Shortly after I saw Aaron Schneider’s 1930s period piece Get Low at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, I coyly tweeted the following summation of the film: Boo Radley speaks. That character was the first role Robert Duvall ever had in Robert Mulligan’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. In the years since, he has enjoyed an illustrious career at the crest of nearly every creative wave that has swept over tinsel town. In Mr. Schneider’s film he plays Felix Bush, a Tennesse recluse as enigmatic as Harper Lee’s Radley looking to reintegrate with the town surrounding him before his last days. The trouble is, the more I play the film over in my head, the more I understand why Boo Radley is allowed only a single line of dialogue instead of his own book: the allure behind society’s outliers is in the mystery surrounding their status, rarely in the unfurling of that tale. Read on…

Ben Lynch and Brad Beesley editor Lousiana Kreutz’s eleven minute The Bicycle Cowboy doesn’t just hark back to the feeling of early 20^th century American cinema, but provides for an interesting metaphor about the clash of today’s progressive movement. We’re first introduced to a cowboy riding along an unseen pathway, but only revealed from waist up. Traditional cowboy iconography calls to mind concepts of American honor and duty, yet what the camera reveals is this cowboy rides upon a bicycle. This addendum to traditional cowboy iconography implies activism, energy conservation, and anti-capitalism/globalism. These concepts are usually in constant battle, and what’s so interesting about this imagery, suggests that our concept of mythic history should contend with an updated concept of “the West,” one in which activism is just as dominant a mode of conduct in America as that of any codes of the “western.”  As two cowboys fight over the control of bikes for the heart of a young woman what results is a narrative that questions the conventions of aggressive and competitive resolution. The film ends with a “winner,” as both cowboys come to realize the young woman has played them against each other. While the reconfiguration of the American cowboy myth is progressive, what remains a problem is the inactive female, upon whom the blame remains at the end of the film (the implied indecisiveness is quite misogynistic). Perhaps any follow up cycle, as is the nature of American myth/cinema, will address such problems. Read on…

While Okie Shorts provided some great works this year (such as the comedy sketch My Own Prometheus about morning coffee and multiple morning identities, or the much talked about faux-documentary Faith Healer, who’s documented protagonists leaving a project reveals less about the film than the metaphor for audience and film-subject relationship), my interest was in two shorts that made analyses of Oklahoma a primary part of their structure. Read on…

Lebanon (לבנון), Dir. Samuel Maoz, Israel, 2009

Middle Eastern politics are as tenuous as ever. While filmmakers, artists, politicos and celebrities became entrenched in a controversy over the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to feature films from Tel Aviv this year, a very interesting thing happened halfway around the world. As voices pointed towards our neighbors to the north expressed beliefs for or against Israeli cinema, the jury at the Venice Film Festival gave their top honor, the Golden Lion, to Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon, a film which chronicles the 1982 Lebanon War from the vantage point of a tank gunner. We can learn a lot from not only a film like this, but the story that surrounds it given the timing of its release.

Lebanon opens and closes in a field, but that is the only time you will be outside of an Israeli tank for the entire runtime of the film. Mr. Maoz, who shares a nickname with the film’s most relatable character, Shmulik, wants to bring us to the emotional realities of a war he experienced through the sight scope. It is a bold move and the concept comes off incredibly smooth. The story keeps moving forward, even though we do not. At the NYFF screening, cinematographer Giora Bejach quipped that they kept the setting minimal for budgetary reasons. While this may be true, it’s much nicer to think there was a bit more intentionality behind the cramped landscape. Read on…