One of the most fascinating aspects of the DC Sniper case is how riveted the American public remained throughout the height of it, and how quickly that fascination dissipated once the fugitives were apprehended. Now, granted, a great deal of that had to do with an overwhelming sense of relief, particularly up and down the northeast corridor, where daily commuters feared they might literally be taking their own lives in their hands. But one might also argue there was a perverse sense of letdown involved, that once it was revealed who and what the killers actually were, it came as a disappointment.

I mean, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, a lone gunmen and his surrogate son … that certainly did not live up to the soldier-of-fortune/domestic-terrorist expectations the mass media had constructed. And yet, it was the damning-and-yet-tragic truth of the matter, a truth that offered very little in the way of epilogue.

I suppose that what I’m getting at here is that the heart of the story – the meat of the story, as it were – was primarily associated with the intense grip Muhammad and Malvo temporarily held over the entire DC metro area. Given the circumstances, one might imagine that writing an intriguing screenplay regarding the tragedy should have less to do with the shooters themselves and more to do with the massive sense of intrigue … the acute sense of both horror and suspense that it aroused.

And that may very well be where Alexandre Moors’ new Blue Caprice falls incontrovertibly short. The movie is well written (by Ronnie Porto), and it’s also commendably well-acted (Isaiah Washington is particularly noteworthy cast in the role of John Muhammad). But the problem with Caprice resides in what it’s missing altogether. And what it’s missing, for the most part, is the harrowing public aspect of that entire three-week period during October of 2002. Blue Caprice is much more of a dual character study, a slow descent into hysteria, if you will. But it leaves you asking the very same question the mainstream media found itself asking once Muhammad and Malvo were originally arrested: Isn’t there anything particularly interesting about the back story of these two?

The answer, both then and now, provides a perverse sense of disappointment.

(Blue Caprice opens in New York City today, with a staggered release starting in Los Angeles and Washington, DC next Friday.)  Continue reading →

Post-Katrina-radical-turned-FBI-informant Brandon Darby considers himself a patriot, but he identifies much more as a control junkie. This may have a direct correlation with the fact that Darby held so little sway over his own situation throughout childhood. He grew up a frustrated outsider from Pasadena, Texas – a 13-year old runaway who consequently began leaning toward anarchy.

What’s fascinating about Jamie Meltzer’s Informant is how effective it is at uncovering Darby’s motives. As a young adult, Darby became interested in precisely the type of bombastic – if not violent – activism that would land him in the papers. Following Katrina, he positioned himself right at the center of the media universe. When the buzz surrounding Katrina began to subside, Darby very quietly began to divorce himself, only to reemerge a year or so later, this time to help the FBI infiltrate a nascent cluster of similar activists. Once those activists were apprehended, Darby openly testified against them in court, once again splashing his name across the headlines.

Informant reveals Darby to be an unreliable – albeit captivating – narrator, one who has already renounced his entire ideology more than once. I mean, how can anyone really be expected to rely upon a guy who previously advocated for abolishing federal government, only to subsequently turn tails and become a government informant? The beauty of Meltzer’s film is that it never really forces you to take sides, nor does it deliver any type of overt indictment regarding Brandon Darby’s character. Nonetheless, it does leave you wondering why anyone might ever believe in Brandon Darby’s word again. And it also leaves you wondering whether anyone should really care about a person’s motives, assuming the greater good is being served.

(Informant will open at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center in New York and the Laemmle Noho Theater in Los Angeles on September 13, followed by additional screening dates around the country. As of this Friday, it will always be available via iTunes.)

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Years ago, when I was dedicating a lot more of my free time to writing music essays, I remember readily avoiding any head-on Springsteen think pieces, the reason being I was intimidated. I mean, I’d bounce around the fringes, sure, interviewing any number of industry people who existed in that universe – Ed Sciaky, Steven Van Zandt, Dave & Serge Bielanko, Alejandro Escovedo (just to name a few). But I never really had the guts to zero in on Bruce. This despite – or perhaps as a result of – the fact I had always kind of revered the guy.

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“If you have a fucking clue and a passion, people will get out of
your way because people want someone to follow.”

“The rucksack sits hopefully in a strewn mess of bottles all empty, empty poorboys of white port, butts, junk, horror … ‘One fast move or I’m gone,’ I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can’t learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimism you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca you drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with – that feeling when you wake up with the delirium tremens, with the fear of eerie death dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobwebs spiders weave in the hot countries, the feeling of being a bentback mudman monster groaning underground in hot steaming mud pulling a long hot burden nowhere, the feeling of standing ankle deep in hot boiled pork blood, ugh, of being up to your waist in a giant pan of greasy brown dishwater not a trace of suds left in it – the face of yourself you see in the mirror with its expression of unbearable anguish so haggard and awful with sorrow you can’t even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection whatever with early perfection, and therefore nothing to connect with tears or anything.”

It’s a dicey proposition, sponsoring an exhibition that documents any type of natural disaster, especially a recent one. Perhaps more so than anything else, curators need to maintain a vital balance between honor and integrity, avoiding the constant pitfalls of sensationalism. By their nature, these types of exhibitions are based around a situation which irretrievably shook – or perhaps even took – a certain number of lives. The last thing any well-meaning advocate needs is to come off like some asshole selling 8 1/2 x 11s along the fringes of Ground Zero.

The good news is, Rising Waters – co-curated by The International Center of Photography and The Museum of The City of New York – is both respectful and appropriate. Housed in an old and blighted building with cracked paint peeling the walls, every photo appears naked, without frames, fanfare or density. Every print is affixed using thumbtacks, black-marker scrawl providing slight context in the margin. It’s a bare-bones approach indicative of the fact that something dear was stripped away here, that wasting money on production flies in the face of mass awareness, that those interested in spending cash on a print should just as soon donate that money toward rebuilding.

The bottom line: It’s an exhibition well worth seeing. Hop the ferry. Take the ride.

(Rising Waters: Photos of Hurricane Sandy will be on view at Governors Island Saturdays and Sundays, 12–6 pm throughout September, and on Labor Day, September 2. Free.)

Five More For The Offing: 

• Sculptures & Prints by Ken Price @ Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl (Free, through 9/7, 535 West 24th Street, 4th Floor)
• Mr. Chips to Scarface: Walter White’s Transformation on Breaking Bad @ Museum of The Moving Image ($12 general admission, through 10/27, 36-01 35 Avenue @ 37th Street, Astoria, Queens)
• Something about a Tree featuring various artists @ The FLAG Art Foundation (Free, through 9/7, 525 West 25th Street, 9th Floor)
• Smoke Paintings by Rosemarie Fiore @ Von Lintel Gallery (Free, 9/5-10/19, 520 West 23rd Street)
• Paintings & Belt Buckles by Cary Leibowitz @ Invisible-Exports (Free, 9/6-10/13, 89 Eldridge Street)

Click through for full-size gallery.

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“It’s cool to go places where working people are happy.”

Click through for full-size gallery.

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OK, so there’s this house, see, and it’s like waaaaay out in the wilderness, right? I mean like sooooo far out that you can’t even get, like, cell phone service or internet access, y’dig? And so, then there’s, like, this tight-knit circle of people, right, and they’re all like friends or maybe even like a … like a … like a group of college students or something. And so what it is is that they’ve all kind of, like, agreed to, like … like travel all the way out to this remote destination for, like a, like a … like a quiet getaway weekend or some such. Only what they don’t know – what nobody knows – is that there’s this unspeakable fucking evil right out there in the midst of all this with them … some unknown quantity, say, that almost definitely seeks to split their ranks and swallow them whole. All of ’em. Every single goddamn one. Kill those motherfuckers! Skin ’em raw! Reign in blood! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

We’re all familiar with this type of thing, correct? I mean, it’s the essential combination that made movies like Psycho and The Shining and Friday the 13th and Halloween and The Blair Witch Project and April Fool’s Day and The Strangers and Silent House and Cabin In The Woods entirely possible (if not consistently plausible). Hell, I’d even go so far as to say it’s the one essential ingredient that put the final hour of Jaws completely over the top. Spielberg himself made a point of insisting that the Orca never be shot with any hint of Martha’s Vineyard in the background. Land meant civilization. Civilization meant safe harbor. Safe harbor meant no shark. No shark meant those three fuckers on the Orca were no longer in a tizzy. And so there was no land shot in the backdrop. And you know what? It worked. It absolutely fucking worked. As a matter of fact it worked so well that Jaws went on to become not only a classic staple of both the Drama and the Horror genres, but also the highest grossing motion picture of all-time (right up until Star Wars).

So goes the story with You’re Next – a much-smaller-yet-equally welcome addition to the horror/suspense genre that relies almost entirely upon an age-old formula in order to keep the adrenaline flowing. Here we find a dysfunctional family wrought with an engaging back story. We find an enviable balance between heightened tension and gallows humor. We find enough to love and fear that it keeps the well from running dry. And, all things considered, we find just about everything else any movie fan could ask for in a low-budget thriller of this order.

What’s more, we find a breakout star – a virtual unknown in the hallowed tradition of Nightmare on Elm Street’s Johnny Depp or Halloween‘s Jamie Lee. In this case, it’s a 30-year old Aussie beaut by the name of Sharni Vinson. From the moment she appears on-screen, she’s the only character that you can actually see yourself investing in (let alone rooting for), which – in turn – makes her almost indispensable to the plot.

There’s more, of course. There’s the fact that this film has virtually been sitting on a shelf since its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September of 2011. There’s the fact that it includes various nods to John Carpenter’s Halloween (not to mention A Nightmare on Elm Street and even Black Sabbath). But rather than ruin anything by delving into details, I’ll simply go on record as saying You’re Next is a highly entertaining, utterly suspenseful, unrepentantly gory good time at the movies. Believe it or not, that type of motion picture is incredibly rare these days (Take a look at the critical response to this summer’s top 10 blockbusters for further evidence of this). I recommend that you go see it in theaters, preferably at a cinema where the in-house management will all but force you to keep from playing with your cell phone. In fact, why not just go watch it at a big ole’ house way out in the middle of nowhere. Better yet, invite a bunch of friends out there to enjoy the movie with you. Have yourself a goddamn weekender, why don’t cha? What’s the worst thing that could happen?

(You’re Next opens in theaters nationwide today.)  

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