Interview

Why Are You Weird? might just be the best VHS feature film to be made in 2009. Zach Shipko and Tucker Bennett's lo-fi exploration of San Francisco art school reality, told through the eyes of an awkward video art/performance art major named Curtis Jackson, also sets a high bar in the world of straight-to-YouTube features.

Using the lowest fidelity equipment outside of pixelvision, the directors achieve a scuzzed-out, VHS bargain-bin aesthetic with a nostalgia that offers a compelling alternative to other low-budget filmmaking options. If you can watch an entire Hollywood film on YouTube, who's to say you can't watch something that objectively looks much worse, with a lot more style? Throw in a bunch of turn of the century pop hits (Thong Song, KC + JoJo) turned into Midi songs and count me in.

From art class critiques to apartment parties, to openings and outdoor music fests, every location is the perfect setting for an awkward encounter between Curtis (played by Shipko) and some girl he's interested in. Admittedly, several of the amateur performers are pretty terrible, but even the worst moments are often redeemed by Shipko's transparent anxiety and awkward fibbing. There are absurd revelations, drug-induced conversations, art-school satires, trips to buy organic food, letters from mom, and an attention to detail that makes even the slower paced scenes comical in their astute observation of reality in the 2000s.

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James Dean and Nick Ray on the set of Rebel Without a Cause
Courtesy Photofest/Film Forum.

Is there really anything to say about this master filmmaker which could be more persuasive than Jean-Luc Godard's famous proclamation that "The cinema is Nicholas Ray?"

The retrospective at Film Forum, which began with a week-long engagement of In a Lonely Place, and which runs through August 6 with fourteen other films, is a gift to the residents of Manhattan and its outer-lying boroughs. Undoubtedly a peculiar type of gift, the kind that you might not seek out on your own, the type which can only come from your bohemian uncle, the family pariah you've admired since adolescence.

Surveying some of the titles in the series—Bitter Victory (1957), They Live by Night (1949), On Dangerous Ground (1951), Born to be Bad (1950), Bigger Than Life (1956)—it's easy to foresee the emotional turbulence that rules over Ray's universe. And that foresight is part of the rub. People who live by night (young thieves in love and on the lam), or endure a bitter victory (a no-nonsense soldier in love with his commander's wife), or exist on dangerous ground (a cop with no empathy forced to care about a killer), are not going to have stories of sunshine and roses. Ray's films are populated by autonomous men who are scarred and crippled; beautiful women who are neglected and beleaguered; and the circumstances that keep them ensnared to their fates.

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Alexander McQueen Fall/Winter 2009; Ugetsu. Eery resemblance, no?

Watching Alexander McQueen's Fall/Winter 2009 collection, critics have been recalled various permutations of waste to fashion. But it jogged nothing so much as our Netflix queue, at the top of which is now Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain). It's Kenji Minozuki's 1953 morality flick about Genjurō, an impressionable country bumpkin who goes into town to sell earthenware pots, leaving his family at home in hopes of benefitting them in the long run. Both the kiln and the terrors of urban space make for multiple metaphors when the protagonist is seduced by a ghostly woman seduces Genjurō and brings him back to her estate. Like any young man new to the big city, he becomes a sex slave, and forgets all about his family. But on top of being an excellent masseuse, the ghost woman—who features a painted face and eyebrows, heavy lip makeup, and geometric-patterned kimono drapery—is a succubus sucking his soul. Why? She doesn't want to be lonely in the after-life and Genjurō might just be green enough to stay with her. And that's just what ghosts do.

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Last night at the State of the Union, President Obama challenged young people to complete at least one year of undergraduate education. Obama gets it and we're glad, as his speech got us thinking of all those kids who went down the wrong path. We're talking heroin addiction, specifically that depicted by Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, the auto-biographical story of Christiane Vera Felscherinow, and its adapted film version, Christiane F., by Uli Edel. Released in 1981, it's about kids in Berlin in the late 1970s. Heroin's more the effect than the cause of the protagonist's dropping out, but nonetheless...

It's an intense, visceral anti-addiction story, and the film runs a little like an after-school TV drama—except for the explicit depiction of violations of the body. Wayward teens beware especially of the scene in which a young addict prepares to shoot up in a bathroom stall. At any moment a crazy, super addicted heroin used could jump over that stall tries to stick in his neck. Look out, America!

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