Preston Miller’s Jones offers an outsider’s perspective on contemporary New York rarely seen on film, and almost never acknowledged by natives. As the camera tracks star Trey Albright strolling the streets in real time, through neon-overlit Times Square and streetlamp-orange midtown side streets, Miller transforms some of the most personality-devoid sections of the city into a kind of paradise of anonymity. Times Square may be a sanitized tourist trap to you and me, but in Jones, it’s a blank screen for an actual tourist’s fantasies of liberation.
Opening tomorrow night for a one-week run at the Pioneer Theater in New York, Jones is the kind of lo-fi, no budget, non-traditional narrative that, without the support of a festival like SXSW, has an extremely difficult time making waves. But Miller finds a few ingenious ways around his limitations, and the unprofessional look of the video is actually one of my favorite things about it. It’s shifty and unstable and, particularly in the eerie brightness it captures on real NYC streets, never film-like but often very pretty.
I’m not trying to be a full-time Anthology Film Archives promotion factory, but in addition to their aforementioned Minnelli festival, tonight the house that Jonas Mekas built is hosting a NewFilmakers program called NewFilmmakers Goes Frat which looks pretty great.
The program includes two films I’d like to see: Altered by Elvis, described as “a documentary feature about lives permanently affected by Elvis Presley,” and Jones, a feature about a young dad-to-be who visits New York on business and gets caught up in the world of Asian call girls. In a Reeler story posted earlier today, Jones director Preston Miller says Jones, which was made on a budget of “about $2,000″, is a testament to the fact that “to make a feature, you don’t have to have tons of money or even a little bit of money.” Judging by the trailer (embedded above), Miller got quite a bit of mileage out of leading man Trey Albright, who comes off as something like Matthew Perry, but with a personality.
For more info on this and future NewFilmmakers programs, check out their website.
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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