected an attitude of No hard-feelings, guys.
But Her Majesty was outdone yesterday by Chief Ken Adams, of the Upper Mattaponi tribe.
His foot-tall, feather-covered cap, adorned with traditional beads and symbols, was grand and magnificent.
Together, the Chief and the Queen looked regal -- and could give this year's Flowermart fans a run for their money.
There will be stars and players in the stands as well as on the field at Saturday night rsquo;s Orioles rsquo; game.
A large contingent of cast and crew members of The Wire, HBO rsquo;s Baltimore-based drama, will be in attendance for the contest with the Cleveland Indians, according to Diego Aldana, a spokesman for the cable channel.
The trip to Camden Yards is a night out for actors, producers and technicians who began filming the final season of the series last month in Baltimore. One performer, however, will be onstage for a moment: Jermaine Crawford, who plays city school student Duquan Dukie Weems, will throw out the first pitch for the game that starts at 7:05 p.
m.
Crawford, a Washington resident and the youngest regular member of the cast, was chosen by having his name drawn from a hat, according to Aldana.
John Waters -- or crab cake?
asked one festivalgoer as she watched filmmakers and finger food go by in the packed lobby of MICA's Brown Center after an Opening Night of five short films selected by festival director Jed Dietz and his coprogrammers, Skizz Cyzyk and Eric Hatch, and introduced by them and the filmmakers.
The evening was a deserved crowd-pleaser for a crowd that filled the main auditorium and balcony and spilled over into the stairs. Two marvelous music films of wildly different types bookended the event: Kobina Yankah's Hazel's Hips, a hilarious visualization of Oscar Brown Jr.
s song about a cafe waitress who earns tips because of her voluptuous hips, and Nathaniel Kahn's Two Hands, a moving crystallization of the life and career of Baltimore-based pianist Leon Fleisher and his fight to overcome the focal dystonia that afflicted his right hand. Fleisher flew in from playing a concert in Chicago (with two hands!) and received a standing ovation when he walked on stage for a joint Q A that featured all five filmmakers and Dr.
Daniel Drachman, the Johns Hopkins' neurologist who successfully diagnosed and treated his dystonia. The pianist expressed his delight to be part of a gala filled with imagination, and confessed that to him shorts had previously been something I wear -- or Tom and Jerry.
Actually, there is a little Tom and Jerry in Hazel's Hips and also in Harry Kellerman's The Little Gorilla, a charming live-action comedy about a small New York City's boy obsession with King Kong, the Empire State Building, and the monkey bars at his neighborhood playground.
(One of the evening's few glitches, apart from over-crowding and a 20-minute delay, was a false, silent start to Kellerman's movie. Take Two! someone yelled out from the back of the theater before running it properly, with sound, from the beginning.
)
Yuro Makino's Alma is a tense, affecting vignette from a projected feature about a naive Latino teenager who crosses paths with the Border Patrol. And Jerome Olivier's ambitious, visually talented Missing Pages tells a dystopian time-travel tale in digitally-altered still photographs, with a style that's avant-garde-meets-graphic novel -- or Chris Marker meets manga. Olivier, who made the trip here from Japan, related in uproarious detail how his movie emerged from his connection to the Garfunkel half of Japan's version of Simon Garfunkel.
Yankah and Kellerman confessed with pride that they'd both recently graduated from film school, Yankah from UCLA and Kellerman from Columbia.
Baltimore-based critic David Sterritt, president of the National Society of Film Critics, told me afterward that he'd been one of Kellerman's teachers a couple of years ago -- and that Kellerman had completed a two-year-old assignment just a few weeks ago. The pacing of Kellerman's film, though, was sharp and snappy.
And so, overall, was MFF 2007's Opening Night.
John Waters was a presenter at last night's National Magazine Awards ceremony in New York. Periodicals could hardly have a bigger fan.
The Baltimore movie director subscribes to 160 magazines, ranging -- he tells me -- from the National Enquirer to the London Review of Books.
And, he'd love to have a magazine of his own, devoted to the down side of celebrity, the few moments it's terrible. As he quipped to , he'd like to call his magazine, Drip.
(Get it -- Waters, drip ?).
When I asked for an example of potential content for the magazine, he shared the following story: A few years back he was at a doctor's office when someone yelled out, It's John Waters!
What have you got?
I'm looking forward to seeing Waters later this month. He'll be back in New York for the latest reading of his next movie to go the Broadway musical route, Cry-Baby.
He added, by the way, that he's seen the movie version of the Hairspray musical. It's good, he said enthusiastically of the film, which is directed by Adam Shankman.
A three-judge panel appointed by the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts has just selected 39 semifinalists from about 200 applicants for this year rsquo;s $25,000 Janet Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize.
The winner of prize will be announced July 13.
The judges will now narrow the field down to six finalists whose works will be displayed at the Baltimore Museum of Art from June 23 to Aug. 25.
The names of the finalists will be announced May 29.
The remaining semifinalists rsquo; work will be on display for one week starting July 13 at the Maryland Institute College of Art. This year rsquo;s Artscape runs July 20-22.
The judges are Becky Smith, owner and director of Bellwether Gallery in New York; Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art; and Derrick Adams, a New York-based visual artist. Congratulations to all the winners!
I felt I had stepped into a time warp the other night when I walked into the weekly life drawing session organized by the Towson Artists Group.
Here was a collection of people from all walks of life united by their love of painting the figure, in this case a serviceable male model. A couple of participants had attended art school; others were self-taught. They all seemed mercifully oblivious to the fact that what they were doing had so far gone out of fashion in the contemporary art world as to almost not even be considered art anymore.
God bless 'em for their stubborn independence, which would do Baltimore Old Master Joe Sheppard proud. Their group show is up through May 19 at Towson Art and Framing, 410 York Road, across the street from Towsontown Center. Find them at: .
Last chance for best movie of 2006 -- or is it 2007?
Best foreign-language film Oscar-winner The Lives of Others premiered in the U.S.at Telluride last Labor Day weekend and has garnered the best reviews and word of mouth of any film released in fall, winter or spring. Baltimoreans who haven't seen it should catch it today and Thursday or Monday-Thursday of next week, because the Charles will be hosting the Maryland Film Festival this weekend and then cleaning house. (Only the hilarious Brit Bad Boys II spoof Hot Fuzz will hold over.
) Although The Lives of Others is adult in themes and mood and intimate in scale, seeing it in a theater full of engrossed movie-lovers is ideal. It may give you feelings of shared delight and surprise you haven't experienced since your first visit to a Bergman or Kurosawa film at some art house in college. It's a serious treat.
R. Kelly, the notoriously salacious singer-songwriter and self-proclaimed R B thug, is releasing Rise Up, a tribute single to the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre. The song will be availabe online on May 15, and all proceeds will be sent to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund, a collection established to provide financial support and grief counseling to families of the victims.
Here's a lyrical sample of the tune: Rise up when you feel you can't go on/Rise up and all of your hope is gone/Rise up when you're weak and can't be strong.
Although Kelly solidified his randy reputation with platinum hits such as Bump n' Grind, Sex Me and Your Body's Calling, he's no stranger to inspirational fare. His 1996 single, I Believe I Can Fly, was a smash on the pop and urban charts and has since become ubiquitous at graduations and gospel programs.
However, the Chicago native still faces multiple child pornography charges for his role in a widely circulated video tape that allegedly shows him having sex with a 14-year-old girl.
Last week, I finally got to hear some music by Nkeiru Okoye, a locally based composer who has been getting more attention outside Baltimore than she does here. (The Philadelphia Orchestra, for example, played her brief, post-9/11 piece Voices Shouting Out this season.
The Baltimore Symphony and other local orchestras so far don't seem to have Okoye on their radar.)
As part of an honors ceremony for students at Coppin State, Okoye gave the keynote speech on excellence and used as her point of reference Harriet Tubman's struggle against slavery. Interspersed with her remarks were performances of four songs from an evening-length work Okoye has been working on, Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom.
The performances, which Okoye conducted, were not polished, but the flavor of the music came through. That flavor comes mostly from traditional spirituals, a style Okoye pays effective homage to and builds on to create dramatic expression.
The question raised by the mini-concert was, when will someone locally arrange for a full-fledged, fully professional presentation of the complete Tubman score?
Seems like a natural for many organizations here, with obvious tie-in possibilities for the Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture.
Keep Cho out of show biz punditry, please
Eight days after The New York Times' A.O.Scott, in the Arts section, ridiculed the notion of the Korean thriller Oldboy influencing Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui, there was Michael Cieply, in the Business section, referring to some commentators who have connected the Blacksburg gunman to possible echoes of the Korean revenge film...
. No one actually investigating the atrocity has made that connection. And as reported on April 20 in The Sun, Paul Harrill, the Virginia Tech professor who first noted similarities between Oldboy and Cho's multimedia package, said his point was to discuss news outlets using a mass murderer's fantasies as sick spectacle.
But few outlets picked up this disavowal.
Yeah, I know, we've all fumed about the candy wrappers, page shuffling, chit-chat and other horrors inflicted by the unwashed masses on us cultural sophisticates at concerts, but there's one nuisance that doesn't seem to have generated as much attention. And since it's one that repeatedly plagues me at performances, I'd just like to put it out there.
I speak of the dreaded multiple-bracelet menace.
Just the other day, while trying to focus squarely on the Peabody Symphony Orchestra's remarkably assured performance of Stephen Jaffe's complex Cello Concerto, with the remarkable David Hardy as soloist, I kept hearing a little chorus of Jingle Bells over my left shoulder. (For some reason, whenever this nuisance strikes, it's over my left shoulder.
) The sound came from a lady wearing two or three hundred thin bracelets on her right arm. (All right, so I exaggerate a little. Wouldn't you?
) Every time she moved, even slightly, she chimed, blissfully unaware that the composer would have added extra ching-a-ling to his score if he had wanted to. Many a Baltimore Symphony concert has been marred by this racket this season in the exact same nerve-wracking manner.
What's with this bracelet fetish, anyway?
And how come it seems so much more prevalent these days? And is it possible that the the wearer truly doesn't notice that she clangs just by making the slightest motion? And can't these dear hearts settle for just one lil' ol' bracelet when they're heading to a public performance?
I don't expect any answers, but I feel better already somehow, just by venting.
However much concert ticket prices have gotten out of control -- and when they're in the three-digit range, this is definitely not up for discussion -- at least be glad you weren't one of the people who paid $125 for . Seems Britney Spears gave one of her first secret concerts last night in San Diego -- and it lasted all of 15 minutes, if that.
I'll refrain from comparing the concert to the relative length of her first marriage. (Well, I tried.)
The Critic's Residency Program at Maryland Art Place invites distinguished art professionals from outside the region to curate exhibitions of local artists and mentor young arts writers in the fine points of critical interpretation.
This year's show looks great on the walls, but as in previous seasons, the critical efforts of the young writers are not nearly as polished or assured as the artworks on display. This represents yet another lost opportunity to nurture future arts writers with the same depth of commitment MAP has shown for emerging visual artists.
Criticism is a literary art that demands mastery of a clear prose style and skill in logical exposition as well as a passion for art.
If the program's resident critics don't have the time or inclination to work with new writers to help them organize their thoughts and correct common errors of style and usage, MAP should recruit a seasoned text editor for that job. As it is, both the aspiring writers and the artists they hope to bring to a wider audience are being shortchanged.
There's a lot of talk in news media circles about the decision of The New York Times to stop attending events like the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner, where, every spring, Washington journalists lay down pens and cameras and yuk it up with White House officials, government bureaucrats and politicians -- the very people they're supposed to be pursuing for the truth.
On Sunday, Frank Rich, in his weekly column in The Times, called the dinners a crystallization of the press' failures in the post-9/11 era, and said they illustrate how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media. Wait a minute, The Boston Herald said today in an editorial: Has there ever in the history of this nation not been a 'propaganda-driven White House' ..
. one which will use the tools at its disposal to advance its agenda? Gosh, bet Bill Clinton never thought of that!
But Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at New York University, wrote in his PressThink blog yesterday that it's good news that The Times is opting out of the bloated and compromised correspondents' dinner.
President Bush is no friend of the media, and he has dismissed its watchdog role. By doing that, though, he broke the consensus that created the modern White House press corps, Rosen wrote.
News RSS