A Beginner's Guide To Endings w/ Kamaria Porter

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A Beginners Guide to Endings

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Friday, 24 June 2011 10:30

Filmspotting contributors Kamaria Porter and Alex Wilgus review the new movie "A Beginner's Guide to Endings," which was part of the Indie Comedy festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center. By Kamaria Porter "A Beginners Guide to Endings" is a convoluted but fanciful romp with a dysfunctional family dealing with the repercussions of a sad sack father's actions after he commits suicide by way of Niagara Falls.  Left behind are five sons by three different mothers.  The story centers around the three eldest (Scott Caan, Paolo Costanzo, and Jason Jones) who discover in their father's will that they will all die prematurely of heart failure.  Dear old dad Duke, played by Harvey Keitel, loved to gamble and bet on his boys' health in signing them up for a drug trial.  Greedy and weak Duke took the payday and ended his life before his sons learned of their medical fate from his priest brother played by the always reliable JK Simmons.   The boys all engage in their own version of carpe diem and comedy flows from the quirky hi-jinks that result.  The funniest is Costanzo's Jacob who has played by the rules and decides to make an extreme bucket list of risky and over-the-top behavior.  With his youngest brother in tow, Jacob buys a muscle car, wears an Elvis suit, finally talks to the cute girl he sees everyday, and plans to ride in a capsule down Niagara Falls. He's a bit odd to begin with and it's quite funny seeing him try to break out of his shell and meet the confines of his nerdy imagination.  JK Simmons is the comedic heavyweight landing caustic one-liners on the idiocy of his nephews.   "A Beginners Guide to Endings" offers a lot to chuckle at, but could have strengthened the relationship between the brothers.  Instead of having to deal with new morality as a family and finding comedy in greater urgency and honesty, the boys disperse to find individual wacky adventures.  The scenes with all three brothers are unfortunately the weakest with the actors fudging lines or breaking dialogue for physical comedy.   I expected a bit more from Caan, who with Casey Affleck was always able to make hilarity out of their bickering sibling interludes in the "Oceans" series. With more attention on the family unit and the comedy of these guys who've avoided being a family finally having to deal with each other, the film could have been much funnier.   By Alex Wilgus Attempting to pull madcap comedy and emotional exposition out of a botched suicide attempt and the slow march toward a successful one is enough to arrest anybody’s attention.  A shocking setup like this one begs to be followed up on with a well-written, compelling tale of irony and comic tomfoolery. Unfortunately, "A Beginner’s Guide to Endings" offers little follow through on big ideas, and a veteran cast of actors does even more to distract from the film’s lack of substance. The brotherly dynamics, slow-motion rock music montages and a perplexing emphasis on gambling culture makes for an uninteresting stylistic cross between "Bottle Rocket" and "Snatch."  The pairing of Scott Caan and Casey Affleck as brothers also brings "Ocean’s Eleven" painfully into the foreground. J.K. Simmons, my favorite character actor, is put in his most thankless role yet, one which assumes his presence alone will make an interesting character out of the furthest thing from:  a priest, who is also for some reason the arbiter of the will and the family’s advisor. I will concede that comedy is largely a guessing game.  It’s a subjective genre, and what’s funny to one person may cause a bad case of the straight-face in another.  Unfortunately, the entirety of my reactions were of the latter type. While I literally enjoyed nothing about this film, I will allow for the possibility that I am a stony, heartless and jaded young man who cannot feel mirth. Well, that’s not entirely true.  I did enjoy Tricia Helfer playing a homicidal ex-girlfriend.  In my opinion, her performance was the only successful curiosity in a series of uninspired attempts at quirky characters. "A Beginner’s Guide to Endings" proves that adding strong acting personalities to stylish direction is not the magic recipe for those ‘classic’ character moments we’ve enjoyed in Guy Ritchie and Wes Anderson movies.  Clever writing and interesting story structure are essential in making comedy work.  Though comedy is a more relative endeavor than most, I can’t help but think that if the script had been given as much attention as the cinematography, the film’s charismatic performances would have been a lot more entertaining.

Battle for Brooklyn w/ Kamaria Porter

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Battle for Brooklyn

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Friday, 17 June 2011 12:30

Filmspotting contributors Kamaria Porter and Alex Wilgus review the new movie "Battle for Brooklyn," which was part of the Chicago Underground Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center and is currently playing in New York. By Kamaria Porter While watching "Battle for Brooklyn", a documentary about the fight between residents and a moneyed block of developers, politicians and business people, I had the famous Gandhi quote pounding in my head, "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."  As a former community activist,  I was solidly on the side of Daniel Goldstein and the group of residents, local politicians, activists and lawyers fighting to stop the Atlantic Yards project and reach a compromise that would bring amenities to the area without uprooting people. I realized I had been trained, through hopeful documentaries of David over Goliath triumphs, to hope for the victory Gandhi promised with the application of diligence, intelligence and perseverance.  I was so longing for the catharsis of victory, that I almost missed the truly wonderful gift of the film.  "Battle for Brooklyn" succeeds in illuminating the birth and tracking the growth of one person’s political conscious. At the start, Goldstein is a miffed and idealistic homeowner in the cross-hairs of the Atlantic Yards Development.  His house is located where the envisioned basketball stadium is being planned.  Goldstein joins up with other neighbors, attends rallies, and makes flyers.  As developers proceed with clearing the building site, Goldstein finds himself the only resident of his condominium not to take the property buy out.  This shock to his system becomes the fuel for the cause.  Speaking at his first press conference Goldstein smiles saying, "I think it went really well and that I like this."  As his political involvement increases, his apartment becomes more of a war room for him and his new girlfriend, a fellow activist, to coordinate the campaign. Goldstein learns about power, influence and how well money organizes people to do things that simply aren’t logical.  On the side of the developers emerges BUILD, a community group praising Atlantic City Yards and touting the jobs, housing and basketball.  In hearings and press conferences, BUILD's line comes out simple and quick, while Develop, Not Destroy must back-track and explain the merits of their case.  Goldstein bemoans the division between residents in his community knowing that together they would have the power to beat the project. Even after scandal, outcries from the community, alternative plans, and the credit crisis, Goldstein and company cannot break the momentum of Atlantic City Yards.  As the project breaks ground in a star-studded ceremony, Goldsteins leads a protest march and must barrel through police and private guards to get to his home.  The fight is over and Goldstein has to move out with the new family he's built in the intervening years. Yet, he's become a different person -- agile with the press, steadfast with private guards trying to limit his access to his home, and connected to the community he's worked to preserve.  "Battle for Brooklyn" shows that public action may not always lead to the just result; Atlantic City Yards proceeded without the affordable housing and numberof jobs it promised, but it can still transform the lives of the people who engage in it.   ByAlex Wilgus "Battle for Brooklyn" was enlightening for me.  I grew up in rural Texas where building codes and allocations of space are slightly less fussed over than in major cities. The film exposed me to the process of urban development and the dire altercations they produce. Structurally, “Battle for Brooklyn” is excellent.  It’s succinct, easy to digest, never wordy, never dull and focused intently on the paper and media war between American entrepreneurs and those that live in the way of their plans.  It’s shot entirely on digital film, but dodges the claustrophobia that entraps so many independent documentaries by filming over several years and investigating nearly everyone involved with the building crisis.  The directors themselves, Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley, act as community organizers, hinging together the cheapest materials using cost-free tools (such as Google Maps) to deliver an urgent message as clearly as possible.  While I don’t have Kamaria’s experience in community organizing, I echo her admiration.  The themes and storytelling are very compelling.  There are heroes and villains, the stuff of any good story, whether it be documentary or drama.  The audience isn’t ever encouraged to take any other side than Goldstein’s, but Bruce Ratner’s relative absence from the entire film speaks a little too loudly in favor of the film’s slanted perspective.  Throughout, the film’s protagonists consistently ask why Ratner hasn’t even bothered to talk to them.  Words are exchanged between virtually every other public figure (including the mayor), but the billionaire himself is absent.  Galinsky and Hawley are so careful to give every involved party their two cents’ worth, that the most prominent player’s absence speaks volumes.  Ratner’s flunkies chatter away, but the man himself won’t talk.  Also in favor of the film’s perspective are the actual events that unfold.  BUILD turns out to be a puppet organization hired to sway community opinion and many of the ‘good things’ promised by Ratner and his company are scrapped in order to save costs while the juggernaut of the stadium remains the top priority.  All the evils of the building project are revealed and Ratner never comes out to say anything differently about it.  That’s not ‘guilty until proven innocent’; it’s never showing up to court.  Despite its low budget, "Battle for Brooklyn" is a broad and critical look into the new face of Brooklyn and the dark side of urban renewal.

Louder Than A Bomb w/ Kamaria Porter

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Louder Than a Bomb

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Friday, 20 May 2011 12:30

Filmspotting contributors Kamaria Porter and Alex Wilgus review the new movie "Louder Than a Bomb," which is currently and playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. By Alex Wilgus One might think that Jon Siskel and Greg Jacobs’ new documentary Louder Than a Bomb is just another entry into what has become a familiar genre of kid-centric documentaries.  One would be wrong.  Ever since Spellbound was released in 2002, all sorts of children’s competitions from spelling bees to ballroom dancing have been documented in much the same way:  heighten the stakes of the competition by filming a handful of contestants and focusing on how winning the competition will improve each protagonists’ quality of life.  "Louder Than a Bomb," documents a different kind of game:  a youth poetry slam in Chicago where schools from the city’s diverse neighborhoods meet to share their talent and their stories. Instead of playing up a heated competition, Siskel and Jacobs turn their cameras on the mutual edification between the contestants.  The kids are out to win, but they’re just as serious about building each other up as they are about taking home any bragging rights.  The spirit of the competition (and consequently, the entire film) is perfectly summarized in one of its principle contestants, Adam Gottlieb.  He’s a magnetic young man who is as un-self conscious as his bushy pony tail.  In front of the camera he’s a good-natured goof who exudes maturity beyond his years both on and off the stage.  He welcomes newcomers and even composes special poems to sing the praises of his competitors while ‘spitting’ rhymes twice as fast as any rapper.  One judge says of Adam, “I didn’t think they made people like him anymore.” Gottlieb embodies the competition’s slogan: “The point is not the points, it’s the poetry,” and Siskel and Jacobs wisely follow this young man’s lead.  The result is a film that doesn’t feel the need to artificially inflate its drama.  There is no comment on the oft-discussed ‘sad state of urban youth’ or any lame attempts to prescribe ‘what these kids need’.  Instead, they are allowed to speak for themselves.  Their poetry forms the whole of this film’s thematic atmosphere, and it’s rich and inspiring.  Siskel and Jacobs are content to present a sober cross-section of the lives of several extraordinary high school students.  "Louder Than A Bomb" exhibits a rare sincerity in a socially conscious documentary. Technically, the film is excellent.  Every scene pops with the kids’ personality, and the few ‘filler’ shots are filmed with careful attention to composition.  The audio is never muddy and the editing is crisp.  Siskel and Jacobs don’t just go in waving cameras around, and their attention to post-production detail pays off.  Even the best source material can be ruined by visual carelessness, but the directors never drop the ball.  As an added bonus, the soundtrack carries some recognizable tunes that make the film’s few music montages memorable. I loved "Louder Than a Bomb." Siskel and Jacobs’ calm resistance of melodrama is fertile soil for these youngsters.  The inherent value of filming the poetry slam, as opposed to the other competitions documented by previous kiddie docs is that these kids aren’t pouring their energies into learning arbitrary parlor tricks.  These teenagers bring only their stories and their creative energy into an event that ends up feeling more like a party than a tournament.  The competitive spirit courses through "Louder Than A Bomb," but it never comes at the expense of positivity.     By Kamaria Porter Having the occasion to spend most of my days with teenagers, I found "Louder Than A Bomb" completely charming.  Documenting the Chicago youth slam poetry competition of the same name, directors Jon Siskel and Greg Jacobs introduce us to four extraordinary young authors and an exciting Chicago art community. The film excels by following the teens, listening to their poetry, and probing the sources of their powerful verses.  The directors rightly drop us into this world, letting us hear the verses and see students and teachers learn through collaboration.  As a hometown girl it was thrilling to watch these new voices bursting out to tell vital stories of loss, hope and identity. The film invests us early in the teams showing how each school prepares for the competition.  We get the closest look at Steinmetz Academic Centre, a public school on the west side of Chicago.  The unexpected winners of last year's tournament, the Steinmetz students are hungry for another victory and the recognition their community so rarely receives.  Headed by Lamar, an electrifying poet and exacting leader, the Steinmetz team goes through fits of inspiration and silliness with Lamar begging his teammates to write. The film seems to be rooting for Steinmetz as underdogs with a title to defend; yet their poetry elicits our respect.  Lamar delivers a sophisticated and risky piece about gun violence, putting himself in the mind of a school shooter.  As a team, Steinmetz delivers targeted and emotional social commentary with the piece "Counting Graves." Through this poem, these students wrest us into the mind of a teen grieving his mother and brother murdered in a drive-by intended for him.  This piece, more than any other, embodies the purpose and possibilities of slam poetry and may be the best sequence in the film. "Louder Than A Bomb" respects this high school competition as a true community of artists.  The students become fans of each other's work, quoting their favorite lines and paying homage to each other in poems.  It gets a little misty when Adam Gottlieb's team calls Steinmetz an inspiration to the entire community in their final poem.  Adam, the most enthusiastic and loving teenager alive, was a pleasure to meet through the film.  He delivers a strong personal and historical reflection in a solo piece called "Maxwell Street."  His deep analysis of his Jewish heritage combined with affection for his grandmother was wonderful to watch.  We can see his love for the competition as he attends every battle and cheers every poet.  Gottlieb is the kind of student you dream of teaching not just because of his congeniality, but his capacity to teach and bolster others. I would say "Louder Than a Bomb" is mandatory viewing for local audiences.  It highlights a vibrant and vital Chicago institution that simply provides the microphone for Chicago teens to tell their stories and join a truly diverse community.  After seeing the film, I made a mental note to stop by Columbia College for next year's contests.  For those outside of Chicago, the film remains accessible by focusing on these emerging artists, their poetry and the stories between the verses.

Stake Land w/ Kamaria Porter

Originally published at filmspotting.net.

Stake Land

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Monday, 09 May 2011 15:30

Filmspotting contributors Kamaria Porter and Alex Wilgus review the new movie “Stake Land,” which is currently playing at the The Music Box at 3733 North Southport Avenue through Thursday, May 12. By Kamaria Porter When the vampire apocalypse comes you might think family, community, or even God will provide solace from things crawling in the dark. In Jim Mickle's “Stake Land,” the only thing our characters can rely on is a swift strike of a garlic soaked stake to the heart.   We follow Martin (Connor Paolo), a teenager orphaned by a vampire and taken in by the peripatetic Mister (Nick Damici). Mister has a special hatred for the bloodsuckers and trains Martin in vampire combat.  The undead are persistent, quick, but dim enough for our trained killers to take down.  Along the way, Martin and Mister save a Nun from brutal rape, take in a pregnant woman, and add Marine to their team. They band together to fight stalking vampires and the brutal group of religious hypocrites calling themselves the Brotherhood. Far from the biting wit of “Zombieland” and the pulpy fun of HBO’s “True Blood,” “Stake Land” is a bleak, winding nomadic story. Bloody scares make a thrilling beginning, but are replaced by threats from the Brotherhood -- the spawn of fascists and religious fanatics looking to rule over and degrade whatever the vampires haven't devoured -- and meditations on a world without order.  Our characters move from town to town each more base than the last, until they trek up to the forest to hide.  Through Martin’s narration, we track his growing hopelessness as human communities disappoint and vampires steal every shred of hope he dares to have. I did like the serious tone and the unconventional family forged on the road by Mister and Martin. Yet these bonds and the social commentary never really settled in me because of the choice to use voice-over narration to reel out the story instead of dialogue and action between the living members of the cast.  We can only guess what these people mean to each other, and their actions, whether expected or surprising, failed to draw me in.   Paolo as Martin tells the story well enough, but I started to crave the vampires to see some action on screen. These scenes felt urgent with gory detail paid to makeup and performance of the night-crawling beasts. The movie has a budding suspicion for religion that never grew enough to stand for me to critique or consider the filmmaker's point.  The leader of the Brotherhood Jebedia Loven (Michael Cerveris) commits atrocities while holding a Bible, but never stood for anything more than another person to be staked.   For me, a more compelling commentary on the abuse of religion combined with scenes building the relationships of the characters would have provided the guts to go with the blood in “Stake Land.”   By Alex Wilgus For whatever reason, it’s great fun to dream about the end of the world.  The typical post-apocalypse film tends to consist of a fantastical event that wipes the world clean of government and re-orders civilization.  Accordingly, humans are forced to rely on wits dulled by cushy society, religion shows its uglier side, and our heroes set out to find a rumored paradise that may just be too good to be true. Jim Mickle’s ‘Stake Land” is a familiar yet memorable road trip through this genre.  Mickle’s idea of hell on earth is that of a global pandemic that turns the good folks of America’s heartland into a teeming mass of vampires.  By the time we join our two main characters, a quiet teenage lad named Martin and Mister, a grizzled old vampire hunter, the world has pretty much ended save for some small pockets of survivors.  In true post-apocalyptic fashion, tensions are always high, danger lurks close at hand and every minute is lived out under a thick veil of doom. Uneasy calm makes “Stake Land” stand out among other post-apocalypse films. Like Gareth Edwards’ “Monsters,” the energy is set very low.  Mickle uses stillness and Martin’s poignant narration to build a tone of sweet dread, which he vents at several points with some expertly crafted fight scenes.  The narration scenes are straight out of a Terrence Mallick movie, providing a needed emotional anchor.   A cheekier reviewer might call this film “28 Days of Heaven Later,” and though several folks in my theater chuckled at hearing a character reach for profundity while liberally using the word “vampire,” the sequences  work.  Martin’s voice is far from saccharine and it was refreshing to see a horror film that welcomes emotional involvement.  My only gripe was that these narration montages were used a just a bit too often, and I often felt prevented from experiencing the film’s drama in real-time. “Stake Land’s” greatest strength is its vision of the American South.  Having grown up not far from the film’s initial locations, I identified strongly with this American wasteland.  Though monsters don’t roam the fields and rural “old-time religion” isn’t as scary as most directors make it out to be, the pervasive feeling of solitude brought it all home to me.  The disconnected communities in the film are not so different from the isolated towns that make up much of the Southern countryside. Martin’s pilgrimage away from this geographical separation and his own personal estrangement from others might resonate with any country boy or girl who has struck out for the north in search of “whatever ain’t here.”   “Stake Land’s” speculative premise conjures up real feeling.  Mickle’s apocalypse offers a glimpse of one’s own self free from the petty complications of modern life and recalls what it is like to be young and in search of something better.

American: The Bill Hicks Story

Originally published at filmspotting.net

American: The Bill Hicks Story

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Saturday, 30 April 2011 09:30

"American: The Bill Hicks Story" is playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center and is available on demand. By Alex Wilgus “I want my rock stars dead!” This might have been a better title for Paul Thomas and Matt Harlock’s biographical documentary “American:  The Bill Hicks Story.”  The speaker of these incendiary and ultimately poignant words is, of course, Bill Hicks, a shooting star comedian who rose quickly in the underground comedy scene, was denied fame by the media due to his uncompromising hatred of mainstream American culture and then died tragically of cancer at age 32.  Before watching this film, my only knowledge of Hicks came from a two-minute clip of one of his comedy routines which, in itself, contained enough controversy to fuel several films.  I assumed an account of this man’s life story would produce similar results, but “The Bill Hicks Story” didn’t soak me in the spice of Hicks’ stand-up act.  Thomas and Harlock deserve credit for their unique visual style, since it takes a great deal of ingenuity to do something new with a biographical documentary.  They wisely stay away from a sober Ken Burns approach or the History Channel-style of filming empty locations with sound and music over it (or worse: re-enactments).  Instead, they compile photos of Hicks’ life and rotoscope them to create animated dioramas from the still frames.  The result is like watching a pop-up-book, and it carries exactly the right tone of whimsy and caricature for recounting the life of a renegade comic.  The animatics pull the audience through the story of Hicks’ life like a roller coaster, but once in a while the parade of moving pictures comes up with a dud.  For instance, the composite images of Houston, New York and Los Angeles do little to recreate the landscape of '80s and '90s America, an environment that is central to Hicks’ identity. But these few moments are forgivable in light of the film’s swift pacing.  Excitement is a difficult emotion to achieve in a retrospective documentary and a few spare missteps don’t derail the film’s visual momentum. Unfortunately, as the freshness of the graphics wore off, some latent dissatisfaction began to bubble to the surface of my consciousness until I had to admit to myself that in spite of all its graphical panache, I was not gleaning enough enjoyment or insight from the film. “American” puts Bill Hicks in a strangely detached and un-controversial light.  It is hard to understand why a movie about a man who publicly called for the suicide of everybody in the marketing business (while repeating over and over that it was ‘not a joke’) wouldn’t be a meaty story, but “The Bill Hicks Story” has a hollow center due to a single stylistic choice:  for whatever reason, all of the film’s narration and content is delivered by a group of roughly ten family members, colleagues and close friends. This choice left the film lacking in two key areas: scope and conflict. At one point a fellow comedian states, “People would walk out of his shows changed.  Even if they didn’t admit it, they were changed a little bit.”  An interview with one of these ‘changed’ fans might have at least colored in this statement, but “The Bill Hicks Story” features not a single fan.  As far as I could tell, Hicks’ audience was just a laugh track punctuating his jokes. Why tell us when you could show us? There was an early attempt at showing how out of step Bill was with his parents and Southern Baptist upbringing, but the rebelliousness is superficial and lasts only through his teenage years.  The only conflict I could detect was between an outspoken comic and a vague amalgam of the government, conservative Christians and the ignorant American populous that is never allowed to talk back.  Without a more defined "enemy," Hicks appears to be ranting into midair. Even documentaries need drama, and the movie didn't need to present such a one-sided story about a controversial figure. If Hicks’ legacy and influence really is as deep and groundbreaking as the film claims it is, then I can’t help but feel that “American:  The Bill Hicks Story” is just the prelude.  The full account has yet to be made.