I don't even know what I'm qualified to do...

*tap tap tap* This thing on?

So, it's been a while. Okay. Maybe more than a while. Real Life got in the way of important things like blogging for a few months, but I never intended to abandon this thing entirely. That said, the reason I'm back to post one more review is because of a movie that's quite a bit like my Real Life: No Footing.

Rowan alum Michael Licisyn screened his film for current students and faculty last night in an event hosted by the Cinema Workshop. No Footing tells the story of Madison (Jensen Bucher), a 23-year-old art school graduate trying to get her life on track. Despite her Bachelor's degree, she finds herself working in a copy shop for an unbearably absurd boss (a perfectly over-the-top performance by Derek Lindeman). She can barely pay the bills and is far too drained at the end of the day to paint for herself, let alone pursue the dream of making a living with her art.

She feels stuck and alone when she finds herself continually bumping into Christopher (Jake Matthews), a kindred spirit of sorts who gave up the theater in order to get a steady job as a high school guidance counselor. Their relationship is refreshingly complex; this is not a love story, despite one very suggestive dream sequence. Instead they are not quite even friends. Their dynamic is one of a mentor and protegee. Madison latches onto him in the hopes that he can teach her how to cope with what she perceives as failure. In turn, he teaches her to take responsibility for her own happiness.

In a Q&A session after the film, Licisyn stated that Madison's journey was based largely on his own, when he was struggling to establish himself after graduation. This may be why the film rings so true. Madison's world is the same one that I'm living in, as are many of my peers, and Licisyn explores the myriad of ways in which we all cope with it. Like Madison's best friend Kylie, I chose to extend my undergraduate education by an extra year (although I didn't fail any classes in order to do it). Like Madison herself, most of my friends who have already graduated are working low-wage jobs unrelated to their majors. Madison's parents are my parents, down to the mother pushing for a career in teaching as a back-up plan. And of course everyone has a Cory (Michael Bower, better known as "Donkeylips" to those of us who were kids in the '90s), that eccentric success story we can't help but look at with envy. This film captures all the uncertainty of entering adulthood at a time when degrees are plentiful but jobs are few, and it does so with a subtlety that is absent from most coming-of-age stories.

I was the steam when hot meets cold...

Tom Kalin is not a director who shies away from controversial subjects. What I like about his films, in fact, is his ability to pull social taboos out into the light and examine them without deliberately trying to be provocative. Perhaps the best example of this is his 2007 feature, Savage Grace.

Savage Grace is, like Swoon, based on a real-life murder case. This one involves the Baekeland family, hiers to the Bakelite plastics fortune. The film chronicles the relationships between Brooks Baekeland, his wife Barbara Daly Baekeland, and their only child, Antony Baekeland, from Tony's infancy through Barbara's death at the hands of her son. A major theme of the film is the rumored incestuous relationship between Barbara and Tony, alleged to be the catalyst that led Tony to kill his mother.

One of the many remarkable things about this film is the way it was shot. As he proved in Swoon, Kalin does period films very thoroughly, shooting each segment as it would have been shot in the time period in which it was set. The progression from a stable camera and classical Hollywood-style invisible editing in the 1940s and 50s to the handheld camera and more adventurous style in the 60s subtly helps to orient the viewer each time the narrative jumps ahead, while making the transition feel seamless by immediately calling to mind the decade that is now being portrayed.



Of course, what many would consider the most remarkable thing about this film is its subject matter. Incest is among the gravest taboos in modern society, foremost on the unwritten list of "Thou Shalt Nots" that governs what topics are addressed in the mainstream media. It's easy to assume that anyone who would make a movie about it is purely looking to capitalize on shock value, but after viewing Savage Grace I can say that this doesn't seem to be the case here. In fact, Kalin seems to take great pains in order to avoid shocking the audience -- anymore than absolutely necessary, that is, because the Baekeland case is shocking in and of itself. Rather than exploiting his characters, Kalin explores them as human beings, flaws and all, and presents a respectful picture of what can go wrong in the human mind that would lead to such tragic events.

I freak out in your dream, I freak out in my dream...

There is one subject that filmmakers seem to love making films about. That subject is making films. Tom DiCillo's 1995 indie flick Living In Oblivion portrays the trials and tribulations of Nick Reve, the over-stressed director of an indie flick. Self-referential in a way that reminds me of Frederico Fellini's 8½ (more on that one later), Living In Oblivion takes the movie-about-a-movie genre in an interesting direction.



The story is told almost entirely through dream sequences, as various members of the cast and crew have nightmares about what can go very wrong in the making of a no-budget movie. I thought this was a very effective way of examining the hardships faced by independent filmmakers; it wouldn't be believable for everything possible to go wrong during the filming of a single movie, but it's absolutely believable that the people with the most to lose would worry to that extent. Thus, in 90 minutes DiCillo manages to demonstrate how many things can plague a set without beating the audience over the head with Murphy's Law.

One thing I really liked was that in the first dream sequence, the film opens up in black and white, then switches to color whenever we are shown a scene that's being filmed. Normally, I see movies or TV shows shot in color for the "real life" sequences and then switch to black and white to represent the camera's point of view. I found this reversal extremely interesting, as it seems to suggest that what's on camera is more important (more vibrant, and thus more colorful) than what's happening behind the scenes. Or I could be reading too much into it, and it could simply be a way to clue the audience in at the beginning to the fact that it's a dream sequence. Either way, I wish that this had been carried out throughout the film.

Interesting, the only part of the movie that's not a dream sequence is when the characters a filming a scene from their movie that is. Wildly over the top and exactly the kind of dream sequence produced in most stereotypical low-budget films, I kept waiting for the reveal that what we were watching took place only in someone's subconcious. However, just when I thought the movie had gotten predictable it threw a curveball at me, and ended with the most obviously unrealistic scenes as the ones that actually took place. Well played.

Your mom's an architect...

It's been quiet around here -- too quiet. School unfortunately has a way of cutting into my movie-viewing time, but today it made up for that by presenting me with quite a lovely opportunity. I'm going to break here from my usual classic-movie theme to talk about a more current independent film, Happy Birthday, Harris Malden. Why? Well, because one of the actor/writer/director/producers went to my school, and today he and one of his buddies came by the Honors film series to show us their movie and were kind enough to stick around and talk to us afterward.

The movie centers around a man (named, if you can't guess, Harris Malden) who for much of his life has drawn his facial hair. In the shelter of his community on Franklin Street in Philadelphia, this is all well and good; there is a silent agreement among Harris' friends and neighbors to never, ever bring it up. It's left up to Harris' best friend, Paul, to keep him from venturing out of the neighborhood, but when Paul can't keep the outside world -- in the form of his obnoxious girlfriend, Susan -- from intruding on Franklin Street, Harris has the very existential crisis that Paul has spent his entire life trying to prevent.

This is not just a movie about a man and his mustache. I found a lot of different themes running through this movie -- truth, community, the nature of friendship -- but the one that I could relate to most was change. In one of my favorite scenes, Harris says to Paul's grandmother that he feels like he's still talking about the good times he's had in the past, while everyone else is trying to move forward. I think that this is something everyone goes through at some point; I certainly did when I went off to college, in between losing touch with old friends and making new ones. And that, in a nutshell, is why I enjoyed this movie so much. I'm a sucker for films that take a completely off-the-wall premise, and manage to say something meaningful with it.

Now, on to my post-movie experience. Ben Davidow and Eric Levy were both on hand to answer questions after the screening, and they had quite a few interesting things to say. Here's some of what I learned:

This film is independent in every sense of the word. The guys of Sweaty Robot did everything from pre-production to distribution. I happened to have caught this movie on a PBS affiliate from New York last weekend, and apparently that was their doing as well. They're trying to get on PBS stations in other major cities as well, so keep a look out.

Shooting took 20 days. In August. In Philadelphia. From what I gather, it was a little warm. The 'stache kept melting off, so instead of makeup in some scenes they had to use foam latex and glue. Due to budget issues, they had to start buying cheaper, thicker latex, which is why in some scenes the mustache looks 3-dimensional. Nick Gregario, who played Harris, is listed as the Foam Latex Mustache Engineer in the end credits.

For the most part they stuck to the script, but a few scenes were smooshed together and others were added after filming started. The scene between Harris and Grams that I mentioned above, for instance, was filmed when they had a spare minute in between shots of the birthday party.

Many, many thanks to Ben and Eric for coming out and talking to us, and to the Rowan Honors Film Series for sponsoring this event.