January 29, 2018

How to Get Started with Instagram Storytelling

Source: Visual Storytelling

January 28, 2018

Sundance Documentaries Were First-Rate, But That Doesn’t Mean They’re Coming to Theaters

What makes a documentary suited to a theatrical release—and all the expense and effort associated with it? And when are they more appropriate for smaller screens? After several straight months of disappointing box-office sales for most nonfiction films, including several hits from last year’s Sundance, this question would seem to be a pressing one out of this year’s film festival. But the answer—as evidenced by the few distribution deals that closed before and during Sundance, those that are still pending, and those that should be—isn’t so easy to nail down, though some combination of topicality, celebrity or artistry certainly comes into play.

Before Sundance kicked off, Oscar-winner Morgan Neville’s Mister Rogers film “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” was one of the few documentaries to already have a major theatrical distributor (Focus Features) behind it—and its rapturous Park City unveiling appeared to justify it. Unlike its description might suggest, the film transcends the standard bio-pic format to become a highly resonant and timely look at America’s culture wars. Who would have thought that a Republican cardigan-wearing Presbyterian-trained minister with a message of tolerance and civility could be our best response to the current President? Set to ignite political debate at the same time as it soothes liberal arthouse audiences, it was one of the festival’s most uniformly embraced docs.

Magnolia Pictures’ mid-week acquisition of “RBG,” a lively, though conventional portrait about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is also instructive. While the film offers a straightforward and hagiographic account of the judge’s rise through the ranks of America’s patriarchal institutions and her close marriage with Martin Ginsburg, there’s nothing particularly captivating here—except for the fact that it’s a rousing activist cry for one of the year’s most significant issues: Women’s rights. If Magnolia’s release of “I Am Not Your Negro” was able to capture last year’s “Get Out”/Black Lives Matter zeitgeist, “RBG” will only become more relevant as Trump continues to attack her and search for her replacement—a fact that makes this documentary one of the festival’s most timely.

“RBG”

For a more punk-rock feminist portrait, there was the Joan Jett film “Bad Reputation,” another chronological survey of a life’s upswing within a male-dominated system. Though likely to play better to the musician’s fan base, the rock-doc also taps directly into the contemporary women’s power movement, showing the life of Jett as a female trailblazer who didn’t give a damn and paved the way for women in the music industry.

There were many—probably too many—other profiles of famous people, including “Jane Fonda in Five Acts” and “Robin Williams: Come Inside My Head,” both set for HBO broadcast, as well as traditional portraits of director Hal Ashby (“Hal”)) and artist Yayoi Kusama (“Kusama – Infinity”). What makes these nonfiction films more befitting a night out at the movies versus cozying up with them on the couch?

Among the best of the HBO docs, “King in the Wilderness,” a compelling and astutely constructed archival-driven look at the last contentious years in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., stands out precisely because it’s not biographical tribute, but a focused chronicle of a combustible time when the stakes reached a fever pitch for the Civil Rights leader. But while “King in the Wilderness” is riveting and relevant to the persistent struggle for racial equality, its historical framework may limit its theatrical prospects.

On the other hand, “Three Identical Strangers,” purchased by Neon mid-week, reflects what it takes to make a film break out without celebrities or timely issues. Reminiscent of last year’s Sundance true-conspiracy docs “Tickled” and “Icarus,” “Strangers” has that WTF-mystique built into its sensationalistic narrative of triplets separated at birth who only learned of each other when they were 19-years-old. But what begins buoyantly, full of fun ‘70s reenactments and archival footage of their brief time in the limelight (they appeared briefly with Madonna in “Desperately Seeking Susan”), eventually turns darker and, as a result, becomes a more enriching and emotional experience about fathers and sons, nature versus nurture.

David Kellman, Eddy Galland, and Bobby Shafran in “Three Identical Stangers”

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

This year’s U.S. Documentary Competition, as always, had its fair share of straight-up advocacy docs (“Inventing Tomorrow,” “Dark Money,” “The Devil We Know,” “Kailash”), all of which will find their niche audiences. But the future of the section’s most cinematic docs is uncertain: Robert Greene’s “Bisbee ‘17,” an elegiac and captivating journey into American history, identity, and division, as enacted by a small Arizona town; RaMell Ross’s “Hale County, This Morning, This Evening,” a strikingly photographed, impressionistic study of black rural Southern life; and Michael Dweck’s “The Last Race,” an operatic Gates of Heaven-inspired look at stock-car racing and its fading Long Island community.

If any of this year’s non-fiction achievements should be experienced on the big screen, it’s these. You can also add in Sandi Tan’s World Documentary Competition title “Shirkers,” a film critic’s darling, which features cineastes and lots of classic film clips, as it follows the filmmaker’s quest to uncover the truth behind her mentor, and the unfinished independent movie he stole from her years before. But it’s unclear if theatrical distributors will take a risk on this type of film. Is aesthetic creativity and mastery enough to propel it into cinemas?

There were other competition docs that shrewdly combine sensitive observational filmmaking with larger social agendas, such as the excellent “On Her Shoulders,” “Crime + Punishment,” and “Minding the Gap.” In each case, the filmmaker takes a central issue and deepens it with penetrating explorations of character. In “On Her Shoulders,” director Alexandria Bombach tracks ISIS victim-turned-activist Nadia Murad in her campaign to raise awareness for her ethnic group’s devastation, but the film’s quieter in-between moments and intimate portraiture powerfully expresses the painful slog and personal psychological toll of making social change.

Similarly, Stephen Maing’s “Crime + Punishment” is an essential investigative documentary about corruption in the NYPD department, whose illegal quota policies continue to disrupt communities of color, but the film comes alive with its empathic look at its whistleblowing cops, particularly Edwin Raymond, a well-spoken officer who eloquently speaks truth to power. Bing Liu’s “Minding the Gap” also skillfully balances social issues with compelling characters as it follows several years in the lives of a group of skateboarding male friends in the Midwest as they grapple with the legacy of family abuse. In previous years, the strength of content in these three films may have been enough to push them into wider distribution, but nowadays, it may not be enough.

Kendale McCoy in “America To Me”

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

But maybe the definition of “theatrical” matters less these days anyway. Consider that two of the biggest nonfiction productions at Sundance, hailing from Oscar-nominated filmmakers Matthew Heineman and Steve James, respectively, are TV projects. Heineman’s multi-faceted expose of the opioid crisis through the eyes of the growers, addicts, cartel bosses and law enforcement officials will premiere on Showtime on February 2. And in the largest documentary deal of Sundance, Starz reportedly paid $5 million to acquire James’ 10-part series “America to Me,” a binge-worthy longitudinal study of race—and racial disparities—in education as seen through the microcosm of one large suburban Chicago high school, and its cast of eminently engaging students and teachers. If Heineman and James don’t need theaters, maybe the rest of Sundance’s doc-makers don’t, either.

Source: IndieWire film

January 28, 2018

‘Blaze’ Review: Ethan Hawke Directs a Gonzo Indie Country-Western Opera About an Unsung Legend — Sundance 2018

Some people never get to realize their full potential, or stick around long enough to do what they were so clearly put on this Earth to do. Maybe they die young, or maybe they just keep getting in their own way. Or maybe, if they’re anything like singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, they find a way to do both, burning out like stars that leave their light behind. But Foley never wanted to be a star, shining only for itself. He wanted to be a legend, and live forever. Thanks to Ethan Hawke’s slippery, whiskey-soaked biopic of the late musician — and newcomer Benjamin Dickey’s casually spellbinding lead performance — he’s closer than ever to getting his wish.

Described by its director as a “gonzo indie country-western opera,” “Blaze” is sleepier and more bittersweet than Hawke might have you believe, less of an opera than an acoustic requiem for a ramblin’ man. Flowing backwards and forwards through time like a set list, this languid tribute might frustrate anyone hoping for a conventional portrait in the style of “Walk the Line,” but there’s something ineffably honest to Hawke’s freeform approach. The contours of Foley’s legacy were as soft and imprecise as the contours of his body, and there’d be no way to measure his life in ticket sales, venue sizes, or the handful of unforgettable live recordings he committed to tape before he was killed in 1989.

So Hawke wisely decided to ditch the womb-to-tomb approach and re-imagine Foley’s journey as a fragmented story of paradise lost. Lucinda Williams once said that “Blaze Foley was a genius and a beautiful loser,” and co-writer Sybil Rosen is the living embodiment of what he lost (this movie was adapted from her memoir). Played by a tender and emotionally limpid Alia Shawkat, Rosen meets Foley at a theater program somewhere in Arkansas, and the unlikely romance that develops between the petite Jewish girl and the hulking singer from the Deep South forms the most important and involving of the film’s various threads.

Draped in shades of autumnal brown and left to unfold with the gentle patience of domestic bliss as Foley and Rosen squirrel themselves away in the woods, these scenes are the heart and soul of a movie that does a better job of illustrating love than loss. Dickey and Shawkat have a relaxed and lived-in vibe together — his voice drawls out in deep scoops of countrified wisdom, and she curls up inside them — and their relationship is the kind that somebody sings about for the rest of their days. It’s the strongest part of a life that’s held together with duct tape (Foley’s adhesive of choice), and it’s genuinely painful to watch it pull apart.

The film’s other two points of focus are both located after that split, though Hawke cuts between all three of them with increasingly little rhyme or reason. One is set some years later in the back of Austin’s Outhouse bar, where a gloriously bearded Foley plays his most famous show to an empty room in the middle of the day. Every song triggers another memory, most of them taking us back to the woods. These scenes feel more like a seance than anything else, as Dickey so completely disappears into the role that it feels like Foley has come back to life for another devastating rendition of “Picture Cards Can’t Picture You” (it’s such a remarkable feat of reanimation that it makes Gary Oldman’s performance in “Darkest Hour” look like an “SNL” sketch). These scenes are drunk with sadness, Foley in particular, and provide Hawke’s story a beacon to return to whenever the telling gets a bit too unmoored.

The final thread finds two of Foley’s closest pals— musicians Zee (Josh Hamilton) and Townes Van Zandt (a perfectly cast Charlie Sexton) — conducting a posthumous radio interview for their late friend. The interviewer has never even heard of Blaze, and so Zee and Van Zandt begin spinning some yarns of their own. This is how the movie allows for a hazy subplot in which Steve Zahn, Sam Rockwell, and Richard Linklater(!) play a trio of dumbass cowboy record executives — it doesn’t amount to much, but it sure is fun to watch.

Shambling on for more than two hours of disjointed memories, “Blaze” isn’t in much of a hurry to put the parts of a life together. The film isn’t a jigsaw puzzle, where every piece neatly fits into a greater whole; it’s more like a drunken night of people sitting around and remembering their old friend, warts and all. The upside of this impressionistic approach is that it allows for a kitchen sink kind of storytelling, paving the way for all sorts of detours, like a one-scene cameo from Foley’s senile dad (played by Kris Kristofferson, of course) and a handful of long jokes that all add some real texture to a bygone era of outlaw folk.

The downside is that Foley tends to slip away from us as the movie goes on. We can see that he’s living like he’s not going to be alive much longer, but the slipstream narrative keeps us on the outside — just like everyone else — desperate to understand how he could be so sweet and self-destructive all at once. Hawke keys in to the banality of Blaze’s behavior, the world shrugging this guy off this mortal coil in the end, but the film leaves us with almost as little as he did: just a few great songs, some scattered moments of sullied joy, and the unfulfilled wish that it had all come together in a more meaningful way.

Grade: B-

“Blaze” premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution.

Source: IndieWire film