One of my favorite escapes is just an hour away, to my parents’ air-conditioned living room, which is equipped with a large television and digital cable. In my own Brooklyn apartment, on the infrequent occasions I do watch t.v. (this mostly includes P.O.V., insomniac-related infomrcial viewing, and sporadic Monday night viewings of MEDIUM) I use an antenna to get the first 13 channels on the dial. So being able to choose from an array of different offerings (90% abysmal dregs and 10% extraordinary programming) is a fun novelty for me. Last night, after the compulsory viewing of the latest ENTOURAGE, i found myself watching an HBO Documentary called REHAB , which was seemingly commissioned as part of their AMERICA UNDERCOVER series. The documentary was a very dark look at a group of middle-class, white teenagers with fairly normal, supportive families, being treated for drug addiction in Santa Cruz. It was notably bleak, with matter of fact shots of zombie-eyed teenagers shooting up, going through multiple relapses, and culminating in a hopeless ending. Although this is surely the sort of sensationalist subject matter that Sheila Nevins has cultivated as HBO’s “style,” it is also an important film. It reminded me, in many ways, of another HBO-produced doc (yet to be broadcast), Lauren Greenfield’s THIN , a verite look at a Florida eating disorders clinic and its patients. (more…)

I needed a few days distance to consider the effects Patrice Chereau’s new film, “Gabrielle” (IFC) had on me, before writing an appropriate entry. Based on a short story by Joseph Conrad (”The Return”) about a wealthy man who is momentarily abandoned by a wife he considers to be little more than personal property, the film, which stars Isabelle Huppert as the titular lady, is, like Oliver Assayas’ “Demonlover”, not exactly what it seems. At first look, we presume a classic power play of “Dangerous Liaisons” ilk. That’s the veneer – a man and woman struggling for conquest of will. There’s the prerequisite backstory of class; how the rich stifle people into objecthood. The husband barely notices he has a wife until she’s gone. When asked if she could live a life without love, she says: yes. There’s something hermetic about this world. We feel there’s something undulating inside the walls at night – something vaguely menacing. Is it decay? The death of love? Like the Assayas picture, there is the sense that there are other stories and issues being presented here, though, not all can be seen by the light of day. Isabelle Huppert redefines resignation with a single twitch of her eyelid. The idea that a possession would leave, and then willingly return to its place not out of passion but out of the love of comfort, is the final stake in the heart of this stab at the bourgeois mind. The film, which lags in some parts, enjoys seemingly arbitrary stylistic shifts from color to black and white, and the jarring superimposed titles over character’s thoughts, along with the horror-film-like movie score, are enough to jolt you out of the ghostly marital half-light. Whether it’s a nightmare or real life, though, remains an enigma.

Yesterday I received an email update from the good folks at AIVF, who are in the process of moving out of the offices on Hudson Street they have colorfully occupied for years and years. While there were valient efforts to keep hold of the Independent, they ultimately have failed, and AIVF managment states:

Instead we are focusing on transitioning the Independent to new management and securing benefits for AIVF members through sister organizations. In order to keep the Independent as an information resource and voice for the independent community, AIVF has approached potential successor organizations to take over publication—including a combination of print and expanded online resources. The AIVF will be reviewing proposals over the next month and we hope to have a concrete plan for transitioning the Independent in the fall.

Let’s hope that some well-endowed (in the financial sense, of course!) savior will step and save this fine publication. I had a conversation recently with someone (I honestly cannot remember whom) about possible organizations that might want to step in and do this. This person, no doubt a seasoned player in the film world (because these are the only people with whom I deign to associate with ) said that perhaps it would be a good move for the BAM Cinemas to do this. Lincoln Center already has Film Comment and Brooklyn, being the home to many artists and bohemians, would be a perfect home for this important, established publication.

Speaking of Film Comment, I met the lovely Alice Lovejoy, a former editor of the magazine, last Friday night. She happens to be the girlfriend of my pal Noah Shencker, who I met at the life-changing Flaherty Seminar last summer. Anyway, I just wanted to give these two brilliant, funny cinephiles a shout-out. Noah is getting his Ph.D. at USC, focusing on Holocaust testimonies and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah . He is also assisting one of my favorite documentary scholars, Michael Renov , in putting together a book about my documentary hero, Peter Forgacs , on whom I wrote a Master’s thesis. Alice is working on her Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at Yale, writing a dissertation on Czech cinema. One of her many Film Comment articles can be read here .

With full red carpet fanfare — flashbulbs going off, video cameras rolling, bystanders asking bystanders “what film is this?” “what’s going on?” — The New York Latino International Film Festival opened last night at Union Square’s Regal Cinema. After waiting in line for a half hour, I was finally let in with some other press folks, including writer Maria Finn Dominguez , who is covering the festival for ABC New’s latino culture blog EXCLUSIVA. The film festival’s two Executive Directors, Calixto Chincilla and Elizabeth Gardner, introduced the festival, especially thanking their corporate sponsor, HBO . Then, the Time Warner Future Filmmaker award was given out by a company spokesman to two very impressive high school students, Anthony Limongi of Hell’s Kitchen, who learned his craft through the wonderful Downtown Community Television youth program, and Queen’s Daniel Sanchez, who learned his through the equally great Ghetto Film School in the Bronx. The two young men seemed wise and articulate beyond their years, and made very interesting speeches about their interpretations of what it means to be Latino. Then, HBO’s Lucina Marinez-Desir came up to the podium to present her company’s award to the short filmmaker Hugo Perez, whose script was selected several months ago to be produced and shown throughout the festival. Finally, the night’s premiere, SOLO DIOS SABE , began. (more…)

Last night I attended the New York premiere for “Brothers of the Head”, an IFC film that I’ve been meaning to catch since SXSW earlier this year. The film, which toggles between serious mockumentary and semi-experimental melange, concerns the story of two conjoined twins who become a successful punk rock act in 1970’s England. The highlight of the film is director Ken Russell, who appears as himself, dressed in imperial garb on the set of a film-within-the-film. It’s a cute ploy, and directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (of the Terry Gilliam making-of “Lost in La Mancha”) make sure to wear their good taste in auteurs on their sleeves. But the picture, which only occasionally dazzles, doesn’t swim beyond the whole pastiche feeling of it all. We’ve seen this film in countless other films before: “Twin Falls Idaho” cut-up with “Velvet Goldmine” remixed to “Even Dwarves Started Small”. This would have been a fine debut; Anthony Dod Mantle’s photography captures the brothers’ melancholic inertia with a mercurial vogue, and my favorite scene, that of the two boys sharing an intimate shower, is practically grace incarnate . But Fulton and Pepe, self-professed fans of Wenders and the German noblesse, do just OK with their material, and you get the sense they haven’t paid their cinematic dues just yet.

The Reeler aka S.T. VanAirsdale, a blog described on the site as “a paean to and an unofficial resource for news, happenings and gossip emerging from the world of New York City cinema”, posted a nice write up about our LAST WESTERN event. So did the Woodstock Film Festival blog . Let me know if you readers find any other Indiepix blog action!