THE NEW YORKER: His interest is in people and their trajectories; a maximalist, he wants to reveal the entirety of his characters’ lives and minds. In “20th Century Women,” the five main characters periodically narrate their own and one another’s biographies. Their stories are accompanied by montages of period photos intended to create an air of credence. A believer in sympathetic magic, Mills gathers dog-eared objects and forgotten rituals to summon a world of mixtapes and Judy Blume and Three Mile Island and skateboarders who grab their boards behind their front leg. Julie (Elle Fanning), a seventeen-year-old who cuddles […]
CINEMA: Purple Reign
SIGN O’ THE TIMES (1987, directed by Prince, 89 minutes, U.S.) BREAKING GLASS (1980, directed by Brian Gibson, 103 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Andrew’s Video Vault presents a pair of semi-lost 80s rock films are on the bill Thursday night January 12th at the Rotunda in West Philly: Prince’s 1987 theatrical concert film Sign O’ the Times and Brian Gibson’s 1980 rise and fall of a British post-punk star Breaking Glass with Hazel O’Connor, in its extended U.K. Cut. It’s easy to see 1987’s double-album Sign O’ the Times as Prince’s cultural pinnacle, propelling three songs […]
CINEMA: Dan Buskirk’s Favorite Films Of 2016
BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Another year ticks by and 2016 reinforces the idea that the creation of serious, non-blockbuster films is less and less of interest in the American movie industry. No less a voice of authority than Martin Scorsese professed this opinion in a recent Associated Press article proclaiming “Cinema is Gone,” and while film culture is still consistently flourishing in pockets around the world, only four of the dozen films listed here as 2016 favorites are by U.S. directors, surely an all-time personal low. People carry with them a lot of myths about creativity being a […]
CINEMA: May The Force Be With Her, Always
NEW YORK TIMES: Ms. Fisher established Princess Leia as a damsel who could very much deal with her own distress, whether facing down the villainy of the dreaded Darth Vader or the romantic interests of the roguish smuggler Han Solo. Wielding blaster pistols, piloting futuristic vehicles and, to her occasional chagrin, wearing strange hairdos and a revealing metal bikini, she reprised the role in three more films — “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1980, “Return of the Jedi” in 1983 and, 32 years later, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” by which time Leia had become a hard-bitten general. Lucasfilm […]
CINEMA: Camelot In La La Land
LA LA LAND (2016, directed by Damien Chazelle, 128 minutes, U.S.) JACKIE (2016, directed by Pablo Larain, 99 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Trepidation preceded me sitting down for director Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to the award-winning hit Whiplash, a film that admittedly irked me in a most personal way. For those lucky enough to have missed it, Whiplash was a musical drama proposing that the best way to craft a new generation of jazz geniuses was to abuse them like a crazed drill sergeant in a house-of-horrors-come-classroom where never is heard an encouraging word. Driven by a […]
FROM THE VAULT: Q&A With Dean Wareham
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Back in the ’60s, Andy Warhol’s Factory — his studio-cum-playpen situated in a brick-walled walk-up on 47th Street in Manhattan — was the epicenter of all things edgy, artsy and, ultimately, profoundly influential. Dylan, Edie Sedgwick, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Nico, and The Velvet Underground all came and went, and most sat for one of Warhol’s screen tests — a three-minute black and white stare-down between the camera and subject. There are some 500 of them in the Warhol archives. Recently the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh commissioned ex-Galaxie 500/Luna mainman Dean Wareham — whose cred as […]
CINEMA: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
OLD STONE (Lao shi) (2016, directed by Johnny Ma, 80 minutes, Canada/China) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The advance word on the new thriller Old Stone, shot in the eastern Chinese city of Anhui by second generation Canadian director Johnny Ma, narrowcasts it as a damning indictment of contemporary Chinese society. In reality, this story of a man who turns desperate while battling the medical bureaucracy feels distressingly universal in its depiction of how governmental dehumanization rubs off on its citizenry. The film may be set in far-off China but U.S. audiences won’t have to squint too hard to […]
BOWIE BOSSANOVA: Q&A w/ Brazil’s Seu Jorge
Artwork by ANDREW SPEAR EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview first ran on VICE/NOISEY. BY JONATHAN VALANIA The Brazilian actor/musician Seu Jorge is probably best known to American audiences for his performance as the Bowie-singing sailor Pele dos Santos — he of the pointy blood red toque, lip-dangling Gitane and vintage white Adidas Sambas — in Wes Anderson’s 2004 film, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. But his breakout role was the homicidal avenger Knockout Ned in City Of God, Fernando Meirelles’ graphic 2002 study of the spiralling ultra-violence of internecine gangster warfare in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. After seeing […]
CINEMA: Sadchester
THE NEW YORKER: Not that Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote and directed the movie, is deliberately making things hard for us to grasp. Rather, he proceeds on the assumption that things are hard, some irreparably so, and that it’s the job of a film not to smooth them over. That is why “Manchester by the Sea” becomes a litany of human error, with the tragic parts nicked and grazed by semi-comedy. We get minor misunderstandings, as when Joe’s best friend, the robust and reliable George (C. J. Wilson), has to shout to his wife across a crowded wake. We get […]
THE GODFATHER OF GRUNGE: Q&A With Butch Vig, Garbage Drummer/Producer Extraordinaire
Photo by AUTUMN DEWILDE EDITOR’S NOTE: A considerably shorter version of this interview appeared in the November 10th edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Enjoy. BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER The Smart Studios Story documents the rise and fall of the legendary recording studio founded by acclaimed producer Butch Vig and his partner Steve Marker, where they recorded Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage, Death Cab For Cutie and, most importantly, Nirvana’s Nevermind. The film tracks the evolution of Smart Studios from its humble DIY beginnings as a glorified punk rock treehouse with free beer to the center of the alt-rock universe in […]
CINEMA: There’s No Place Like Home
BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK (2016, directed by Ang Lee, 110 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Ang Lee’s latest exemplifies the sort of intimate drama on a grand scale in which the director specializes. With Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, based on the best-selling novel by Ben Fountain, Lee again dazzles us with visceral, ambitious visuals, but the story at its heart seems just as simplistic as the empty patriotism against which the film rails. It is brilliantly constructed, a time capsule set in the early years of our 21st century war on Iraq, with the scene at […]
CINEMA: Glitter And Doom
Gimmme Danger (2016, directed by Jim Jarmusch, 108 minutes, USA) BY JONATHAN VALANIA Loud, lewd and anarchic, the Stooges emerged from the dark side of the ’60s like a bad moon rising, and while they were largely misunderstood if not altogether despised back in the day, both their sound (the prototype of both punk and metal) and vision (hearts full of napalm, 10 soldiers and Nixon coming, apocalypse now) would prove prophetic as the Age of Aquarius curdled into the ’70s. James Newell Osterberg — AKA Iggy Pop, the titular frontman for Iggy & The Stooges — single-handedly invented the […]
CINEMA: Black Lives Shatter
Moonlight (2016, directed by Barry Jenkins, 110 minutes, U.S.) The Handmaiden (2016, directed by Park Chan-wook, 144 minutes, South Korea) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC A couple years ago, I climbed aboard the critical pile-on for Richard Linklater’s ten-years-in-the-making epic, Boyhood, an intimate coming of age story that grew up alongside its young star. Watching a kid grew over a decade in a fictional film was an intriguing novelty and Linklater has a genial way with actors but through all the film’s pleasures was a gnawing thought that this kid’s life and experiences at their heart were not very […]