From the category archives:

Film

Christening a Film Festival’s New Old Home With John Waters

by Michael Anthony Farley on May 24, 2017
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The Maryland Film Festival has a glorious permanent home in a formerly abandoned theater. Of course, as with all developments in Baltimore, it’s restoration hasn’t been without controversy.

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We Went to Star Wars: The Force Awakens

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on January 7, 2016
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We went to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, an action-packed tale of a desert orphan who meets a droid on a quest to help a group of freedom fighters destroy a weapon that can blow up planets.
Paddy: If this basic plot summary sounds remarkable for its lack of imagination, you’re not the only one who feels that way. The movie looks and feels like the original trilogy, but throughout, I found myself mentally editing the script, and re-imagining its scenes. Not a good sign.
Michael: This felt like a movie where about 1/1000th of the makers’ time and energy was budgeted for writing, and all other effort went into production. It’s more akin to watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade than a work of narrative fiction.

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Not Just Luck: New Art World Documentary Dispels “Making It” Myths

by Paddy Johnson and Matthew Leifheit on April 30, 2014
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“In the art world, there’s no such thing as climbing the ladder. You have to start at the top.” Lisa Adams tells us, quoting the words of Dave Hickey in the new twelve-part documentary Fritz. The series by AFC friend Benjamin Gonyo and co-conspirator Michael Martinez is divided into five to seven-minute segments and tracks a 70-year-old artist named Fritz, who’s hoping to make it in the art world. It is also a document about overcoming adversity. Fritz has a few handicaps; he’s past his prime, he is hearing impaired, he has a bad back. He hasn’t had much luck, much like the protagonists in other films similarly tracking unknown artists—Waiting for Hockney’s Billy Pappas being the most notable example.

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Ai Weiwei Made a Metal Video

by Whitney Kimball on May 22, 2013
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Ai Weiwei will do whatever it takes to get the message out, which includes making a heavy metal video about his three month-long detention.

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“Gerhard Richter Painting” Is Mostly Gerhard Richter Painting

by Reid Singer on April 4, 2012
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How do you make a documentary about abstract painting? When your subject strives for the indescribable, the normal tools of narration and interview become glaringly imperfect; I sympathize with any journalist who feels a sense of futility in the face of a work of art whose emotive power might be ineffable. This includes Corinna Belz, whose film “Gerhard Richter Painting” relies very little on interviews and stated history, and very heavily on long shots of the artist painting in his studio.

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Porn In Church: 30 Years of Charles Atlas

by Whitney Kimball on January 27, 2012
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Marginalized culture loves to watch the mainstream played out on its own terms — to make itself visible within the imagery that bombards us. It was fitting, then, that last night's screening of seven videos by upcoming Whitney Biennial artist and longtime documenter of queer culture, Charles Atlas, took place on a small screen in the empty nave of the Judson Memorial Church.

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Is “The City Dark” Self-Parody?

by Reid Singer on January 25, 2012
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There’s nothing immediately offensive about the premise of Ian Cheney’s new documentary, The City Dark. Living in New York, I can believe that Cheney, an amateur astronomer since his teenage years in Maine, might miss seeing the stars at night, and feel deprived. When he attempts to stretch that wistfulness into an authoritative documentary, however, the results are less than convincing.

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Ai Weiwei is Being Watched

by Reid Singer on January 21, 2012
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As it debuts at Sundance this weekend, Alison Klayman’s “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” is being pre-emptively treated by critics as a highlight of the festival. We take a sneak peek at the documentary, which shadowed Ai for years leading up to his detention.

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Sundance Film Festival Art Highlights: Dog Orbits Earth, Abramovic “The Artist is Present” Doc Debuts

by Reid Singer on January 6, 2012
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Cold weather, Robert Redford, and an excuse to turn off our phones for at least six hours a day. These are just a few of the attractions awaiting visitors to the Sundance Film Festival, which kicks off in Park City, Utah in two weeks. From the looks of the 2012 program, we should expect an array of precocious documentaries, trippy animated films, and bourgeois coming-of-age maneuvers (for some reason, they’ve decided to re-screen “Reality Bites”). It is, in short, an uneven mix of pyrite and gold.

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