Greta Gerwig, left, as Frances and Mickey Sumner, as Sophie, play-fight in a scene from the film, “Frances Ha.” Independent Film Channel photos
It’s not hard in the first minutes of Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” to feel we’ve popped up in some episode of “Girls” — if was directed by Francois Truffaut. Here we have the New York setting, the trust fundies living three to an apartment, the casual and blunt sexual talk from 20-something women, and even an appearance from Adam Driver. But as “Frances Ha” continues, we get something more idiosyncratic and charming.
Written in collaboration with its star, mumblecore doyen Greta Gerwig, “Frances Ha” charts its 27-year-old protagonist as she gets dumped by her best friend and has to figure out what to do with her life.
Several months ago, Brad Nack brought four abstract artists to MichaelKate Interiors, each dealing in their own way with topography. After that, another quartet dealt with flight and birds. But this month’s exhibition, “Bright Lines and the Void” (through June 30), complicates matters further with a disparate selection of paintings from four vastly different artists. Thomas Van Stein’s nocturnal landscapes; John Carlander’s bold abstracts; Hilary Baker’s enigmatic yet representational work; and Norman Lundin’s witty realism — this is a conversation between four distinct personalities, and like a great dinner party, it’s worth sitting in and checking out what comes up.
Mr. Lundin comes from the grey climes of Seattle and you can see it in his paintings, as if somebody had told Edward Hopper to tone down the color and get the people out of the room. These are interiors and exteriors (sometimes both, seen through windows) honoring still moments on endless overcast and wet days. I say witty, because check out “Sun Break, Studio” which only shows its sun through a thin strip of light that defines the shadows on the window sill. The rest, from our perspective, is yet another gloomy, almost smoky day, looking out across the landscape in search of a horizon. These are the funereal rooms of Tarkovsky and Bergman, where time has slowed down, crawled, and given up. On the other hand, the entropy is so finely rendered that the paintings energize in a perverse way.
For a man who despised Los Angeles, John Lautner created some of the grandest versions of modernist architecture in the city, buildings and private homes that bring back the space-age future of the ’50s, yet also were all specifically built to fit into their surroundings, not stick out from it. In this recent documentary, “Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner,” that closes off UCSB Arts & Lectures’ Art Architecture series, Mr. Lautner’s life is traced through loving explorations of his surviving work.
Mr. Lautner’s own voice drops in here and there to occasionally elucidate the history of a home, and his accent and tone is classic Midwestern, clipped, efficient, nasal. It’s the voice of a man who devoted his life to work, and we hear anecdotes of hours, sometimes days spent looking at a topographical property map before a sudden flurry of sketching and creation.
‘Portrait of Wally/Egon Schiele Seventh Art Releasing photo
Portrait of Wally” is less about the man who painted it — Viennese wunderkind Egon Schiele — than it is about the trail of the work’s owners. The fascinating tale is one of betrayal, ownership, and the clash between public cultural institutions and private collections.
Schiele’s sometimes graphic portraits — of mistresses, models and wives — embody the decadence of 1920s Vienna, with plenty of nudity. They embody a battle between voluptuousness and brittleness, indulgent in sexuality but keenly aware of the constantly dying frame carrying this flesh around. It’s the kind of progressive fun upended so easily by the evil of the Nazis.
What a mother!” says one of the survivors in the Holocaust documentary “No Place on Earth.” Part of a two-family group that survived underground for a year and a half until the Russians defeated the Nazis, this mother, along with uncles and brothers, were extraordinarily resilient. Pure chance also plays its part, which is one of the still scary musings to take from the history of the Holocaust.
Moving at a swift 80 minutes, “No Place on Earth” begins in modern times with Chris Nicola, an amateur spelunker and New Yorker, traveling to the Ukraine to search for his Eastern Orthodox heritage and take in some of the world’s largest gypsum caves. Inside these deep, deep caves accessible through tiny crevices and crawl spaces he finds traces of human habitation from decades, but not centuries, past: pieces of metal, shoes, names written on walls. Nobody in these backwater villages wants to talk, but he soon hears rumors of the “Jews in the cave” from World War II.
Now that “The Artist” demonstrated that audiences could not only sit still for a silent movie, but could also entertain and win Oscars, getting another silent film funded, shot and distributed got that much easier. And by “that much,” I mean better than zero percent. Fortunately, the Spanish feature “Blancanieves” makes for a worthy addition to this sub-genre of retrofilm, in some ways a response to the death of celluloid and the dominance of the digital image. In several shots in Pablo Berger’s film, there was a hair in the gate, down in the left hand corner, a shocking reminder that this feature is indeed shot of the preferred medium of the 20th century.
The story, however, is straight out of the Brothers Grimm, as it is a Seville-based retelling of “Snow White,” with nods to Disney’s classic retelling. But it is also modern, feminist, and decidedly Spanish tale.
Henry Alex Rubin’s “Disconnect” opened this year’s Santa Barbara International Film Festival, a screening that seems so very far away from the film now returning to theaters. Admittedly, it was one of the better opening movies in the year of the fest, boasting recognizable names and a contemporary setting. And it was definitely a step up from “Darling Companion,” the previous year’s film about a couple searching for a dog. But outside the context of the evening, with the excitement hanging in the air like ozone over a beach, “Disconnect” is all a bit much of a muchness.
A woe-is-us worryfest about the evils of technology, Andrew Stern’s script gives us three stories and interweaves them later in the film. With its po-faced moralizing, it’s reminiscent of Paul Haggis’ drippy “Crash,” but with iPads, which itself was an attempt to reinvent Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” (which took its inspiration from Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts”).
Lautner broke from the Frank Lloyd Wright school of architecture and created some of the 20th century’s most dramatic spaces: from L.A.’s Chemosphere to the Elrod House in Palm Springs. This doc follows his history and vision.
UCSB’s Art/Architecture series was such a hit last year that it has returned for another mini-season of documentaries. There’s a shorter timeline (this Sunday through May 19) and only four films but plenty to mull over this year. Full reviews will continue throughout the series.
A hit in its native Canada, the French-language comedy “Starbuck” is already set for a Hollywood remake featuring Vince Vaughn, and it’s easy to see why in its opening minutes. The shlubby, scruffy but good-hearted David Wozniak (Patrick Huard) seems more a Paul Rudd than a Vince Vaughn, to be honest, but his best friend and part-time lawyer Avocat (Antoine Bertrand) is definitely the Seth Rogan/Jonah Hill role.
The setup too, is very Judd Apatow: Back when David was a 20-something slacker, he donated sperm at $35 a pop over 500 times. Through some screw-up that only exists in films, the sperm bank used every single donation, and now there’s over 500 young adults wanting to meet the man who only used the nickname “Starbuck” as identification.
This earnest documentary should be proceeded by the famous quote by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” The “something” director, narrator, and occasional star Craig Scott Rosebraugh is talking about is climate change, or as someone recently renamed it, climate chaos. And you know the Koch brothers: the salary can be huge.
With a title like “Greedy Lying Bastards,” one could expect an angry tirade against the control oil and energy companies have over our climate and politics. In fact, that would have been preferable to this documentary, which is honestly a bit of a mess, regardless of whether you agree with its ideology.
