Friday, June 20, 2014

Northern Light (2014) A Film by Nick Bentgen and Lisa Kjerulff

Northern Light, Nick Bentgen's microbudget portrait of frost-bitten Americana, is a better film than my immediate reaction led me to believe. The issues I see in construction are minimized somewhat by the film's overwhelming humility. Either way, here's a review I wrote on the documentary against the clock this week for In Review Online.

Monday, June 16, 2014

Conversation on Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death (2005)

It's been nearly three months since Kenji Fujishima and I published our last Passing Notes column at In Review Online—a feature in which we pick a cinematic subject (anything that strikes our fancy at a given point in time) and trade thoughts about it. Our last two happen to have been prompted by tragic losses in film culture, the March piece focusing on the Phillip Seymour Hoffman-co-starring The Master and our new discussion—all 4,293 words of it—looking at Workingman's Death, the audacious 2005 docu-essay by recently deceased Austrian globetrotter Michael Glawogger (whose Whore's Glory I mused on at this blog two years ago). I'm a strong supporter of Glawogger's work, Workingman's Death especially, and the loss of this artist is devastating. We're not only losing a vitally important voice in contemporary documentary cinema but also a genuinely curious human being whose thirst for knowledge and experience was an example to live by. The conversation can be found here.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Borgman (2013) A Film by Alex van Warmerdam

"Like some kind of nightmarish variation on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, the film charts the process by which a posse of seductive but cold-blooded forest-dwellers infiltrates the rural Netherlands home of a wealthy family and proceeds to exert an ambiguous grip on them—the exact nature of that grip and its implications being the mystery of the narrative." Full review at In Review Online.