Film Review
August 22, 2007 by JAN ALBERT
It’s the end of summer and if you’re ready for something a little more challenging than TRANSFORMERS, here are two startling new films from Brazil that will take your mind off how f-ed up our nation is.
IMAGES: COURTESY MANDA BALA (SEND A BULLET)
MANDA BALA (SEND A BULLET) Jason Kohn’s first film won the Grand Jury documentary prize at Sundance this year. It takes you far from the beautiful beaches of Rio and exotic revelry of Carnival depicted in tourist ads and plunges you into the fear and horror that has come to define daily life in Brazil’s largest city. Sao Paulo is a city (the third largest in the world) where the least fortunate citizens regularly emerge from the slums to exact revenge on the corrupt politicians and wealthy industrialists who make their fortunes off the backs of the poor by kidnapping their wives and children and demanding enormous ransoms for their return. As the film’s tag line puts it: “When the rich steal from the poor the poor steal the rich.â€
Kohn and his crew spent 5 years assembling an amazing cast of characters to depict Sao Paolo’s surreal food chain: the former head of the nation’s Senate who has been convicted of stealing millions from a government program meant to improve life in Brazil’s most remote Amazon villages but was nonetheless reelected by those districts. The wealthy manager of an industrial frog farm set up to launder the money stolen from the government program. A kidnapper who supports his family of 10 by abducting rich teenagers and cutting off their ears to urge their parents to pay ransom demands… a plastic surgeon that has become famous for inventing a cosmetic approach to replace the ears of kidnap victims…. A successful businessman who lives in constant fear of being kidnapped and so has spent vast sums to armor his bulletproof car and learn defensive driving techniques – a big business sparked into life to respond to the kidnap culture, along with the sale of private helicopters so the super rich can take off from the roofs of their penthouses and avoid street traffic, and microchipping, which enables tracking in the advent of a kidnapping.
Most unforgettable is the young woman nabbed outside a nightclub who describes how a young kidnapper practically passed out while cutting through the cartilage of her ear and how Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Birds, was playing on TV while they performed this butchery. That night, she dreamed that birds were picking at her ear. YIKES! I dare Wes Craven to equal that horror scene or the image of small kids playing in the slums, acting out kidnappings and stick-ups, instead of playing soccer.
Jason Kohn is a protégée of Errol Morris, whose imaginative touch has stretched the boundary of documentary filmmaking. Kohn has a gift for intrepid reporting, ambush tactics (like a sly young Mike Wallace!) when necessary, and vivid imagery. If the scenes of frog farm produce digesting each other to symbolize the revolting way human beings feed off each other are a trifle heavy handed, you won’t be forgetting them anytime soon either.
Manda Bala, which opens Friday, August 17th at The Angelica Theater, got me so interested in life in Brazil, that I went over to the Film Forum to check out LOVE FOR SALE, a haunting drama about a vibrant young woman who heads for Sao Paulo to seek her fortune, then slinks back to Iguatu, the desert wasteland that is her hometown.
HERMILDA GUEDES as Hermila (foreground) and GEORGINA CASTRO (background) as her friend Georgina, as seen in LOVE FOR SALE.
PHOTO CREDIT: STRAND RELEASING
I didn’t see Karim Ainouz’s first film, Madame Sata, which Film Forum premiered in 2003, but if there’s any justice in this world, this film will definitely launch the career of a major new director. With a complete economy of images and a minimum of dialogue, we get the whole picture within the first few frames. We meet Hermila in a home movie, carefree, radiantly happy, and in love. Then we cut to a close up of the still beautiful but somewhat drawn girl bumping along a dusty road on a crowded bus. The camera slides over to reveal a baby in her lap.
Hermila’s Aunt Maria and grandmother take her and her infant son in and a temporary situation becomes permanent after several weeks of public humiliation as the whole town watches her calling again and again from the only public phone and waiting in vain at the gas station for her 20-year-old husband to join her from Sao Paulo.
Using a combination of non professionals and theater actors in the main roles, Ainouz and his wonderful cinematographer, Walter Carvalho, capture the details of life in “nowheresville Northeastern Brazil†perfectly—Hermila leaning against the open fridge at her granny’s house to cool off, sucking on a piece of ice. The truck stop, the open air market, the sidewalk restaurant, the guys blowing up dust on the main drag with their scooters, and the disco. The camera loves Hermila Guedes, the beautiful lead actress, who is deeply affecting as she grimly washes cars, pumps gas, cleans motel rooms and goes back to the kind but passive loser she thought she had left behind as ancient history. We watch her growing more wan and bitterer everyday until she challenges her life sentence and plots her escape from Iguatu with an enterprising plan that shocks the whole town.
I loved LOVE FOR SALE. Go see it. You will too.
www.angelikafilmcenter.com
www.filmforum.org
~Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) & Love for Sale |
Posted in Movie Reviews | By Jan Albert | August 22nd, 2007, 1:23pm
SUZANNE M. WINTERLING at the opening of her debut NYC show,
‘i’ll be your mirror, but i’ll dissolve’ – DANIEL REICH GALLERY,
August 13, 2007
PHOTO: Nancy Smith
SUSANNE M. WINTERLING –
‘i’ll be your mirror, but i’ll dissolve…’
AUGUST 13 – SEPTEMBER 7, 2007
DANIEL REICH GALLERY – 537 W. 23rd STREET, CHELSEA
as part of the exhibit, which comprises of video and still photographs, DANIEL REICH GALLERY and SUSANNE M. WINTERLING PRESENT A FILM SCREENING of:
“THE FLAMBARDS” – To-nite – FRIDAY – AUGUST 17, 2007 – 7PM
at the DANIEL REICH GALLERY
you can also check out the show – which is cool tempered but intense and emotional at the same time.
more about SUSANNE from the press release:
“In 2006-2007, Winterling participated in ‘Eve’s Arc and the Feminist’ at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, PASSERBY; and had a solo exhibition at the Moscow Center of the Arts/Moscow House of Photography; she was also included in group exhibitions at the Kunstverein Hamburg and Kunsthalle Basel.
She was also featured by Josef Strau at Vilma Gold, London.
Previously, Winterling participated in exhibitions at the Swiss Institute, NY and Kunstverein Stuttgart.
Winterling lives and works in Berlin.
She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.”
more photos from the opening, posted AUGUST 29, 2007
DANIEL REICH GALLERY
~SUSANNE M. WINTERLING/THE FLAMBARDS/screening/to-nite/FRI AUG 17 |
Posted in The Bomb | By Nancy Smith | August 17th, 2007, 1:02pm
I’LL DRINK ANYTHING
Cheap Beer Taste Test & Beer themed film screening
with PATTERSON BECKWITH & AMY GARTRELL
FRIDAY – AUGUST 17, 2007 – 6:30 PM
ELIZABETH DEE GALLERY – 545 W. 20th STREET – CHELSEA
ELIZABETH DEE GALLERY
~PATTERSON BECKWITH & AMY GARTRELL/to-nite/FRI AUG 17 |
Posted in The Bomb | By Nancy Smith | August 17th, 2007, 12:32pm
AU REVOIR SIMONE plays SEAPORT MUSIC FESTIVAL, SOUTH STREET SEAPORT, NYC
FRI AUGUST 10, 2007 – 8PM
PHOTO: KATE CERIGO
AU REVOIR SIMONE – myspace page
~AU REVOIR SIMONE/PLAYS SEAPORT |
Posted in The Bomb | By Nancy Smith | August 15th, 2007, 12:12pm
an image from the DUKE RILEY website homepage archive
image: courtesy www.dukeriley.info
www.dukeriley.info
~DUKE RILEY’S website |
Posted in The Bomb | By Nancy Smith | August 8th, 2007, 3:31pm
NEW YORK POST – FRONT PAGE – LATE CITY FINAL – SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 2007
the caption reads: “SUB MORON – Submarine nuts invade B’klyn ship”
the text on the cover reads: “The replica Revolutionary War submarine at far left, sparked terror fears on the Brooklyn waterfront yesterday as Philip Duke Riley (right) and two cohorts steered their art-project craft too close to the Queen Mary 2 ocean liner.”
(it’s the egg shaped vessel with what looks like a scuba apartatus shaped appendage, to the left of .. “MORON”.)
more details of the story, and more photos, were posted inside on pages 4 & 5 in an article written by HEIDI SINGER, PHILIP MESSING & PATRICK GALLAHUE.
The other 2 players were MICHAEL CUSHING and JESSE BUSHNELL. The original revolutionary war submersible invention, was called the Turtle. Bushnell, claims to be a descendant of the original Turtle’s inventor, David Bushnell. The Turtle a rudimentary foot pedaled underwater vessel, was used by the USA, in 1776, in a strike on a British warship, in what is believed to be the first underwater ‘submarine’ attack.
Bushnell, 35, and Cushing, 23, have Rhode Island addresses. Riley graduated from the RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN in 1995, and moved to NYC about 10 years ago.
According to the article, Cushing and Bushnell “towed the inoperable wood and fiberglass, egg shaped submarine in a rubber raft as Riley rode inside the 12-foot-deep, 8-foot-wide replica, police said.”
“As the craft came within 200 feet of the Queen Mary, an NYPD intelligence detective aboard the luxury liner spotted the Turtle reproduction and alerted authorities…”
get this: – “The NYPD’s Aviation and Harbor units responded, as well
as, police from the Port Authority, the Waterfront Commission and local and federal intelligence personnel.” !!!!
Apparently they were taken from the water to the 76th Precinct House in Carroll Gardens, where “they were questioned before being released” – ” ‘We can summarize today’s incident as marine mischief,’ (NYC) Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.”
“Riley the owner of the vessel, was given summonses by the harbor unit for reckless operation of a craft and towing in a reckless manner” – Riley blamed it all on the current !!
according to the article:
“The Post caught up to Riley at a neighborhood bar, B61, after his aquatic adventure got shipwrecked.
‘I just got caught up in the current’, he said over chips and salsa.”
DUKE RILEY last surfaced in artlovers, summer 2006, at an art opening, with his then-girlfriend, ‘Tide and Current Water Taxi’ artist, MARIE LORENZ.
MARIE LORENZ and DUKE RILEY, attend ‘Local Transit’, Artists Space, May 16, 2006
Marie had work in the show.
PHOTO: Nancy Smith
more photo coverage from that opening
check out: DUKE RILEY’S WEBSITE
~DUKE RILEY/scores NY POST FRONT PAGE |
Posted in The Bomb | By Nancy Smith | August 4th, 2007, 10:24am
MAIL ORDER MONSTERS, Curated by KATHY GRAYSON
with: FRAN SPEIGEL, DENNIS TYFUS, BEN JONES, TOMOO GOKITA, EDDIE MARTINEZ, WES LANG,
RY FYAN, TAYLOR McKIMENS & JOE GRILLO
July 1 – August 4, 2007
PERES PROJECTS/Berlin
POSTER IMAGE: courtesy PERES PROJECTS, image: TOMOO GOKITA
if you are in BERLIN, you can catch the last week of this show, apparently the hit of the summer 2007 season. if not, not to worry – the show is coming to DEITCH PROJECTS, this FALL – in fact, the opening has been moved up to: THURS SEPT 6th, 2007. (6-9pm) (76 Grand ST)
KATHY GRAYSON photographed at the recent NICOLA VASSELL opening on Greene St. in SOHO,
MAY 11, 2007
PHOTO: Nancy Smith
more pix of KATHY & her friends at Nicola’s
. . . back to ‘MAIL ORDER MONSTERS’, from the press release:
“Peres Projects presents a group exhibition by curator Kathy Grayson, exploring new trends in fucked-up figuration. Every generation has its unique take on the figure and the most exciting new art seems to all see the figure as broken, decaying, fractured, and monstrous! Each artist in this exhibition exemplifies this pervasive tendency in a unique way …”
some images from the PERES PROJECTS website:
TAYLOR McKIMENS, ‘Goo Girl on Cement Bags’, 2007
TAYLOR McKIMENS, ‘Melt Truck’, 2007
DENNIS TYFUS, ‘She Had Mushrooms’, 2005
TOMOO GOKITA, ‘Woman of the Year’, 2006
JOE GRILLO, ‘Detroit Graffiti’, 2007
JOE GRILLO, ‘The Real American Tail (theusaisamonster)’, 2007
JOE GRILLO, ‘Nestle Mesca’, 2007
WES LANG, ‘What is and What Never Should be’, 2007, acrylic on fabric
WES LANG, ‘From the Red, White and Blue’, 2007
WES LANG, ‘Of Sad Songs and Waltzes’, 2007
all ‘MAIL ORDER MONSTERS’ images: COURTESY PERES PROJECTS/Berlin
PERES PROJECTS/Berlin
DEITCH PROJECTS
~MAIL ORDER MONSTERS/PERES PROJECTS/Berlin |
Posted in The Bomb | By Nancy Smith | August 1st, 2007, 8:25pm
curator KATHY GRAYSON posted a whole bunch of really cool photos from the ‘MAIL ORDER MONSTERS’ installation & opening, at PERES PROJECTS/BERLIN, on her myspace page.
here are a few of my favs:
KATHY installing the show, with work by FRANCINE SPIEGEL
KATHY’S BF Patrick – that’s ‘Block Head #10’by EDDIE MARTINEZ on the left – the small drawing resting on the radiator
installing the show, from left: DENNIS TYFUS (orange painting), TAYLOR McKIMENS – a large painting from his “THE DRIPS” series, and TOMOO GOKITA’S drawing, about to go up
outside PERES PROJECTS/BERLIN, the show is about to open
TOMOO GOKITA, ‘Orthopedic Surgery’, was the image used for the show’s poster
large works by BEN JONES
checking out JOE GRILLO
‘Forest Gump’ 2007, by DENNIS TYFUS
that’s a large painting by WES LANG behind them
that big black rag doll is also by WES LANG
ALL PHOTOS: BY KATHY GRAYSON, ‘Mail Order Monsters’, July 1, 2007 opening,
PERES PROJECTS/BERLIN
(except the first one is probably by PATRICK !)
you can check out more photos on KATHY’S myspace page
PERES PROJECTS/BERLIN
~KATHY GRAYSON/Mail Order Monsters |
Posted in The Bomb | By Nancy Smith | August 1st, 2007, 7:44pm
we finally caught up with WES LANG. here he is, (on the right), choking BRENDAN DONNELLY.
both artists had work in the show, and were photographed, at the opening of ‘Revelations’, the dark visioned group show curated by ERIK FOSS, at his FUSE GALLERY.
the show is up thru SAT AUGUST 11, 2007
WES LANG, ‘Life and How to Live It’, drawing and collage, ($5,000)
Wes also has work in the ‘MAIL ORDER MONSTERS’ show, curated by KATHY GRAYSON, now in its last week at PERES PROJECTS BERLIN, & coming to DEITCH PROJECTS, this FALL 2007.
more pix of WES LANG work, at the NYC headquarters of LOYAL, March 12, 2006
scroll down to row: 14
another photo of WES LANG work, in the 1st hard cover LOYAL and HIS BAND,
Oct 20, 2005
also scroll down to row: 14
BRENDAN DONNELLY, ‘Jesus Saves 3:16’, pencil colored pencil on paper, (NFS)
anybody else think this looks like TERRY RICHARDSON ?
you can see the rest of the show here.
FUSE GALLERY
~WES LANG/BRENDAN DONNELLY/FUSE |
Posted in The Bomb | By Nancy Smith | August 1st, 2007, 1:06pm
‘Revelation’ a group show curated by ERIK FOSS
opens To-nite – SAT JULY 21, 2007 – 7-10pm
the show runs from July 21 – August 11, 2007
FUSE GALLERY – 93 2nd AVE (bet 5th & 6th Sts) – NYC (East Village)
and now from the darker side – a group show of an entirely different nature (see Neointegrity post below) – ERIK FOSS seems really psyched about this FUSE SUMMER 2007 offering.
from the press release: “This summer at Fuse gallery, an uncanny mix of artists will proffer their vision of apocalyptic literature from the last canonical book of the New Testament. Curator ERIK FOSS, who was raised a strict Catholic, selected these artists to share what he feels is the darkest story in God’s creation”.
artists invited to participate: Brendan Donnelly, Brian DeGraw, Chris Dingwell, Gibby Haynes, Spenser Sweeney, Arik Roper, Jason D’Aguino, Jordin Isip, Lisa Lebofsky, Neck Face, Veronica Obermeyer, J Penry, Ron English, Rob Leecock, Roy Miranda Jr., Cheryl Dunn, Damian Weinkrantz, Travis Louie, Colin Burns, Michael Hussar, Josh Wildman, Wes Lang, Goldmine Shithouse, David Hochbaum, David Stoupakis, Julie “Jigsaw” Ashcraft, GH avisualagency, Chris Yormick, Danielle Ezzo, Sebastian Mlynarski, Ellen Stagg, Vincent Castiglia, Chet Zar, Mike Aho, Carlucci Bencivenga and Dash Snow.
view artists’ work online: www.fusegallerynyc.com/revelation/revelation.html
VIEW PHOTOS FROM THE OPENING
FUSE GALLERY
P.S.> there is an interesting photo on the FUSE GALLERY homepage today –
‘Irak Memorial Mural for Joey Semz’. that’s DASH SNOW on the right hand side, top of the gate. WHAT HAPPENED to JOEY SEMZ ?
PHOTO: COURTESY FUSE GALLERY
~REVELATION/FUSE GALLERY/opens to-nite/SAT JULY 21 |
Posted in The Bomb | By Nancy Smith | July 21st, 2007, 12:06pm
