Indiewood/Hollywoodn't
The H Collective Launches First-Ever Global Film Competition to Produce Full-Length Feature Film – "if24" - May 3, 2018
2017 IFFR Interview: Sophie Goyette (Mes nuits feront écho) - February 9, 2017
Remix Godard's 'ALPHAVILLE' with BRIGHT IDEAS Magazine - January 10, 2015
CONTEST: 'Imagine I'm Beautiful' Film Review - October 13, 2014
CONTEST: 'The Sublime and the Beautiful' Student Film Review - September 27, 2014
Tribeca Film Festival 2019 Curtain Raiser: What to See / Part 2 - April 21, 2019
Tribeca Film Festival 2019 Curtain Raiser: What to See / Archival-Themed Movies - April 21, 2019
Top Ten TFF2018 Mother-Daughter Movies - April 18, 2018
Fashion Documentary Films to Watch, from Tribeca Film Festival - April 18, 2018
Tribeca Film Festival 2018 Curtain Raiser - April 17, 2018
AT&T Presents Untold Stories: "Lucky Grandma" and "Nigerian Prince" Film Reviews + AT&T's Own Untold Story - June 23, 2019
Freedom Films: "A Night at Switch n' Play" "Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes" and "Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation" - June 7, 2019
Christo Film: "Walking on Water" Review, Directed by Andrey Paounov - May 19, 2019
"The Quiet One" Documentary Film Review: Bill Wyman Does Beckett - May 11, 2019
"Slay the Dragon" Documentary Review / Interview with Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance - May 8, 2019
Digital Age/Digital Space 2 – Tips for a Successful Campaign - September 3, 2013
Interview: Ryan Reynolds - July 11, 2015
2015 Tribeca Film Festival Interview: Laura Bispuri (Director/Writer) and Alba Rohrwacher (Actress) – 'Sworn Virgin' - April 22, 2015
Interview: Jeremy St. James (Actor – 'Marfa Girl') - March 24, 2015
65th Berlinale Interview: James Franco (Actor) & Justin Kelly (Director) – 'I Am Michael' - February 12, 2015
65th Berlinale Interview: Ella Manzheeva (Director) & Evgeniya Mandzhieva (Actress) – 'The Gulls/Chaiki' - February 9, 2015
"On the Inside of a Military Dictatorship" Interview w/ Director Karen Stokkendal Poulsen - May 19, 2019
Klein and Mason's HP Garage "History of Memory" Film Review at TFF2019 Tribeca X Competition - April 25, 2019
Hot Docs 2018 Interview: Joseph Pace Documentary, The Game Changers - May 5, 2018
Dispatches From NYWIFT 37th Annual Muse Awards Honoring Women In Film, Television & Media - December 14, 2016
2015 SXSW Interview: Mick Partridge (Producer – 'Sneakerheadz') - March 16, 2015
2015 SXSW Interview: Alexander Dunn (Director) & Alex Noyer (Producer) – '808: The Movie' - March 13, 2015
Interview: Jeff Vespa (Photographer – "The Art of Discovery") - October 16, 2014
Roundtable Interview: Kathryn Altman (Wife of Robert Altman), Bob Balaban (Actor, Friend and Collaborator with Robert Altman) – 'Altman' - August 7, 2014
Untouchable Documentary Interview with Director David Feige - May 18, 2016
2015 Tribeca Film Festival Interview: Burhan Qurbani (Director/Writer – We Are Young. We Are Strong) - April 24, 2015
2015 Tribeca Film Festival Interview: David Oelhoffen (Director/Writer – 'Far From Men') - April 24, 2015
65th Berlinale Interview: Muayad Alayan (Director/Co-Writer) and Rami Alayan (Co-Writer) – "Love, Theft and Other Entanglements" - February 16, 2015
film festivals (us)
Support Documentary For Women By Women - June 21, 2016
Egyptian Superstar Satirist Announces New Documentary & IndieGoGo Campaign - February 10, 2015
SUPPORT: Sci-Fi Short Film 'The Quantified Life' - October 6, 2014
Interview: A.T. Sayre, Writer / Director – 'The Song the Zombie Sang' - October 4, 2014
Interview: Brannigan Carter (Director) – 'RUN': a Werewolf Short Film - September 23, 2014
10 Things You're Doing Wrong In Your Screenplay - October 27, 2015
Explore The Rise Of The Non-Traditional Aspect Ratio [VIDEO ESSAY] - October 6, 2015
Noemí Weis' MILK; A Universal Perspective Of Motherhood, Birth & Infant Feeding - August 14, 2015
Teach Film To Kids in Latin America, Asia, and Africa With Filmmakers Without Borders - May 6, 2015
The Top 25 Film Schools in the Country – 2013 Edition - July 31, 2013
Albert Dabah's "Extra Innings" Picking Up Traction & Will Be Featured at Jersey Shore Film Festival - June 6, 2019
Sundance Selects: "The Quiet One" Opens in Theaters and On Demand - May 13, 2019
Tarantino's Hateful Eight, Extended Version, is Now a Netflix Miniseries - May 13, 2019
Oscar Nominated Iranian Filmmaker Barred From Ceremony; Academy Responds - February 1, 2017
Carrie Fisher / Debbie Reynolds Combo Obituary & Film Review: "Bright Lights" - December 29, 2016
Dispatches From The 2016 American Film Market - November 14, 2016
"Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes" Documentary Review - June 12, 2019
Review: "The Spy Behind Home Plate" by Aviva Kempner - June 10, 2019
SXSW & TFF 2016: Starz Wins Bidding War for My Blind Brother Distribution - May 18, 2016
"Bikes vs Cars", Inspiring a New Approach to Urban Planning - September 24, 2015
HP Power Up Festival: Visual Effects in 'Guardians of the Galaxy' - October 5, 2014
4K Resolutions and the State of New York Production: Thoughts on the 2013 CCW Expo - November 15, 2013
Craft Truck 'Tech Bites' – Blackmagic Hyperdeck Shuttle (Video) - August 9, 2013
Craft Truck 'Tech Bites' – Sound Devices 664 - July 30, 2013
Craft Truck 'Tech Bites' Leica Summilux C Prime Cinema Lenses - July 22, 2013
"17 Blocks" Documentary Review - May 28, 2019
Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation by Barak Goodman Documentary Review - May 5, 2019
Review: 'Song One' - January 23, 2015
Review: 'Reach Me' - November 25, 2014
Review: 'Amor Crónico' - November 23, 2014
I/H Español
Las 5 películas latinas del Festival de Autor de Barcelona que no te puedes perder - April 21, 2016
Los Goya 2016, Unos Premios Muy Latinos - December 28, 2015
Las 5 películas del Festival de Sitges que no te puedes perder - October 27, 2015
Lost Soul es el documental sobre "La Isla del Dr. Moreau", la película que Richard Stanley nunca pudo terminar - October 21, 2015
Baskin, puro terror en la sorpresa turca de Sitges - October 13, 2015
Las 25 mejores películas latinoamericanas del 2018 - December 13, 2018
Corto Circuito, el festival de cortometrajes latinos de Nueva York celebra su 13 aniversario - November 9, 2016
Victor Gaviria (Colombia) recibirá el premio a toda una vida en los premios Macondo 2016 - November 3, 2016
Presentación de la Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid (SEMINCI) - October 19, 2016
La 5a. edición del Dominican Film Festival New York del 22 al 26 de Junio - June 21, 2016
Seminci 2016: "Las Furias" de Miguel del Arco - November 1, 2016
"Pazza Gioia" de Paolo Virzì : Sección Oficial Seminci 2016 - November 1, 2016
Les Innocentes: Sección Oficial Seminci 2016 - October 27, 2016
LA LA LAND; LA VUELTA DEL MUSICAL CLASICO - October 9, 2016
La Corona Partida de Jordi Frades, nos acerca a uno de los periodos más interesantes de la historia de la península ibérica. - July 15, 2016
Entrevista con Javier Angulo, Director de la Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid (SEMINCI) - June 29, 2016
"Los Actores Americanos No Están Acostumbrados A Que Los Dirijan"; Entrevista a JC Falcón, Director de People You May Know - July 27, 2015
"La Nacional Era Encontrarse En Casa A Miles de Kilómetros"; Entrevista Con Celia Novis, Directora de Sole Survivor - July 24, 2015
"En Estados Unidos, La Gente Está Entrenada Para Reconocer Talento"; Entrevista Con Elisa Lleras, Co-Fundadora y Productora Ejecutiva de La Panda - July 1, 2015
Havana Film Festival Filmmaker Interview: Roberto Salinas (The Troublemaker) - May 26, 2015
I/H Europe
IFP & Sundance Institute Return to the EFM With "American Independents in Berlin" – Feb 7-17, 2013 - February 7, 2013
2018 Cannes Film Festival: Ten Things To Know - May 15, 2018
Romanian Film 'Touch Me Not' Wins Golden Bear At Berlinale 2018 - February 27, 2018
CPH:DOX 2017 Filmmaker Profile: Petr Lom (Burma Storybook) - March 21, 2017
CPH:DOX Unveils Full 2017 Program - March 9, 2017
Berlinale 2017 Filmmaker Profile: Neil Triffett (Emo: The Musical) - February 18, 2017
Berlinale 2017 Filmmaker Profile: Carol Salter (Almost Heaven) - February 10, 2017
Berlinale 2017 Filmmaker Profile: Rafael Kapelinski (Butterfly Kisses) - February 10, 2017
Berlinale 2017 Profile: Katja Gauriloff (Kaisa's Enchanted Forest) - February 10, 2017
Pedro Almodóvar Announced As 70th Festival de Cannes Jury President - February 1, 2017
The Killing Of A Sacred Deer Cast Is Getting A More Hollywood Touch - June 18, 2016
FLIX Premiere Online Cinema Opens Throughout UK - June 16, 2016
Ken Loach wins second Palme D'or at Cannes 2016 for "I, Daniel Blake" - May 26, 2016
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Violent-Young-Men Movies: "The Dinner," "Sweet Virginia," "Super Dark Times," and "The Gray State"
Violent-Young-Men Movies: Teenage Sociopaths Are Everywhere!
by HelenHighly
The fresh batch of films coming out of Tribeca2017 seems to have a violent teenage psychopath every time you turn around. What turns our young men into crazy killers? At the same time as a slew of documentaries and true-life tales are depicting the courage and moral fortitude of actual young men around the world, responding to terrorism and war with bravery – going to extraordinary lengths to save lives, we get a bunch of "thriller" films that depict American young men as narcissistic psychopaths who revel in bloody violence. On one hand there is City of Ghosts, Dabka, and When God Sleeps, for starters – peace-seeking films about heroism abroad, and on the other is The Dinner, Super Dark Times, Sweet Virginia, and even The Gray State, all featuring violence-obsessed middle-class Americans. Is there a cultural connection? Helen is Highly contemplating the significance of this, while I write some short reviews of these Tribeca thrillers:
Shahin Najafi in WHEN GOD SLEEPS. Photo credit: Khelghat.
I'll start with The Dinner, directed by Oren Moverman – an intelligent thriller, starring big-names Richard Gere and Laura Linney, which is a well-made, well-balanced film that is an adaptation of the Herman Koch bestseller (first published in the Netherlands in 2009 but now smoothly re-made into an all-American tale). The film begins as a kind of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf-ish gentil sit-down between two well-dressed and well-mannered couples, and with smart editing and sophisticated structure, it skillfully reveals the violent underpinnings to this story. The film's layers and complexity make it engrossing. I also will say here that the performances are all stellar, including the other two leads, Steve Coogan and Rebecca Hall. And the cinematography is top-notch, which adds to the startling revelations and juxtaposition of civility and brutality.
This may be the most thoughtful of these violent-young-men movies, with a serious and nuanced nod to the challenges of mental illness. But that mental illness does not belong to the violent young man whose horrific actions are at the center of the tale. Is the teenage son turned into a violent sociopath by his father's badly-controlled rage, despite being otherwise surrounded by a supportive and nurturing family, and an especially close relationship with his mother?
Steve Coogan as Paul Lohman, Richard Gere as Stan Lohman, Rebecca Hallas Katelyn Lohman, and Laura Linney as Claire Lohnman in THE DINNER. Photo courtesy of The Orchard.
Is that really how sociopaths are built? And if not, then… what? I guess the teen boy could have inherited some mental illness from his father, but the father's behavior is closely detailed and scrutinized, while the son shows no early signs of imbalance – until this one spectacular act of terror. I left thinking that was the weak point of an otherwise intelligent movie. Maybe I am underestimating the suddenness with which severe mental illness can manifest. But the movie does not fill in the blanks, so I am left to contemplate just another brutal teenage boy.
FYI, it is no spoiler to tell that there is deadly violence in this film, because the true story is about if/why/how the parents will deal with it and/or cover it up. This is not an original idea. We have seen the likes of it before in films such as The Deep End, where a mother and/or father struggle with the moral issues involved in parenting a murderer. Still, Helen does recommend this film (leaving out the Highly), if you are in the mood for a literate and complex family-drama / crime-thriller.
BUT: Back to my larger topic. That's one violent-boy-culture movie. Now the next:
Sweet Virginia: This movie is as thoughtless and superficial as The Dinner is layered and complex. As I said in my mini-review, Director Jamie M. Dagg delivers a Cohen-Brothers-wanna-be movie that fails miserably (and I mean miserably literally – wretched to sit through). I don't care about any of the characters, and Christopher Abbott is no Javier Bardem. Calling the pacing lethargic is kind. And the lighting is bad too (annoyingly dark, since I guess the filmmakers couldn't manage to portray emotional darkness).
Jon Bernthal as Sam and Chris Abbott as Elwood in SWEET VIRGINIA. Photographer: Jessica Gagne.
The odd thing is that this movie does take time, during its dull and sluggish storyline, to give us some specific detail about the predator – his father, his mother, his personal troubles and dreams. And it still adds up to a big, empty nothing. And at some point it is suggested that all that info was false anyway. No insight. No appeal. Just a young guy with a gun who cares not who he kills or why. The epitome of Violent Boy Culture.
Unfortunately, when I watched this film, I was not able to obtain my always-preferred end-seat, so I was stuck in the middle and therefore trapped; I had to sit this movie all the way through. Otherwise, I would have bailed by the halfway mark. Helen Highly recommends that, if you go, you have a good escape route.
Super Dark Times: There seems to be something inherently menacing about teenage boys – rural-suburban teenage boys in particular. In the opening scenes of this movie, directed by Kevin Phillips, we see our key players demonstrate how over-sexed, aggressive, uneducated, bored, and rude they are. They have a callous curiosity about death. I guess these are the type who kill cats for fun. But these boys don't do that; they kill people instead – "friends" in fact. It starts out as a single-death accident that they decide for-no-good-reason-other-than-stupidity to cover up. Then things get out of control.
Actually, this film could have been a sensitive coming-of-age tragedy. The young actors are quite good and there are inklings of emotional depth. But the filmmakers went for the thrills and gore instead. There is no apparent rhyme or reason. This serial killer is just… another kid next door who develops a taste for blood. It's dark times; get ready for the end of the world. I would call this genre a 90's chiller.
Owen Campbell as Zach, Charlie Tahan as Josh, Max Talisman as Daryl, and Sawyer Barth as Charlie in SUPER DARK TIMES. Photo by Eli Born.
And, now that I think about it, the movie starts with … I think… an enormous, bloody and dying moose sprawled out on a classroom floor at middle school. The way the director shows it, we first see a vague bloody carcass on the school floor (can't tell what it is and assume it's a person), with police and students gathered around, in horror. This raises to mind the mass shootings around the country at numerous schools… an association that is brought to the audience's mind and then discarded and totally ignored for the rest of the film. We never see or hear of that moose ever again. Kevin Phillips, please meet Anton Checkov (re gun in the first act).
And finally: A Gray State, a documentary directed by Erik Nelson and executive produced by Werner Herzog. This is a completely fascinating film and astoundingly true tale that takes you on a wild ride with surprising twists and turns, even if you already read about this story in the news. In 2010 David Crowley, an Iraq veteran, aspiring filmmaker and charismatic up-and-coming voice in fringe politics, began production on his fictional film Gray State. Set in a dystopian near-future where civil liberties are trampled by an unrestrained federal government, the film's crowd-funded trailer was enthusiastically received by the burgeoning online community of Libertarians, Tea Party activists and members of the nascent alt-right. In January of 2015, Crowley was found dead with his family in their Minnesota home. Their shocking deaths quickly become a cause célèbre for conspiracy theorists who speculate that Crowley was assassinated by a shadowy government concerned about a film and filmmaker that was getting too close to the truth about their aims.
The documentary carries appropriately weighty seriousness, but it also shrewdly includes a touch of macabre humor – a kind of delightful brutality, which illustrates a component of this violent-young-men mentality. The movie is meticulously thorough and fully investigates the why and what and how of the story (which is perhaps a conspiracy wrapped in an enigma). It's a film within a film, a documentary with a thriller structure, which I love, when it's done right, which it is here. I won't get into the quicksand of outlining the plot, but I will mention that it also takes place in American, middle-class, suburbia, with nice homes, in a Minnesota town actually called Apple Valley.
David Crowley, self portrait, October 2014, two months before murders. Film still from A GRAY STATE. Photo credit: David Crowley.
And whatever way you look at it (and the film offers a range of mind-boggling and emotionally charged perspectives) … no matter the tragically true earnestness of the film, it ends with a double-murder-suicide by a young man. It's a thoughtful film that addresses the Violent Boy Culture head on, at the least, and goes well beyond to explore the glamorization of the military, especially to boys, and the paranoid "they're coming to get you" belief system that has run rampant in this country. Click here to watch the infamous trailer to the film within the film, which had a seductive appeal to many other violent young men.
The documentary also suggests legitimate mental illness as a possible contributing factor to Crowley's bloody end (although… not every mentally ill teen necessarily turns into a killer). But if you really want to consider what is wrong with our young men, this is a good movie to see. And it's easy and fairly entertaining to watch.
Click below to watch the "viral" trailer that attracted so many military-obsessed young men:
I have not seen all the films at Tribeca this year, and not even read about all of them, so there are likely even more than these few films that are based on Young Male Predators. In fact, there is one in particular that I can think of, which definitely fits this "genre" of Violent Young Men in new American films, but I don't want to give a spoiler by revealing that the male lead is a killer. But let's just say… yet another thriller with a young male killer (this time with religious undertones). But, it feels like I see one of these Violent-Young-Men movies every day, and I'm sure it says something sad and dangerous about American society. I can only add, that by my count, there are even more films this year about young heroism (in societies not-American). Unfortunately, it's the spooky movies that follow you home and haunt you.
HelenHighly
Tags A Gray State Documentary review, Christopher Abbott, City of Ghosts Tribeca, Dabka Tribeca, David Crowley documentary, David Crowley film, David Crowley movie, Erik Nelson director, Gray State documentary, Gray State film, Gray State trailer, Helen Highly, HelenHighly, HelenHighly Violent Young Men Movies, Herman Koch Dinner, Herzog Gray State, Herzog Tribeca, Kevin Phillips director, Kevin Phillips Super Dark Times, Lara Linney Dinner, Richard Gere Dinner, Super Dark Times film, Super Dark Times movie, Super Dark Times review, Sweet Virginia review, Sweet Virina movie review, The Dinner movie review, The Dinner review, The Gray State documentary review, The Gray State review, Tribeca Film Festival 2017, Tribeca2017, Violent Boy Culture, Violent Young Men movies, Violent Young Men Movies HelenHighly, Werner Herzog, When God Sleeps documentary
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