Substitute

Substitute from A. D. Chan on Vimeo.

Hong (Terry Chang) is a repressed ogre living amongst peasants; peering out from beneath his woolen greasy locks toward Joan (Cheryl Miles). When her husband leaves for business, Joan's full lips, tight breasts, tan skin and loquacious legs are left vulnerable and open to this pasty suitor.

The coolness of the camera can be given responsibilty for expressing the words which the narrative does not so easily offer up. Notice Hong's sterile and undefined quarters; cold, green, wearing the same pair of boring shorts the whole film... Contrasted with his first one on one confrontation with Joan, the damp flatness of Hong's identity exists solely in relation to his proximity with Joan. To say masterful is to say too little about Looi Wan Ping's work as Director of Photography.

A.D. Chan's exploration of saturated infatuation doused in thick satin reds and chilling blues is as much a testament to perceived expectation as it is to the magnificence of the image. Each frame is balanced toward a charecters desire to become the object of his desire. The lingering question my mind: does the camera flood the vacant space that our minds fill with thoughts of heterosexual attraction?

Review of Gillian Robespierre's short film "Chunk"

Gillian Robespierre is a Brooklyn based filmmaker who, from over here on my end of the country, appears to be taking her craft for serious. Filmmaking isn't reducible to a singular craft, because there's no single skill or ability to focus on or perfect to become the competent F I L M M A K E R... It's more like a huge potluck style party thrown together by a few people, and the entire party's success depends on every dish down to weakest one. That's a bad analogy. My point is, even though I've never met Robespierre, I can tell you from my experience that she's the type of artist who is willing to roll her sleeves up and invest herself wholly in her films, because at this level, quality films with good story-lines and believable acting and setting that bring it all to life on the screen- they don't just happen.

Robespierre's film "Chunk," her thesis project at the School of Visual Arts Film & Video Program NYC, is more than just a good film with a good story line and believable acting: it's a funny movie. One that maintains a charming authenticity throughout it's 16 minutes of play. The movie follows Liz, a cynical teen who's been forced to spend the summer at a fat camp by parents who, obviously, think she's fat. She's got a bad attitude about the whole thing, but in the context of a fat camp, and by extension the type of neurotic culture that needs to send it's kids to a place called a fat camp, Liz's attitude strikes me as better than any of the alternatives. In this vein, she wanders the peripheries of the camp, getting into understated shenanigans, including letting a kitchen worker shag her, and buddying up with the camp owner's cigarette smoking outcast daughter. Realistic writing, great sound and editing, and a nice structure in the unfolding of "Chunk's" events; all kept me engaged emotionally when I needed to be.

Films like "Chunk" make a good case for amateur filmmakers to prioritize good story through writing and finding the right actors to deliver on that writing. A superior story with less-than-notable cinematography or image quality will still be accessible to audiences- the opposite isn't always going to be true. The image quality on "Chunk" reminds me of movies I used to shoot on an archaic RCA Video Camera my dad let me use when I was a kid, with those totally-certain-of-themselves video colors, but oh how the stop-motion dinosaur toys did fight. Anyways, despite the washed out, video-color look of the movie, I thought the cinematography was great. It felt natural. My favorite moments for DP Ross McDonnell were at 3:20, as Liz floats face down in the lake, doing her best to look like an overweight drownee, and at 9:28, when we see the kitchen guy's New Balances pressed together so pathetically as he bones Liz.

Robespierre has to be given credit for her knack for putting characters in the right situations so we can learn something about them, and then taking the characters a step further to find some humor in it all. Her two films on Vimeo, "Chunk" and the more recent "Obvious Child," which she co-wrote and directed, present life at those awkward moment's, when it's coming across as a bad joke. The movies' have as their premises concepts I would expect to find trite(snarky teenager in fat camp / unexpected pregnancy leads to abortion clinic first date), but turned my preconceptions around by introducing me to intelligent characters dealing realistically with some of life's many bad jokes. Robespeirre turns these bad jokes funny again, by alternating between just the right doses of harshness and sensitivity in the examination of her protagonists. For me, the films stand apart from so much other amateur movie-making because they pull off that tone- where people cope with weirdness, heaviness, or sadness, by being funny, or in Liz's case, by staying cynical. Afterall, it is pretty effing funny, isn't it? Either way, as a generation so thoroughly laden with cynics, I feel safe in recommending Robspeirre's movies because they achieve a mood many of us can identify with.

But don't take my word for it, watch them yourself.

http://vimeo.com/6459808

'big picture' film artists

My tastes in film and story stray toward the abstract, the complex, and the combative. These days, I wouldn't trust an artist who was sure of themselves; the modern world as a backdrop demands strands of uncertainty in the cultural narrative, and it's an appreciation of this sentiment that I look for in great contemporary cinema.
In movies like Von Trier's AntiChrist, Noh's Irreversible, the recent Italian film Gomorrah, and western political pieces like Steve McQueen's Hunger, the audience is heavily dosed with gut wrenching absurdity, stern and all the more scary for its realism. These are glimpses of the insanity any sane person has flirted with, human society being what it is.
As the Dalai Lama remarked in Ethics for a New Millennium, "Modern industrial society often strikes me as being like a huge, self-propelled machine. Instead of human beings being in charge, each individual is a tiny, insignificant component with no choice but to move when the machine moves." Indeed, in this climate of collective questioning and general uncertainty, the mythos of the hero not only seems unlikely, it seems irrelevant. (The recent stellar success of novelist and dread monger Cormac McCarthy also sings to this theme.)
The aforementioned film Hunger takes on the complex topic of the 1981 Irish political conflict and subsequent hunger strike. In the narrative, the goals of the characters are subordinated to the extreme deadlock of the ideologies at work. We learn that the prison guards (stand-in representatives for the status quo governing establishment) are not in positions of "real" authority at all, but are in fact slaves to the wills of the activist inmates, mere caregivers and house cleaners, obligated as thus by a petulant and reactionary society. The antagonist prisoners are the true masters in their utter determination to use the system's rigidity against itself. In this world, David does not defeat Goliath in open battle, but instead endures a terrific beating, the punishment of a lifetime, until the onlookers are so disgusted by themselves and the gruesome display their 'civil' society has allowed, that Goliath must heed the public outcry and surrender to societal obligation. The same way the machine forces us to move when it moves, it is forced to stop only if we truly stop (in Hunger, this is exemplified by extreme asceticism).
In a time when leaders are so afraid to speak frankly about the gravity of our predicament that they hide behind hundred year old platitudes about progress; In a time when the dexterity of a rabble of religious clans in the Middle East can sucker the world's most omnipotent empire into it's own drawn out and inevitable defeat, movies like Hunger provide us with the depths of theme we need to make some small sense of reality.
The voices of these filmmakers give hope to those looking for the kind of artistic substance that might save us from ourselves. They show me that even if the machine is impossible to halt completely, its most effective navigators are those who understand its function and are willing to stand up for what they've come to believe, not with the certainty of a fundamentalist, but with the unwavering inquiry of a scientist.
In essence, these films do not prove anything, instead they provide us with some very interesting evidence that, no matter how you look at it, is difficult to refute.