Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone

"I've seen them do every style—in the same song!" Mike Watt of Minutemen declares early on in “Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone,” Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler's cinematic tribute to the titular SoCal black punk rock band. Fishbone also makes other white talking heads, including Perry Farrell, Gwen Stefani, Flea, and, uh, Tim Robbins (who seems to have wandered into the wrong documentary), gush like giddy school kids. Even better regarded black musicians such as Branford Marsalis, who says about the band, "The musicians get it; the other people don't," and George Clinton, who theorizes that the members are too white for black people and too black for white people, seem in awe.

To read the rest of my review visit Slant Magazine.

Hell and Back Again

Unlike most war docs, which tend to only skim the surface of its gun-toting subjects' lives, photojournalist Danfung Dennis's “Hell and Back Again” isn't content to merely capture warriors in combat. He follows an injured Sgt. Nathan Harris all the way from Afghanistan to his home in North Carolina, where his wife and high school sweetheart Ashley is helping to reconstruct their former lives. From its high-adrenaline opening of Echo Company preparing to take a Taliban stronghold before they're ambushed and lose a man, which segues to footage of the unit's homecoming, the documentary smartly shuttles between the sergeant in the heat of battle and his tackling of daily mundane tasks. Refreshingly, Dennis is less concerned with questions of morality than he is in pondering how a person can mentally take the leap from making life and death choices for himself and the men under him to deciding where to park the car at Wal-Mart.

To read the rest of my review visit Slant Magazine.

Toasting a Theatrical Mash-Up: Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club

Sprung from the mind of Jeffrey Hatcher, the writer behind the underrated play-turned-film “Stage Beauty,” the Arizona Theatre Company's 45th-anniversary season opener “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club” is a fun theatrical mash-up that drops the characters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's “Sherlock Holmes” realm into an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's “The Suicide Club.” I caught this world premiere helmed by ATC's artistic director David Ira Goldstein at the Temple of Music and Art, the company's cozy home base and a civilized oasis in the heart of downtown Tucson. There isn't a bad seat in the roomy house, and you can peruse the upstairs art gallery or take your time enjoying gourmet food, a glass of wine, or a cup of locally roasted coffee from the adjoining Temple Lounge before the show, then grab a refill and take it into the theater with you—a far cry from the tourist cattle call-feel of leisure-lacking Broadway these days.

To read the rest of my review visit The House Next Door at Slant Magazine.

The Mill and The Cross

The word "film" seems inadequate to describe Lech Majewski's “The Mill and The Cross,” a mesmerizingly layered rendering of the creation of Pieter Bruegel's iconic “The Way to Calvary.” The painting itself is imposingly dizzying—a depiction of the crucifixion containing over 500 figures and, like the film, set during the painter's lifetime, when Spain ruled Flanders with an iron fist. From its arresting opening image of Bruegel (played by another legend, Rutger Hauer) wandering inside his masterpiece-in-progress, to Majewski's ingenious use of subtle movement in both foreground and background planes and absolute stillness in the middle one, “The Mill and The Cross” is less costume drama and more time capsule come to life. It's an art installation captured by painstaking cinematography.

To read the rest of my review visit Slant Magazine.

Sex and De Stad: A Brush with Romance

Check out my romantic Jordaan column on page 74 of Amsterdam Magazine!

Where Soldiers Come From

I recently chatted with a Canadian director of government-funded documentaries who lamented the artistic restrictions that are par for the course for every filmmaker who accepts a significant amount of cash from any nation's coffers—no matter how seemingly liberal the country. I thought of this conversation as I watched Heather Courtney's “Where Soldiers Come From,” financed in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. A four-year study of an Afghan war-bound group of friends (the mother of Cole, the goofy joker of the group, compares the boys to the characters in “The Deer Hunter”), Courtney's doc is equal parts heartfelt and public-television predictable.

To read the rest of my review visit Slant Magazine.

The 2011 Montreal World Film Festival

C’est dommage. Despite the fact that the summertime Montreal World Film Festival is 35 years old it continues to be eclipsed by its (year) older, bigger and bolder, Anglo relative’s annual gala in September. Nevertheless – and even if Catherine Deneuve hadn’t been honored with MWFF’s lifetime achievement award – the fest has much to buzz about. For one thing it’s headquartered at the Quartier des spectacles, right in the entertainment heart of a gorgeous Paris of the North (America) that made this bi-continental critic miss Europe a little bit less. Secondly, this UNESCO-appointed City of Design has a vibrant cinephile culture, evidenced by both the Cinémathèque québécoise, which maintains an international collection of 35,000 films from all eras and hosts free exhibitions, and the National Film Board’s (also free to the public) sci-fi-like CineRobotheque, which makes 10,000 movies available on its 21 touch-screen-accessed “personal viewing stations.” Thirdly, both of these institutions are located mere minutes away from the Cinéma Quartier Latin and the Cinéma ONF (also housed in the NFB building on colorful St.-Denis), two cozy venues that screened a handful of selections that, like the host city itself, transported me completely to another world.

To read the rest of my coverage visit Filmmaker magazine.