In her review of artist Brock Enright’s 2007 multi-media exhibition Good Times Will Never Be the Same, New York Times critic Roberta Smith summed up her somewhat bemused pan with a general statement of disapproval for the image under which Enright has molded himself, as a kind of bad boy trafficking in the surreal aesthetics of fear. “Mr. Enright’s art has more energy and ideas than clarity or purposefulness,” Smith wrote. “It is also trailed by debts — to Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelly, The Blair Witch Project and Stanley Kubrick for starters — that need to be sorted through. In the process he might examine his faith in mess for mess’s sake.” This faith of Enright’s propels Jody Lee Lipes’ documentary on the creation of that art show, Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same, which premiered at SXSW and won a special jury prize for cinematography at the Sarasota Film Festival (full disclosure: I was on the jury that gave the film a special award for cinematography). Enright’s faith that if he makes it, he’ll be able to sell it –– regardless of what “it” is –– creates an expectation of an resolution which, ultimately, Lipes backs away from playing into. He’s more interested in how his subject’s endless faith in mess, and the increasingly unacceptable methods which feed into it, is both seductive and destructive in his personal relationships.
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Last week, I sat on the Documentary Competition Jury at the Sarasota Film Festival. The lineup was extraordinarily strong, and my fellow jurors and I found something to admire about most of the eight films on the slate. In the end, we gave the grand prize (which included a DVD/VOD/Educational/Television and “first look” theatrical offer from First Run Features, as well as a guaranteed slot on the Fall 2009 lineup of Stranger Than Fiction at the IFC Center in NY) to Ben Steinbauer’s Winnebago Man, and a special cinematography award to Jody Lee Lipes, the director and camera operator of Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same. I’ll write about the winning films individually as they continue their travels on the festival circuit. Below the jump, some notes on the other six films in competition.
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Jody Lee Lipes, cinematographer of Antonio Campos‘ Afterschool, makes his feature length directorial debut with the SXSW Emerging Visions selection Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same, a beautifully shot doc about an artist struggling to maintain a somewhat normal domestic relationship while producing a half-baked, largely inscrutable but still vaguely offensive installation for a New York gallery. Below the jump, check out the film’s trailer, as well as Lipes’ answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone.
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