Each day through the end of the Sundance Film Festival, Industry Editor Sandy Mandelberger will profile top American and international films that are creating a buzz at the Festival.
AMERICAN HARDCORE
(US, Paul Rachman, Midnight)
Director Paul Rachman had a dilemma. His new documentary film AMERICAN HARDCORE, a slashing portrait of American punk and hardcore bands of the 1980s, was accepted at the Sundance Film Festival’s quirky Midnight section. However, as one of the founders of the rival Slamdance Film Festival, which also wanted to screen the film, Rachman had a difficult decision to make.
“Of course, I give all my support to Slamdance and serve as the East Coast Director”, Rachman explained. “But Slamdance is an anti-establishment event and delivers an expected audience. I realized we are telling this story more for a mainstream audience, and Sundance is a bigger stage for that."
Rachman’s film was inspired by Steven Blush’s book American Hardcore: A Tribal History. The film chronicles the spirit of the times, as American hard rock, influenced by the English seminal punk bands developed its own unique American style. The film provides a vivid portrait of the influential bands of that era and their loyal fans, including such the mind-numbing music of Black Flag, Bad Brains and Minor Threat.
Hardcore was more than music; it was a social movement created by Reagan-era misfit kids who thought of themselves as a tribe existing outside the margins of the polite, consumer-oriented society of the Me Decade. Rachman takes the audience on a frenzied joyride through the movement, combining archival concert footage with interviews of the key players, who voiced the discontent of a generation.
THE AURA (Argentina, Fabian Bielensky, World Cinema Drama)
Director Fabian Bielensky roared onto the international film scene with his first film, the David Mamet-like caper film NINE QUEENS, which was distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. Bielensky is back with another twisting thriller, THE AURA, which is having its North American premiere at the Festival after winning the Top Jury Prize at the Havana International Film Festival in December. The film is also the country's official entry in the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race.
THE AURA is an engrossing existential thriller that reteams the director with his favorite actor Ricardo Darin, a dour faced everyman who handily represents the down-and-out of their native country who aspire to something more. Darin, in a superb performance, plays Espinoza, an introverted taxidermist who secretly dreams of pulling off the perfect robbery. On a hunting trip in the Patagonian forests, his dreams unexpectedly are made reality with one squeeze of the trigger.
Complicating matters is Espinoza’s epilepsy, which hurls him into “the aura” of utter confusion and overwhelming disorientation, just when he most needs to be at his sharpest. The plot contains a number of superb twists, as the timid taxidermist experiences violence, fear and betrayal on the road to the perfect crime.
DESTRICTED
(US, Various Directors, Midnight)
Here’s a concept….commission some of the world’s most glamorous art stars and rebel filmmakers to make short erotic films and then combine them in an anthology film that mines the artistic in the erotic.
Described as “porno chic for the 21st century”, the omnibus film is contemporary and explicit and direct in its goal to arouse the senses and that most erotic of body parts, the brain.
Each film maps its territory in dramatically different ways. Performance art legend Marina Abramovic delves into Balkan folklore to create a series of tableaux that explore the crude, magical and mysterious rites of ethnic fertility.
American fabulist Matthew Barney stages the sexual encounter between ‘green man’ and a customized deforestation vehicle at a Brazilian Carnival. American iconographer Richard Prince appropriates a segment video that captures big tits, big cock and multiple cum shots as a comment on the cowboy mystique that first made him famous.
American artist and filmmaker Marco Brambilla ransacks porn-film archives to produce a witty, fast-moving montage of money-shots. British art star Sam Taylor-Wood directs a porn star in a droll elegy to masturbation and the great American outdoors.
Larry Clark, the controversial anthropologist of American adolescence, directs a riveting documentary about desire and sexual initiation. French bad boy Gaspar Noé, maker of IRREVERSIBLE, the controversial art-house movie whose brutal depiction of rape left audiences physically sick, now promises to turn you on with a cinematically erotic journey into the world of a babysitter. Bring your raincoat and be careful who sits next to you.
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Posted by: Bob | August 31, 2007 at 07:48 PM
Last week, after returning from a disappointing dancing session in da club, where Taylor learned some harsh lessons about love, loss, and getting totally shut down by a hot girl, Taylor had a lot to think about. So he sat down at his computer and carefully compiled his thoughts in an entry on his blog,“ UnCommoN SENSE with Aaron P. Taylor.” The entry,“ Advice 4 Women: How to NOT Get a‘ Deserved Raping,’” was a quick primer on how girls might avoid doing things that would lead them to be responsible for their...
Posted by: | February 13, 2009 at 09:11 PM