Interview

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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 ADIDAS SLVR line just put out a new video, shot by famed photographer and Interview contributor Mark Segal, and directed by Pietsch Lim. It's a modern lifestyle video, one that recommends you live simply, never flash your teeth, and rotate unceasingly on an offscreen Lazy Susan.

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You're probably watching the inauguration right now. But what's behind those innocent eyes, that confident voice, that immense popularity? With hope, change, and transcendence taking their places on the political stage today, some are already taking bets on when something will go terribly wrong. With that in mind I wanted to share some of my favorite Political Conspiracy films of all time:

Z (1969)

Part military-coup exposé, part cinema-vérité reenactment, part Nouvelle Vague-tinged political drama, Z is greater than the sum of its fairly interesting parts. This is Costa Gavras' definitive statement about repressive, power-hungry bureaucracy and his nostalgic memorial to the romantic failure of liberal do-gooders. In an unnamed country very much resembling Greece in the 1950s, a popular, intellectual, leftist candidate (Yves Montand playing Obama's ideological doppelganger) is about to rectify his country's wrongs. Only one thing stands in the way: the powers that control everything wrong. The ensuing assassination and the duel between investigation and cover-up is one of the great procedural-thriller experiences in cinema.

Two of the greats: Charles Denner, chased to the music of Mikis Theodorakis.

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Back in early 2007, with nary a thought of our inevitable economic doom, when the world was peachy keen and every night was a cabaret, a group of renegades under the leadership of director Ronnie Bronstein had the audacity to unleash a movie so negative, so frustrating, and so dismal that it engendered a unique form of hostility, the likes of which had not been seen from an audience since Alan Vega snarled and whipped his chain on stage in the early 70s. Frownland never got an official release in our sunny United States, and only played for a few weeks in Existentialist Paris. Tonight it screens at UCLA, free to the public, at a time when viewers may finally be ready for its utter bleakness.

There are a multitude of reasons to see Bronstein's debut film; unrivalled in its dedication to awkwardness and anxiety, the film follows a lowly New York man (maddeningly portrayed by Dore Mann) in his lowly New York existence. There's no point in saying too much; it is a character study, a mood piece, reality gone really bad. Like Wiseman meets Cassavetes meets Suicide meets barbiturates, Frownland shares some aesthetic features with the best parts of 1970s America, but as anyone who reads the newspaper will tell you, its suggestion that miscommunication and absolute failure are at the core of our country is definitely of the now.


Frownland plays at UCLA's Melnitz Hall at 7:30 PM tonight. If you don't live in the LA-area, the inevitable DVD release should not be ignored.

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