By Stephen Tringali
I took these photos a little while ago now, when Mission of Burma came to the Black Cat to play their seminal post-punk album, Vs., the entire way through. Definitely my best concert experience of this summer.
By Stephen Tringali
Black & White Jacksons closed last Thursday’s Fort Reno show with an excellent performance. Here are a few pictures from the evening.
By Stephen Tringali
Yesterday, I finally managed to catch a summer show at Fort Reno. Here are some photos of John Wayne Hero, one of the three bands playing that evening.
By Lindsay Zoladz
This summer I’m working at a program at my university that teaches communications courses to high school students. Last Saturday night, the good folks at AFI were kind enough to give us passes to attend the screening of American Teen at their Silverdocs festival. American Teen was one of the most talked-about darlings of Sundance this year, and it’s getting ready for a relatively wide release. Needless to say, those of us involved in scheduling events for the students were all pretty pumped to see it. The kids, however, were skeptical.
When I went to pick them up at the dorm, one of the students glared at me and said, “This is going to be one of those movies that is like, ‘all teens are really destructive and terrible,’ isn’t it?” Sniffing out the air of dissent, a few others chimed in. “I watched the trailer online. It looks stupid.” I tried my best to quell a mutiny that seemed almost inevitable, as Kung Fu Panda had opened only a day before. “Well, we already bought the tickets,” I shrugged. Somehow, that worked. We were off, but nobody seemed too happy about it.
We arrived just on time to the AFI Silver Theater (hands down my favorite place to see a movie in the entire DC area), which stands like a glowing beacon in a turbid sea of Red Lobster and Panera that is “downtown” Silver Spring, Maryland. The kids began to let their guards down a bit, impressed by the size of the theater and swept up in the hubbub of SilverDocs. But they really came full cirlce once the film started. I could tell immediately that they were into it; they laughed at all the jokes and booed almost any time Megan, the spoiled prom queen archetype, appeared on screen. (At one point, when Megan was fretting about how her SAT scores had only gone up 70 points, one of our kids yelled out, “Oh, your life is so hard.” I mean, we were all thinking it.)
American Teen is being advertised with a poster that cleverly apes The Breakfast Club, even using the same tagline as John Hughes’ iconic ode to teen-dom. It’s an incredibly smart ad campaign, because it deflects the film’s biggest criticism up front. American Teen isn’t breaking any new ground, and it doesn’t pretend for a second that it is. It’s just one more take on an age that has always fascinated filmmakers, only this time it is seen through the lens of text messages and Facebook profiles. And although the methods might be different (the bullying of the John Hughes era certainly did not know the particular sting of having your nude photos passed around the internet), the cataclysmic feelings of teenage love, aspiration and heartbreak are all too familiar.
I’ll admit that I, like the kids, was a little apprehensive about the film at first too. After all, in a culture saturated with reality TV, the premise of the film seems pretty banal. I expected it to be a glorified episode of MTV’s Made. And in some ways, it is. In the end, American Teen doesn’t really come to any conclusions on life that are any grander than the scope of its small town high school world. But it doesn’t need to. Director Nanette Burstein engrosses you so completely in the world of these kids that you cannot even believe that there could be something out there more heart-poundingly glorious than being asked out by Mitch or more catastrophic than waiting in vain for him to call you back.
Everybody in the group was, like myself, totally swept up in the film. So much so that when one of its subjects, Hannah Bailey (the one that the ad campaign has fashioned into the Ally Sheedy of the bunch), turned out to be the surprise guest in the audience and went up to do a Q & A after the screening, we were acting a little bit like she was a bona fide movie star.
On the Metro ride home, I turned to our standard method of evaluating the evening’s activity: the gladiator-style thumbs up or thumbs down. To my pleasant surprise, I was met with twelve hearty thumbs up, and one that was pensively teetering at at 45-degree angle between up and halfway-up. I considered this a tremendous success. The only universal complaint was that the kids said they’d seen the “small town” angle pulled so many times and would have liked to seen the same story in a more urban environment. Still, in the discussion that the film generated, we were all able to agree on one simple truth: it is never Ok to break up with someone via text message. Thanks, American Teen.
By Stephen Tringali
Earlier this summer, I stumbled upon some concert photos I took at various shows last year. I thought I’d post a few of them online. Enjoy.
Aqueduct
Black Lips
Youth Group
The Ponys
By Stephen Tringali
For my final critique in Fine Arts photo, I decided to transform a story I had written earlier this year into a short film that is very much inspired by the Chris Marker short “La Jetee.” The inspiration, though, comes from the format in which Marker works, not necessarily the story he relates. This format utilizes a series of photographs, along with a running monologue and minor sound effects, to tell a story.
I shot the photographs using 3200 black and white film, which was shot and processed at 1600. This gives the photographs both a grainer look and a higher contrast. I used some props, but only enough to convey the storyline. The real element of interest here, however, is the location. Those of you whom I share a hometown with may recognize it.
By Stephen Tringali
Joe Lally, former bassist for the D.C.-based post-punk/post-hardcore band Fugazi, played the Black Cat backstage this past Wednesday in support of his most recent solo effort, Nothing Is Underrated. He was accompanied by Jonathan Morris (guitar) and Ricardo Lagomasino (drums). Boston-based Glorytellers provided a brief set before Lally went on stage.
Joe Lally
Glorytellers
By Stephen Tringali
Here is the rough cut of our very latest short, “Freak Scene.” Please leave us any feedback, especially considering elements that can be manipulated in post-production. Also, feel free to suggest any titles. Some friends, whose names will not be mentioned on this blog, have expressed great distaste over the current title. We hope to have the final cut completed by the end of the summer.
As usual, the short is split into two videos, the top one being part one and the bottom being part two. Enjoy.
By Stephen Tringali
Here are a few production stills that were taken by John Arturo’s mom during the couple days we shot at James Madison High School. The short, tentatively (but probably not) entitled “Freak Scene,” will be up on the blog in the next week, so watch out for it.
By Lindsay Zoladz
People who don’t like David Gordon Green’s films seem to dismiss them by branding them all “pretentious,” but it’s hard to imagine anyone trying to make that charge stick to his next project, the upcoming Judd Apatow-produced stoner flick Pineapple Express.
Even if Pineapple Express turns out to be less than amazing, (which, judging by the trailer, seems impossible), DGG should be applauded for stepping out of his comfort zone, which is something that a lot of other talented young directors seem unable to do right now (Wes, I love you, but seriously). If you have 89 minutes to spare while you’re waiting for the film’s August release, you might as well check out Green’s gorgeous debut feature, George Washington, made when he was just another 25-year-old kid coming out of art school and hyped up on Terrence Malick.
George Washington follows a group of kids as they wander listlessly around their crumbling North Carolina town, exploring abandoned buildings and hotwiring cars. The film is filtered through the consciousness of the kids, and so the things that matter to them (like 13-year-old Buddy’s break-up with his girlfriend) are the major plot points of the film. Everything changes, though, when the kids become tangled up in a fatal accident, and they each find themselves coping with the situation in their own ways.
Nasia’s poetic but childlike narration and Tim Orr’s hypnotic and stunning cinematography draw obvious parallels to Malick’s Days of Heaven. But while Malick’s protagonist was a young girl coming of age in a decidedly adult environment, Green places the viewer almost exclusively in the kids’ world. The adults in the film are big, lumbering figures, characterized more like myths than actual people. In the opening voiceover, Nasia says, “The grown-ups in my town, they were never kids like me and my friends.” And although this chasm is always apparent, some of the most beautiful scenes in the movie are the rare moments when the adult world and the kids’ world bleed into each other.
All of the kids in the film are black except for Sonya (a blonde-haired little ragamuffin who is there throughout all the kids’ adventures even though she can’t be more than 9), but Green doesn’t make an issue of race at all. As someone points out on IMDB, “the film has been made and written so that every single character could be black or white, and none of the dialogue or storyline would need to be changed.” There’s something very refreshing about it. A different screenwriter might strain to find racial tensions in the town, bring them to a boil and exploit them for some big dramatic conflict, but Green isn’t interested in doing that. Instead, he paints an intimate and moving portrait of camaraderie in a small town that is struggling just to hold itself together.
The ending is ambiguous, and the film doesn’t really come to any conclusions, or at least not the kind of gift-wrapped morals that some viewers might expect. This is not that kind of a movie, and it never tries to be. Although there are moments when the acting falls a little short or the dialogue feels a bit stilted, on the whole George Washington is a beautiful, affecting film. Like Malick’s best films, it unfolds like a dream—albeit a slightly disturbing one.
(Image courtesy of glennkenny.premiere.com)
