Interview - Jen Sharpe, Lia & Phyllis Johnson of "I'm Through With White Girls"

"I'm Through With White Girls" has cleaned up on the black film fest circuit this summer, taking home prizes at the Hollywood, Roxbury and Martha's Vineyard black fests. I've wrriten about it extensively in earlier posts. Still without distribution, the romantic comedy stars Anthony Montgomery as a comic drawing, cigarette holder sporting Black nerd who serial dates and denies caucasian woman, until he meets his match - a multi-colored dreadlocked, yellow skinned, indie rock loving novelist, played by the film's co-producer Lia Johnson. Both are graduates of "Star Trek" and they have a positively otherworldly quality in the film - next to never do you see African-American characters like these on the big screen. This charming comedy, which pokes fun at just about everyone while taking a gentle and amusing look at LA blipsters, was executive produced by Lia's twin sister Phyllis. The trio corresponded with me last week about the film.

BH: How did each of you become involved in the project?

LJ: I had produced a number of short films and was looking for a feature script that I could make on a small budget. Courtney and I went to Columbia together and he’d been working in television, writing on FOX’s Arrested Development. He had me read the script and I fell in love with the uniqueness of the characters.

JS: I heard through a friend about a fundraiser that Lia was having to raise money for the film. I went to support a fellow artist making her film, and Lia and I became aquaintances. We kept in touch, and when she started interviewing directors, I asked her to put me in the mix. I showed her my previous short film, "Boxed" which she loved, and gave her the confidence to hire me on my first feature.

BH: What drew each of you to Courtney Lilly's script?

LJ: My favorite kind of art is the kind that is at once completely engaging and entertaining, and yet also achieves the purpose of social and cultural examination. Sometimes just the sheer existence of a story, rarely told, is enough. Characters like Jay and Catherine are people that everyone knows in our daily lives, but we almost never see them in media. I was extremely interested in making a script that illustrated these wonderfully diverse people and also so effortlessly dealt with class, race and cultural issues with in our American fabric. There was just all this great stuff woven into an extremely funny script.

PJ: Specifically, the characters drew me to the script. They were multi-faceted and interesting in the sense that they were, as many folks of my generation are,fluent in many different social codes. They were able to survive in multicultural environments effortlessly. The challenge for these characters to address race and society was less and yet the human challenges were still there, ie. the challenge of maturity and self-evolution.

JS: The first thing I was attracted to was having black characters who were not typically black. I loved that Jay couldn’t dance and couldn’t play basketball, and that Catherine loved the beach. The number one thing was just showing black people in a different light.

BH: What are some of the challenges in making a genre film and specifically a genre film within an African-American milieu?

JS: The biggest challenge in African American romantic comedy is not over stereotyping. Finding the humor and keeping it funny, but also keeping it intelligent and subtle. Romantic comedies are very formulaic, and it's a challenge to play the formula, but also to keep it fresh and interesting.

LJ: Every film borrows elements of genre in an effort to capture story. My favorite films are more squirrelly ones that refuse to bend to the rules of “genre,” and their resistance redefines the term. The challenging thing is more for marketing departments. Good films with “crossover audiences” require marketing teams to be versatile in their ability to proactively cultivate the areas of audience that the film overlaps. The most savvy marketing teams are able to do it effectively. Clearly audiences want good films, it is evidenced by the proliferation of indie film festivals in every corner of our country and abroad.

PJ: I don't think we set out to make a genre film. It was about telling the story. The genre came along with the humor and emotion that came out of the story's situations.

BH: What is the core audience for a project like this and do you think the film's provocative title will help or hinder its commercial prospects?

LJ: This film was an effort to demonstrate the diverse world I live in here in America. A world I rarely see on screen. The film is made for Americans in particular, who recognize the same world I live in and want to see it represented. Because of the standard methods of marketing films, many people will take the faces of the lead characters to signal that it is a film for the “black” community. ITWWG is a film for our American community. I think the film’s title is provocative and draws attention, and that is positive. The film itself stands on its own for people’s critique. ITWWG is really about being through with the idea of “white” and “black” and the limited boxes those words represent.

JS: This film reaches out to all different audiences. I prefer to think of it as an indie film. But it also has strong urban appeal. The title will help it commercially and in the urban market, but it may also turn away the more indie film audience who will enjoy it equally. That's hard. The previous title was, "The Inevitable Undoing of Jay Brooks". I liked that better and felt it represented the film and the audience better. But we quickly found that for marketing purposes, something more provocative and shorter was better.

PJ: The core audience for a project like "I'm Through With White Girls (The Inevitable Undoing of Jay Brooks)" is an audience that is looking to address the social constructs and/or "boxes" that are White and Black. They are seeking an opening to the discussion of what else there is... outside of these boxes. They are looking to break the boundaries of these stereotypes. I think the title will help it's commercial prospects with respect to this core audience. I think the title may hinder the film's success if those seeing the title don't want to think farther than the film's exterior and are more comfortable dismissing it at first glance.



BH: How did you settle on Anthony Montgomery for Jay?

LJ: Anthony and I worked on a show together for the WB called Popular. When I read ITWWG and began brainstorming potential actors, he was the first person that came to my mind. I felt he had the passion and ability to carry a film like ITWWG. The role of Jay is a deceptively difficult one. At the same time that Jay does all these unlike able things, he must be someone that the audience connects with in spite of his flaws. We’ve got to believe he is a commitment-phobic guy, and yet the audience must be rooting for him to turn the corner that lets him commit to this woman he’s fallen in love with. Anthony worked so hard to achieve that balance for Jay.

PJ: No one else could do the role.

BH: How did you go about raising the private equity financing?

LJ: I began with a fundraiser and I sent out a donation letter. That raised a lot of awareness as well as in-kind donations of equipment and locations. My previous short films helped to demonstrate that I could go the distance to make a film. Panavision and Kodak were incredibly helpful and gave me grants for the camera and film stock based on the strength of the script and my presentation. Once the core team was assembled, we all pounded the pavement to get the things we needed.

PJ: We had a strong script. That is the first, and most important thing to start with. And then using the strengths of the individual. Rollerskating parties are a great way to get friends involved.

BH: Uh huh. Um, we're you consciously attempting to reverse or subvert the popular myths about black masculine sexuality and/or modes of representation of black men in American cinema?

LJ: I definitely wanted to subvert stereotypes and, in doing so, broaden the spectrum of media representation of black men. One of my pet peeves in American cinema today is the constant stereotyping of black men. As much as I love hip-hop, it has been such a domineering force in shaping stereotypes of black men. Jay represents a broader representation of the varied interests, pursuits and sensitivities of American men today.

JS: Definitely! We are not stereotypes!!! Black people are different and black men don't have to act certain ways. That is one of the keys, I think, to our success as a race. Stop pigeon holing ourselves and allowing ourselves to be pigeon holed.

PJ: Although, as Jay alludes, even myths have some truth. We wanted to add to the representations of people of color in American cinema.

On The Hottest State

Although I drive past the corner of Bedford Avenue and Broadway (the Brooklyn one) on a daily basis, I’ve yet to encounter two hipsters whose cultivated inauthenticity is quite as palpable and grating as Catalina Sandino Moreno and Mark Webber’s couple in Ethan Hawke’s overlong and mildly indulgent adaptation of his own source material, “The Hottest State”. Yes, Ethan is the bard of young love yet again, yet one cant help but think that he should be leaving this sort of stuff to the Bujalski’s, Katz’s, and Swanberg’s. “Before Sunset” this is not and despite the participation of an ex “Dawson’s Creek” star, the film remains watchable largely because of Chris Norr’s moist, hyper saturated camerawork and some moments that verge on emotional resonance. Sadly most of these aforementioned moments get drowned by Jesse Harris’ overripe soundtrack of tunes performed by an all-star lineup of indie crooners (Cat Power, M Ward, Colin Oberst) that are sure to attract, well, someone.

Webber plays a young actor on the verge of success, not unlike the kid himself (wait until you see him in “Weapons”, the best little secret at Sundance this year), who falls for a Hispanic songstress (Moreno) he meets in a bar one night while out for drinks with his Ex (Michelle Williams). He walks her home and discovers that she’s squatting across the street. She tells him not to smoke because she’s thinking about kissing him. Blamo, like that they’re screwing like jack rabbits and painting her new apartment blue. They take a trip to Mexico pre-Cuaron movie for more loving, but surely, break-ups and early twenties angst lie around the corner. The fact that they know this solemn fact all too well (they’ve seen “Before Sunset/rise”) seems to be no reason for avoiding it, perhaps the movie’s most authentic move.

The central romance works well enough I suppose and Webber is really convincing when he’s hanging out by a telephone, post break up #1, tormented by the prospect of calling her. He’s even better when he’s complaining to his mother about his cluelessness concerning the proper tenor for his masculinity. Yet, what’s really our way in with this guy? He exhibits the traits of a flaky, self involved, struggling Brooklyn artist, but the studied soullessness is replaced by an achy earnestness this humble author didn’t quite buy, at least not from Webber. Catalina fares a bit better, but she’s not the focus of the narrative and she seems a little too serene and accessible for beautiful girl in those sultry red coats and purple knit caps, especially when she constantly claims to have come to the city not to have a boyfriend.

Oh and wait… Neither of these working class characters would have there own spacious apartments in Williamsburg! This movie needs to get some roommates, uncomfortable ones at that.

And why all the back-story? Mom (Laura Linney, doing her best to make the best out of a bad situation) relocated with the boy to New Jersey and settled into a life of working class mediocrity as a college textbook saleswoman, while dating the real life director’s best friend (Frank Whaley), whose scenes have largely been cut from this already way too long, one hundred and seventeen minute endeavor. I’m sure Ethan called an apologized. Is it really necessary for Mr. Hawke to pop in and out of flashbacks and the diegetic narrative as our up and coming actor/young lover/author surrogate’s father, a Texas cowboy who has remarried and settled his seed on the home soil? He’s a mere ten years older than Webber, who could probably pass for thirty if he wanted to. They didn’t even rock the aging makeup in the scenes within the diegesis. Its not quite as jarring as the minute age difference between Lansberry and Harvey in “The Manchurian Candidate” or Bancroft and Hoffman in ‘The Graduate”, but the comparisons are silly; Frankenheimer and Nichols are always in control of their material, where as Mr. Hawke can’t seem to see the forest for the trees.

On The Invasion

A veteran, mid level European director comes to the states after his biggest continental success, a powerful recounting of the final weeks in the life of perhaps the 20th centuries most notorious and vilified man, and after dutifully remaking “Invasion of The Body Snatchers”, what happens? The suits take it away from him. Bummer. Indeed, this is what happened on “The Invasion”, action producer extraordinaire Joel Silver’s newest Warner Bros./Village Roadshow bankrolled extravaganza, an empty headed but viscerally entertaining Alien invasion thriller that doesn’t quite live up to Don Siegel, Philip Kaufman or Abel Ferrera’s versions, but isn’t the car wreck one would expect from a movie that might as well bear an Alan Smithee directorial credit.

Although a third of the movie was re-shot following its January 06’ wrap by none other than James McTeigue, last seen directing the heinous “V For Vendetta”, also from an overcooked Wachowski Brothers script (they did the Silver ordered rewrite after principal photography), “The Invasion” isn’t pure hack work. Nicole Kidman dutifully plays a D.C. psychoanalyst and mother, her ex-husband (Jeremy Northam) having abandoned the family for the top job at the CDC in Atlanta, her anti-depressant intake high enough that she can’t get hip to the charms of Ben (a miscast Daniel Craig) her plutonic scientist friend who takes her to dinners at the Czechoslovakian embassy where she can announce grandly to Russian diplomats that she’s a “postmodern feminist” in a scene that the Wachowski Brothers surely though up as a way to hammer home the film’s barely realized themes concerning the nature of identity. The line only draws an unintentional laugh from a small segment of the general audience and a dull, blank stare from just about everyone else.

After a space shuttle crash leaves “contaminated” debris across the Red states, which in turn unleash Alien spores across America that quickly infect Northam and other CDC officials, Americans are ordered to get vaccinations to avoid a deadly and mysterious “flu”. As spouses, children and employers become emotionless automatons that really want to give you a beverage, Hirschbiegel/McTeigue load their mise en scene down with allusions to the various plights of early 21st century life, be it war, nuclear proliferation, genocide or tight skirts, all courtesy to overdoses of MSNBC hovering in the background. While neither happens to be Michel Haneke, the TV as symbol of postmodern doom hangs heavy in the narrative. The symbols are all in play, but what do they add up to, especially when Nicole Kidman starts shooting people, hitting her pod infected Ex’s with hammers and drinking absurd amounts of Mountain Dew? What are Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam and Jeffery Wright doing in this movie when all they get to do is functionally inhabit non-characters? The opportunities wasted are copious, especially in this conformist post 9/11 American political environment in which we all live. Yes, humanity essential byproducts are strife and horror, but why all the fuss. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” went from Communist parable to post Nixon critique to AIDS metaphor and now it’s back just to sell some ancillary rights.

On Rocket Science

Enchanting in its self-effacing hyper articulateness, academy award nominated documentarian Jeffery Blitz has made a built for Sundance American Indie in “Rocket Science” that isn’t quite good to the last drop, but makes for an enjoyably awkward time anyway. Like fellow coming of age for a wily troublemaker kid movie “The Go-Getter”, also at Sundance 07’ although currently without distribution, “Rocket Science” employs a third person narration and other alienating affects in an attempt to engross the audience in the scatter psychology of a limited young man, with largely mixed results.

Blitz’s stuttering hero is Hal Hefner (the intriguing newcomer Reece Daniel Thompson) trapped with a dim witted, simultaneously brutal and tender brother Earl (Vincent Piazza), a mildly depressed father (Denis O’Hare) who, without explanation, leaves his wife (Lisbeth Barlett), a banal middle New Jersey woman and a mother who doesn’t quite know what to make of her life (Lisbeth Barlett). Hal’s alienation is deftly set up in Blitz’s skillfully comedic exposition, in which we also meet Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) the overachieving debate team captain who with her partner and lover Ben (Nicholas D’Agosto) strikes fear into the hearts of debate squads across the state of New Jersey. When Ben has a breakdown mid debate and relocates to the urban seclusion of Trenton, Ginny recruits Hal, the stutter, to replace him. But wait – why on Earth would she do that?

If this were a formulaic Hollywood effort, one which stresses the aesthetic and cultural unrealities of MTV as an accurate representation of adolescent life, she’d seduce him after plying hard to get, but her motives prove far tricker in Blitz’s script, which allows Kendrick to provide one of the most winning performances by a young actress in some time. The scenes in which the stuttering Thompson and the uber polished Kendrick square off are examples of pristine comedic timing married to smart, artfully inefficient writing. As she tries to turn him into the debater he will never be the logical, mainstream-oriented conclusion of the narrative we’ve come to expect from the set-up is gently subverted by Blitz’s keen understanding of the fact that few of us every overcome our central inadequacies, we just learn to live with the better. Or we don’t.

Still, there is a darker flip side to the tale that never really gets explored. What of the anomie which grips his family – his mother seems clueless how to make any of the men in her life happy and his brother is constantly on the verge of kicking the shit out of him? Denis O’Hare, terrific recently in films like “Half Nelson” and “The Babysitters”, barely gets the time of day. That more hay isn’t made out of this family obviously painful middle class existence, or out of the aftermath of Hal’s drunken, vengeful episode after learning that Ginny is dating an Indian debater from a rival team, which ends with Hal throwing a stringed instrument through the Ryerson’s living room window in the middle of the night, is a pity, but “Rocket Science” is built for a small seven figure sale, distribution of a few hundred screens and a strong life on DVD. Cut it some slack. Even if all these high schoolers are really in their twenties.

On Descent

Who would have thought – Rosario Dawson signs up for the Gasper Noe treatment. Not nearly as provocative as it wants to be, Talia Lugacy’s “Descent”, one of the most talked about films at this year’s Sundance rejec… whoops, I mean Tribeca Film Festival, is an empty headed rape drama that doesn’t hold a candle to Mr. Noe’s troubling yet formally audacious “Irreversible”, an obvious antecedent. Taken from Mr. Noe’s long journey into the bowels of France are the deep shadows and garish reds, the overwhelming sense of doom without the pathos of tragedy, although the swirling cameras and overacting Europeans are replaced with petulant long takes and sullen looks of misery for Dawson, whose performance, while competent, lacks any of the urgency one would expect from such a loaded star vehicle.

In her sullen, quiet interpretation, Dawson, too old to be playing bookish, nineteen year old undergrads, never achieves the serenity and layering one sees in the performances of an Isabelle Huppert or even Jodie Foster in “The Accused”, another underwhelming rape tale that seems like “Ordet” compared to “Descent”. Dawson’s Maya, a star philosophy student and an unnamed, urban university, falls pray to a ungainly, thoroughly repellent football player (Chad Faust) who seduces her one night at a house party. She agrees to go out with him and they share a quaint dinner, his baseless personality and beedy eyes providing fodder for her entertainment, but he’s obviously not serious material. Of course, she returns home with him nevertheless and unfortunately begins to “hook up” with him, her seemingly flexible boundaries coming into contact with an awkward, passive-aggressive and extremely vulnerable personality who, sadly has a penchant for forcing himself upon young Latinas n his modest room.

Done in a single, excruciating medium close up of the two actors faces that contains a single, unnecessary cutaway to entangled legs, it’s the film’s raison d’etre, but what a shallow one it is without being contextualized in any meaningful way. The ultimate perversion of the biological imperative, the rape act is disturbing a priori cinematic representation, but Lugacy seems to have no desire for psychological insight, framing Maya in long shots that isolate her from human interactions and from background space, yet simultaneously lacks the directorial chops to cop a long take, mise en scene heavy style that would infuse the material with some existential grandeur. Cut to three months later and Dawson’s Maya drifts into a lift of aimless drug use, sexuality and sadomasochistic club life, plus a new downer haircut. Did she tell anyone what happened? Why didn’t she call the cops? “Kids” this is not – material like this doesn’t work that way. You can only withhold so much from the audience without supplying the cinematic goods – eventually they begin to distrust you. Of course, when Maya returns to school as a TA in a class featuring our football scrub/rapist, the opportunity for revenge presents itself. Fear not, castration is not in store, but the film’s final masochistic flourish, where Maya understands that no retribution can help her escape her pain, drew laughs at the screening I attended. A pity – the elements are in place for a film worth seeing, but their execution are sorely lacking.

Roxbury Film Festival - Dispatch 4

At an emotional ceremony at Roxbury's Hibernian Hall, the Roxbury Film Festival closed Sunday night, handing out a pair of prizes to Audience favorite 'I'm Through With White Girls". The event proved to be the last for Festival founder Candelaria Silva, who is bidding the festival goodbye after overseeing its first nine editions. Here's a list of winners:

Audience Award: Jennifer Sharp's "I'm Through With White Girls"
Special Prize, Cannes Pan Africain: "I'm Through With White Girls"
Short Film Prize: Randall Dottin's "Lifted"
Prize for Most Original Voice: Faith Kululu ("Autumn's Turn", "Open Secrets")
Documentary Prize: Faith Pennick's "Silent Choices"
Youth Prize: Andre Woodberry's "What It's Like To Be Homeless"

Roxbury Film Festival - Dispatch 3

In many ways the most elegant of African-American film events, the ninth edition of the Roxbury Film Festival has been a solid if not spectacular affair, culling together a group of features and shorts that compromise a majority of the interesting work among emerging Black American film artists from the last year. The event has trimmed its program for its 2007 edition and as a result doesn't suffer from the bloat and uneveness suffered by the Hollywood and San Francisco Black Film Festivals. The parties, luncheons and panels seem a bit rote: they don't overflow with filmmakers, offer festival committee members as "industry panelists" and engaging in dialogue about African-American cinematic representation that seems pedestrian and overwrought. That and sometimes these events take place in Chicago Pizza chains, but for the most part the hospitality and atmosphere is a plus. Screening just over sixty titles at a series of Southeastern Boston's venerable cultural and academic institutions (Museum of Fine Arts, MassArt, Northeastern University and the Wentworth Institute of Technology), the festival has a high mindedness (despite its largerly middlebrow programming) is a respite from the California festivals more populist sensibilities and suggest their still lies potential for a richer, more unique and challenging African-American film culture, even in our sorry postmodernity.

Negligent fathers and the burden of their excesses and betrayals has been a constant theme among the stronger films at this year's festival. Among these is Lanre Olabisi's "August The First". Shot with a gentle naturalism in long, loose handheld takes, the film recounts the college graudation party for Tunde (Ian Alsup), a sensitive if irresponsible young man who has invited his estranged African father (a terrific Dennis Ruben Green) to his party after an abrupt, ten year absence. He's done this without telling his ailing grandmother (Gloria Suave), pregnant sister (Kerisse Hutchinson), alcoholic mother (Joy Meriweather) or dutiful brother (Sean Phillips), all of whom hold different degrees of hostility toward the returned patriarch. The film never reveals the nature of his earlier disappearence, but we slowly learn of the tentative relationship he has maintained with Tunde, and his desire to relocation his new, Nigerian family into his previous household. Olabisi and co-writer Shawn Alexander parcel out details with sparsity, and to great effect.

As the Nigerian's machievellian intentions and supremely manipulative nature rise to the surface on this long day's journey into night, "August The First" delicately crawls underneath the spectators skin, becoming sneakily powerful by its climatic moments in a way reminiscent of Charles Burnett's "To Sleep With Anger". Alsup bouys the film with as the child who only wants to please everyone, and ultimately unravels each of his loved ones darkest secrets. Stylistically the film falls well within the AmerIndie tradition, but also owes a debt to the narrative verite style of French D.P. like Eric Gautier. Shot at the director's mother's house, a piece of autobiographical information of no small relevance considering the subject matter. A favorite at SXSW this year, this powerful slice of black American working class social realism deserves a much larger audience.

Among this year's shorts, the trend continues: This year's festival screened films in which father's, unable to accept their childs homsexuality, beat them viciously, (Dee Rees' amazing "Pariah"), force them into seclusion on a lifeless middle African military compound (Faith Kululu's slight "Autumn's Turn") inexplicably abandon their children for a life underneath the subway (Randall Dottin's Fox Searchlight produced "Lifted") and implicate them in a series of intra-family lies and betrayals in order to protect their shattered masculinity (Moon Molson's "Pop Foul"), which received another curious reception, as audiences a black film festivals can't seem to take this absolutely devestating short seriously.



One woman walked out of the screening twice! In a twenty minute film no less. It's bizarre that in front of a sizeable and ostensibly cine-literate audience at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, chuckles spread through the audience as Darryl, a gargantuan thug, begins to beat the shit out of a little leaguer's hypocritical father right in front of the boy, in one of the film's several harrowing scenes of the dark side of nihilist black masculinity. Later, after both of his parents have betrayed him physically and emotionally, the child returns to the baseball field, inflicting his anger on both the outfield fence and, in perhaps the most terrifying and emotionally resonant moment in any short film this year, his dog. Still, until Steven Clark's character strikes the dog, scattered chuttle spread through the crowd. One was almost compelled to shout them down, yelling "Will You Please Take This Movie Seriously!", as someone famously did during the initial screening of David Cronenberg's "A History of VIolence" at Cannes a few years back. Yet this is even more troubling. "A History of Violence" is a tongue in cheek genre deconstruction; "Pop Foul" is an earnest and extremely moving film that provokes the audience with clarity and concision, so why the laughs? It seems that certain segments of the black movie going audience just seems unable to deal with these issues in a mature manner.

Roxbury Film Festival - Dispatch 2

Although its title may provoke knee-jerk associations among the core demographic for “Diary of a Mad Black Woman”, Roxbury opener “I’m Through With White Girls” proves consistently clever and endearing while perhaps playing it a bit too safe around the jagged ideological edges its narrative deftly swerves past. Courtney Lilly’s script doesn’t demonize white girls or play heavily into the mythologies blacks of both genders build around them. Miscegenation is Jay Brooks’ (Anthony Montgomery) only choice as he explains to his white pal Matt near the beginning of the film, because black women just don’t like him “I’m not one of those football playing, doctor to be, alpha male, talented tenth types they all like” he says while ogling white women at an indie rock club. Yet his non-committal ways (he breaks every young Caucasian woman’s heart by leaving a note and disappearing with his comic book paraphernalia) are clearly the root of the problem.

Jay mulls over a moratorium on dating white women as his more traditionally “black” and masculine best friend Drake (Lamman Tucker), soon to be married to the uber-controlling literary agent Julie (Ann Weldon) struggles with the class differences between his bourgeoise wife to be and his parents working class ethos, a standard relationship comedy trope which is mined for some choice laughs here. As the late twentysomething black comic nerd with a penchant for trucker hats with oddly bent bills and an absurd cigarette holder, Montgomery is an arresting comedic persona. He brings light to a host of retrograde spade stereotypes effortlessly while embodying an identity where race is not a defining issue. This is unusual in contemporary black themed films, especially one with as provocative a title as this one.

Jay is a skinny narcissist who doesn’t drive (in Los Angeles), won’t dance in public, and can’t stand the radio, yet, he lands a yellow skinned novelist Catherine Williamson,(Lia Johnson). Catherine can’t do public readings because of anxiety, is loaded with opinions and double entendres (plus her hair puts Ani DiFranco’s to shame), giving the film an equally compelling foil for Jay and neatly escaping the slacker-striver dichotomy that drives much contemporary romantic comedy. Where as the career women who half heartedly hunt down slackers in “High Fidelity” or “Knocked Up”, the apothesis of this current trend, seem to have little on their minds, Catherine is akin to the neurotic screen personas of mid 70s Diane Keaton or Kate Winslet in “Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind”.



Directorially, Jennifer Sharp stays out of her own way visually while providing a steady display of efficient comedic timing and direction that only amplifies the charisma of her neurotic blipster stars. The whole thing has a delightful and mischievous levity while it shakes down a number of racial constructions and myths with grace and quick humor, yet you never feel like the onion is completely peeled. What of these white girls – they just about never surface in the narrative, the filmmakers interested only in the aftermath of Jay’s pattern of behavior than in giving any of them representation heft, making the choice to pursue Catherine a closed issue. Still, while it doesn’t strive to reinvent the wheel, “I’m Through With White Girls” never feels like the cinematic hand me downs black audiences were being force fed a generation ago (think “Mahogany”) or a self-important, angsty, revenge minded Black romance/feminine empowerment picture like those of Tyler Perry’s or T.D Jakes and Michael Schultz’s “Woman Thou Art Loosed”, a hit on the black film fest circuit a few years ago.

Eddie Bole’s “Results”, a winner at the San Francisco and Martha’s Vineyard Black fests, is an uneven "down low" melodrama that features some competant acting but leaves one feeling that this fascinating topic deserves a more rounded treatment. Programmers at film festival we're flooded with "down low" shorts the past two years, as this particular phenomenon in the black community has griped headlines, Oprah's couches and four summers ago, the cover of the New York Times Magazine. A faithful bourgeoise black woman's nightmare comes true is the basic premise; a loving husband confesses late one night that he's had an affair with a man unprotected and the man fears he has AIDS. Whoops. Of course, to actually depict the affair, its immediate aftermath, the psychological conditioning the man must have undergone to stymie his lust for homosexual contact (since 11 he admits), this is all left under the surface or treated with speeches that could have been written for an episode of "Guiding Light". Still, bold choices shooting DV in extremely low light with dark Black actors. Some of the movie has a ethereal quality that is quite pleasing.

Roxbury Film Festival - Dispatch 1

The Roxbury Film Festival, the largest African-American film festival in New England, opens tonight with a gala screening of Jennifer Sharp's "I'm Through With White Girls", a winner at June's Hollywood Black Film Festival. A survey of some of the best new work by American filmmakers of color, the festival runs through Sunday. Films of note include Dee Rees' "Pariah", the longish short film about a lesbian teenager in the Bronx which has been racking up prizes on the black and gay fest circuits, Moon Molson's "Pop Foul" (see the new issue of Filmmaker Magazine for more on Mr. Molson and his much lauded film), Lance Olabisi's SXSW narrative competition entry "August The First", expanded from his short film which is still on the fest circuit, and another account of the Melvin Van Peebles myth in "How To Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)", which has already screened commercially in different parts of the country (and which will be closely watched by this reporter, who has yet to see it but suspects the usual hyperbole and self-mythologizing by one of the most divisive figures in modern cinema).

What good are niche festivals anyway? This is a question that we will be asking throughout the week as the Cinema Echo Chamber covers the festival. It seems that with the proliferation of film festivals, just about every conceivable audience has a moderately prestigious event on which to hang worthwhile cinematic representations of their communities and cultures, yet, as any discerning viewer who attended enough NewFest or Frameline or Hollywood Black Film Festival screenings can attest to, mediocrity reigns. Is that a good thing? Were there really 65 black shorts made in the states this year that are festival worthy? HBFF thought so. As Earnest Hardy wrote in LA Weekly last month while covering OutFest, "Watching most contemporary queer movies, particularly the American ones, is to see art reflect the downside of the progress achieved in the culture wars, in gays and lesbians securing that much-coveted 'seat at the table,'", who then goes on to call most contemporary American queer movies "infantilized art".

Though the narrative lineup at SXSW was "amateur hour" this year (as one of the jurors shared with me in confidence), it would not have dipped so low as to program the outrageously bad reparations drama "Sorry Ain't Enough" and the near unwatchable Frank Vincent/Chuck D classroom drama "City Teacher", as San Francisco Black did. Do these festivals provide a marketplace in which niche films can be bought by outlets that specifically market them to the audiences they are meant for? I didn't see Logo making alot of acquistions at OutFest. We'll be exploring the implications of these issues facing minority filmmakers in a number of interviews and dispatches this week.

Me and Michaelangelo Antonioni and Blackness

Oh Antonioni, you made me an adult. I was in an office full of people who worked in the media, nary a one responding to the the gasp and bold announcement ("Antonioni is dead!?") I let out when I saw the email concerning the maestro's death from Variety updates, their lives too busy selling hip-hop culture to the middle and upper middle classes as authentic expression of post civil rights era BLACK identity, via streaming video feeds of mediocre rappers and the brands they support of course, but regardless of their lack of perspective, it was like an Antonioni scene itself, or perhaps like one by any number of his Asian progeny, the material world moving faster in its evolution that the emotional lives of the human beings residing within it.

Sadly, the first Antonioni movie I saw on the big screen was his last, his segment in the omnibus film "Eros". The short film is "Il filo pericoloso delle cose" and it is an utter embarassment, a sad whimper on the way out, the depiction of a long, poorly dubbed argument between a naked woman and her cold man, its setting and milieu falling neatly within Antonioni's career long concerns with landscape and the bored bourgeoise of Europe, but its complete lack of resonance and control, the sense that we are being invited to camp upon its iconic maker making the project all the more contemptuous. It surely must have been after that disaster that the rumblings about a new Antonioni feature must have stopped. Better to live out one's final years with dignity than attempt another "Beyond The Clouds" with a lesser European auteur in tow to try and sort out the maestro's wishes.

Still, his achievement is staggering. The eight film run from "Il Grido" (1957) to "The Passenger" (1975) is one of the most accomplished in cinema history, the auteur, well entrenched in middle age, coming to artistic fruition amidst the bold cultural changes occuring everywhere around him and, in the process, creating a cinematic grammar of loneliness and ennui that was so new as to complete reshape the face of modernist cinema.

Oh, god bless the esoterists out there. I spent long afternoons and longer nights debating the merits of Antonioni in dorm rooms and Brooklyn lofts, cigarette smoke (and perhaps other kinds) wafting through the air, the glamour and aestheticism of the Antonioni oeuvre rubbing my colleague and fellow Italian cinephile Nick D'Agostino the wrong way, his corrective being the oeuvre of Roberto Rossellini. Perhaps Mr. Antonioni cared not to show the deadening effects of post-modern culture on the Italian working classes, but we have Ermanno Olmi for these tasks. His risk taking, be it his career long obsession with dead time ("temps mort"), his experimentation with color ("Il Deserto Russo"), his prophetic interests in the emptiness of image making ("Blow Up", "The Passenger") or revolution, ("Zabriskie Point"), is undeniable and perhaps his most laudable contribution. Stephen Holden was correct when he observed that Mr. Antonioni was a moralist of sorts and, although his contemporary Federico Fellini is thought of as a warm and humanistic auteur, it seems to me that Antonioni's reputation for clinical coldness is a bit overstated; Antonioni desperately wants to find evidence of genuine human connection and feeling everywhere in his filmic worlds. if he can't find any, its not of his own design, but that of the textures and inadequate modern landscapes he finds his heroines (often the inimitable Monica Vitti) trapped in.

A singular anomaly in the American and Italian cinemas, "Zabriskie Point", Antonioni's first and last American film, is a radical departure from the director’s previous work, a deeply imperfect film that nonetheless brilliantly highlights, both in its thematic incoherence and aesthetic indecisiveness, the still irresolvable ideological conflicts that arose on American streets, university campuses, Capitol Hill and suburban living rooms during the 1960s, that place where all the 20th centuries founding myths went to die. It was a vast critical and commercial disappoint because of its aesthetic risk taking; the protagonists of Antonioni films find themselves unable to connect with their lovers, the spaces they inhabit, or a greater set of principles upon which they can erect a reasonable way of approaching the world. These characters frequently make decisions that scream Sartrean “bad faith”, before, in the optimistic films such as "Blow Up" and "L’Eclisse", finding some sort of solace and perhaps the first stirring of MORALITY, in nature. In the less optimistic films, such as "La Notte" or "Il Deserto Rosso", the characters find no way out of the empty Eros, the self delusion and incessant neediness that defines their lonely lives. In this context, the expectant late 60s viewer of such films would find "Zabriskie Point" a great disappointment, the film being explicitly political and less interested in its characters interpersonal lives.



Others, such as the film’s star, non-actor and former political activist Mark Frechette, who clashed with Antonioni frequently in attempt to make the picture a Marxist diatribe, came to it as a polemical film that was supposed to provide easy answers to the pressing socio-political questions of the moment. In making a film that deliberately jettisoned any notion of fulfilling its audiences’ expectations, Antonioni doomed his projects commercial and critical prospects, while leaving a film that merits much greater attention than anyone, including Mr. Antonioni’s fiercest supporters, has been willing to give it.

Zabriskie Point is ostensibly about the highly ambiguous road toward liberative struggle. Its climax, one in which Daria Halprin’s character appears to blow up a beautiful cliff bound home, one in which her boss and his partners are discussing their plans for developing the area, before the curtain is pulled back and we understand that she has only imagined the destruction, is both a self-reflexive nod to the crassness of American popular cinema and an earnest indictment of its culture. Mrs. Halprin gets back in her car and drives off into the sunset mourning an ephemeral cause that she never truly grasped, much like almost every baby boomer I know. Yet in witnessing the bomb’s destruction, the burned clothing racks and floating loafs of Wonder Bread, a bizarre and intoxicating fantasy, not altogether more fantastic and ungrounded in reality as the countless empty discussions of liberative struggle that takes place in the film, Antonioni is starring right back at his audience with a rather cynical gaze.

The liberative struggle in this film is like the empty talk of progress and psychology in "La Notte", in which characters speak endlessly about themselves and others as if they have important insights, when in fact they have none. Since this liberative struggle is something that real life new left groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground could never fully articulate into a coherent ideology and subsequent post Civil Rights films like "The Spook Who Sat by The Door" or "The Final Comedown", both earnest and flawed films made by Black Americans that failed to give much credence to revolutionary action or depict such an uprising with some semblance of verisimilitude, its no surprise that "Zabriskie Point" fails, both in the conversations between committed, poorly dubbed young people or the larger, highly ambiguous thematic mission of the picture, to sell its vision of a truly radicalized American youth scene to the audience.

Yet in the cracks of its loosely constructed post Civil Rights reality, one that in its flat, one dimensional depictions of revolution hungry black students, thuggish police officers and land developers (American force and capital) is not so far from the blaxploitation cycle of the same period, their lurks the ever skeptical eye of a master director in a foreign land, flailing about in a vain attempt to understand the denigrating culture of excess he had newly found himself in and yet, despite the prevalent confusion, retain a modernist vision in which human progress (spiritual and emotional) could still take place.



“White radicalism is nothing but bullshit and jive” says the black militant running the meeting, his shades hiding his eyes. His comment is met with hisses, jeers and liberal sermonizing before he responds, “Black people are dying… We’ve earned this leadership in blood jack, we’re not going to give it up.” The ironic yet lightly pejorative exoticism which greets Antonioni’s marginalized black characters (or shall we say manifestations of “the other”) in "La Notte" and "L’Eclisse", where blackness is represented as containing a vitality and closeness with nature that the stilted white bourgeois types of Antonioni’s films seemingly lack, continues here, sort of. The blacks are so committed and earnest, where as the first white student to speak draws an unintentional laugh, the first of many in the film (“what if you want to end sociology…”). The notion of comfortable white college students as revolutionaries might be called into question by the black characters’ open contempt for their complacent whiteness, but the only means they express this through is an empty rhetoric of victimization and politically under thought revolutionary agenda; Antonioni never seems to give the black student union leaders’ struggle any weight other than depersonalized oppression. Although the “struggle” is positioned as a black one that whites might join (or not. Frechette remarks at the end of the scene “I’m willing to die… of boredom” before walking out), only marginal white characters such as the imprisoned college professor are given any larger human characteristics. The blacks, before they and their struggle disappear from the movie completely, are just running mouths or meaningless victims, such as the faceless armed protester who is shot exiting the administration building, setting our protagonist on his journey of reinvention.

What is so ironic about this is that "Zabriskie Point" became a grand failure commercially and critically at a cultural moment when middle class Americans, entering a new decade that would be rife with scandal and national malaise, had tired of liberative struggle, were moving to the suburbs (Sunnydunes!) in droves and taking up arms, not to rid the country of Nixon or Hoover, but for personal protection from barely perceived, media generated threats (urban crime). Perhaps, Antonioni's greatest "failure" was his most prescient film.

"Maxed Out" with "No End in Sight" while "Sunshine" rests up ahead, you "Sicko"!

After a mid summer hiatus, largely caused by its author's impending poverty, The Cinema Echo Chamber is back this week. The first week of August has brought the death of two of the modernist cinema's most enduring figures (more on Antonioni in the next post) while July was notable mainly for the release of several outstanding documentaries about troubled corners of the world (Asger Leth's penetrating look at Haitian street gangs in "Ghosts of Cite Soleil", Ricki Stern and Annie Sundburg's Sudanese genocide doc "The Devil Came on Horseback") although, for Americans, the most troubled of all corners of the world seems to be our own (and wherever our military decides to intervene). If James Scurlock's "Maxed Out" and Michael Moore's "Sicko", both outstanding critiques of faulty policymaking, shed light on two of American principal domestic deficiencies that are dire but not unfixable (those being predatory money lending and insufficient health care. Full disclosure: I'm a victim of both, as 23 year old middle class college graduates are designed to be) than Charles Ferguson's incendiary Iraqi war documentary "No End in Sight", the first to elegantly detail the myriad ways in which American incompetence, naive and hubris lost the war in the months following the fall of Baghdad, has clearly installed itself as the apocalyptic conundrum documentary of the year (with no Al Gore to be found, sigh), its depiction of American malfeasance and its catastrophic consequences in these oh so dangerous times as dense, urgent and sobering as anything you'll see on American movie screen all year.

Interviews with American principals on the ground in those early months along with poignant and measured use of all the familiar archival footage shows how terrible and misguided our policy of disbanding the Iraqi military and De-Baathifying its civil bureaucracies has been while our leaders lack of interest in providing Iraqi's with safety and necessities has left a vacuum in which militant jihadists of many stripes have taken hold of the public's imagination and their young men's efforts. Please run and see this movie and tell your friends, colleagues, lovers, parents and whomever else you can to see it. Much has been written about it already: Filmmaker Magazine and Indiewire have both interview Ferguson, A.O. Scott and David Denby have weighed in with positive notices, Michael Atkinson was more reserved (and witty) on his blog, but somewhere, lost in all the glowing coastal mediasphere coverage, is how absurd it is that this film won't reach a major American audience. That its not being broadcast on CNN, on PBS, on the Late Show with David Letterman, anywhere in which Americans would have to address it more directly. Why no major American broadcasting companies haven't, out of a sense of civic duty (that is, after all, why they still broadcast election night coverage when they could still make more money showing American Idol reruns with full Ad support), opted to broadcast Ferguson's masterpiece is at the root of our problems - the demand for the safest, most mediocre and inoffensive cultural products is at the root of television's dwindling grasp on our public imagination. Yet still, the blood rests on our hands, but with still have the remote control and the youtube search engine, so who cares about staying tuned, even if a sticky, bloody keyboard is left in its wake. Atkinson's point that after seeing the film, that one can only draw the assumption that the men responsible for this outrageous war ought to hang does not fall on deaf ears here.

Heavy stuff, but perhaps not as heavy as the future imagined in Danny Boyle's entertaining if ultimately underwhelming "Sunshine", a film that ought to have stretched its conceptual hands further toward greatness, but like Icarus, came a bit too close to the sun for its own good. A brilliant dwindling crew space thriller for its first hour, Boyle reteams with "28 Days Later" scribe Alex Garland, producer Andrew MacDonald and star Cillian Murphy (I don't want to think about what this movie would have been like with Ewan McGregor and John Hodge writing) to produce one of the most sharply executed sci-fi thrillers in years, although its sharp left turn into the realm of slasher movie in its final act remains a stunningly inept miscalculation, Boyle & Co deciding to surprise and terrorify their audience instead of focusing their energies on the doomed crews final moments of approach, they're dreams, fears and forever unrealized desire, you know, the human stuff. That's always more interesting than mad men with charred skin wielding knives, but don't ask our friends at Fox Searchlight, I'm sure Rupert's indiewood vehicle has a few development types whose notes told Mr. Garland a different story.