Vadim Rizov is a free-lance writer operating out of Brooklyn. He contributes to The Village Voice, Sight & Sound, The Onion AV Club, The House Next Door and other publications on a semi-regular basis. He is still searching for a decent Tex-Mex restaurant in New York and/or gainful employment.
This review was originally published during the 2009 SXSW Film Festival. Died Young, Stayed Pretty opens in New York today at the IFC Center. There is also an opening party tonight at the 92Y Tribeca.
I’ve hung out with enough graphic design nerds to know how tedious their fetish can be to the unconverted, and the [...]
Youssou N’dour: I Bring What I Love was shown at SXSW in a 35mm print. Director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi announced she’d brought it with her having last shown it in Burkina Faso three weeks ago, and it showed the wear-and-tear of having only one print to go around for a year: it was scratchy during [...]
Documentaries about musicians gravitate towards dysfunction, because that’s how you get drama into documentaries and most musicians — especially in bands, where too much time spent together yields unnatural tensions — seem to be pretty dramatic anyway. So it’s curious that both Anvil!: The Story Of Anvil and Iron Maiden: Flight 666 played at SXSW, [...]
Peter Gibson is a modest guy in Montreal who didn’t think of himself as an artist when he started spray-painting stencils on the street; he just had inchoate notions about public space and was fueled by a post-9/11 desire to enter what seemed like a new era of discussion — about, seemingly, everything, but never [...]
Being a humorless young man, I’m driven crazy by people who actively seek out bad movies for fun; it seems like that’s a way of avoiding engaging with good art, where the correct response isn’t always obvious. So I was nervous about Best Worst Movie, whose title tells it all. Voted worst film of all [...]
It’s heartening that 45365 won Best Documentary at SXSW; Severe Clear is ultimately stronger, but 45365 is the only doc I saw that took any formal risks. The first five minutes made me think I was looking at the doc of the year, let alone the fest.
First the opening shot, repeated several times, a stream [...]
Sweethearts Of The Prison Rodeo is precisely the kind of documentary SXSW must stop showing. In the dark, pre-mumblecore days, when the festival’s mission was pretty amorphous, SXSW premiered Spellbound. Maybe the most financially successful film ever to launch at SXSW, it came with a dark price: any number of soul-sucking, would-be uplifting documentaries in [...]
I’ve hung out with enough graphic design nerds to know how tedious their fetish can be to the unconverted, and the options for a documentary about rock posters seemed to be either that kind of geekery or hipster hagiography. “Culture is that thing you shovel out of your window in the evening,” interviewee Mike King [...]
There’s the SXSW of indie premieres, and then there’s the stuff the fanboys come for; the home of Ain’t It Cool News and the Alamo Drafthouse has an understandably enthusiastic place in its slate for midnight gorefests. So relax fanboys: Sam Raimi’s “work-in-progress” screening of May 29’s Drag Me To Hell (missing ambient sound and [...]
Severe Clear is the Iraq documentary I’ve been awaiting conscientiously if not eagerly. There certainly hasn’t been a shortage of retrospective examinations from a position of authority - e.g. the macrocosmic No End In Sight and the microfocused Standard Operating Procedure - or, in lesser quantities, on-the-ground reportage. The best-known of those is probably 2004’s [...]
Robert Blecker is a professor at New York Law School, best-known for being one of the most active public proponents for the death penalty. He’s a retributivist who likes to quote Socrates and the law of Solon when arguing the death penalty isn’t just a judicial but a moral imperative, just retribution for the worst [...]
Upon its Russian release in 2007, Cargo 200 immediately provoked a national furor. Alexei Balabanov’s grim little movie centers around one Captain Zhurov (Alexei Poluyan), a police officer in 1984’s Soviet Russia who uses his position of authority to essentially institutionalize rape, prisoner beatings and all-round mayhem. In a typical scene, he tosses the corpse [...]
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We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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