Movies: Around the Bay
Jul. 1st, 2009 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deirdreNow that local indie filmmaker Alejandro Adams is featured on the cover of this week's SJ Metro, it's probably time I should review his movie Around the Bay.
Rick and I went to see it a couple of weeks ago, driving across the bay to Fremont's Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum to see it. I told Rick that the director would be there, and Rick said, "Don't tell me, let me guess -- he's speaking." Funny man.
I had no expectations other than it was a feature-length film made for no money and that it had been selected in the past for Cinequest. It's about a broken family, and the descriptions sounded like a picture that was typically Not My Thing. However, I'd been following him on Twitter, and he sounded interesting, and interesting people tend to make interesting movies, so what the heck.
When I say it was made for no money, let me be clear: a lot of people say no money when they mean several million dollars. This movie was made for the sunk cost of a camera, Adobe Premiere, and the actual cost of crew lunches.
I haven't seen a lot of truly low-budget indie films, seeing mostly those that are big enough to get into theatres (I've been trying to change that). So I'm way out of touch with what's going on at the film festivals and lower-end of the indie budget.
However, I had just seen Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience and that did help me prepare for watching AtB. TGE is essentially loosely scripted and improvised, with Soderbergh giving information about what he wanted accomplished in each scene, but the acting was done by people who weren't actors (except for Sasha Grey in the lead role) but who were people in similar life roles. Adams chose actors, but you still get the feel that some of what's happening is fluid.
Soderbergh took two weeks to film TGE, and thus tended to use master shots (a distance shot that encompasses all the action in the scene) to minimize lighting set-up time. He used almost all natural lighting, which is possible with digital video in a way that isn't with film. AtB used a lot of close-ups.
Both films have an emotional distance. In TGE, you can feel that she's one step removed, distant from everything about her life except her relationship to money. In AtB, you get the distinct emotional distance of the father from everyone around him, and how it is so pervasive that it begins to affect the first degree relationships too. The interesting thing is that Adams is so able to create this distance largely through close-ups, generally used for increased intimacy.
There were some issues I had with the film, and they were the director's choices: there were periods of no sound, which I found distracting, and non-sync sound (e.g. where an actor was speaking over a shot of them not speaking). Both break the cinematic illusion for me. Soderbergh does non-sync sound too sometimes, and it doesn't work for me when he does it either.
Because so much was closeups, sometimes the film would cut from one closeup in one scene to a different one in another scene in a way that felt jarring, and sometimes the timing felt a tidge off. However, since I haven't exactly been producing my own movies, I'll call the last a minor gripe.
In a non-directorial sense, I'm also really accustomed to the high contrast of film, and so the lower-contrast of AtB's video meant I noticed that issue from time to time. TGE was shot with a RedOne digital video camera, but those aren't free. Yet.
Overall, Around the Bay is a remarkable film about a broken family and the attempts to keep it together.
However, I haven't gotten to what really really impressed me about Around the Bay: I've never seen anyone capture an out of control child on film so remarkably well. I've lived in that family, I've seen that child, and the film gave me some clarity on what had happened now that I'd had time and distance.
For me, a great film is one that offers insight into my own life or the life of those around me. Around the Bay is one of those films. It took a while to write about it because it was cathartic and I needed to think about it separate from the catharsis.
Rick and I went to see it a couple of weeks ago, driving across the bay to Fremont's Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum to see it. I told Rick that the director would be there, and Rick said, "Don't tell me, let me guess -- he's speaking." Funny man.
I had no expectations other than it was a feature-length film made for no money and that it had been selected in the past for Cinequest. It's about a broken family, and the descriptions sounded like a picture that was typically Not My Thing. However, I'd been following him on Twitter, and he sounded interesting, and interesting people tend to make interesting movies, so what the heck.
When I say it was made for no money, let me be clear: a lot of people say no money when they mean several million dollars. This movie was made for the sunk cost of a camera, Adobe Premiere, and the actual cost of crew lunches.
I haven't seen a lot of truly low-budget indie films, seeing mostly those that are big enough to get into theatres (I've been trying to change that). So I'm way out of touch with what's going on at the film festivals and lower-end of the indie budget.
However, I had just seen Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience and that did help me prepare for watching AtB. TGE is essentially loosely scripted and improvised, with Soderbergh giving information about what he wanted accomplished in each scene, but the acting was done by people who weren't actors (except for Sasha Grey in the lead role) but who were people in similar life roles. Adams chose actors, but you still get the feel that some of what's happening is fluid.
Soderbergh took two weeks to film TGE, and thus tended to use master shots (a distance shot that encompasses all the action in the scene) to minimize lighting set-up time. He used almost all natural lighting, which is possible with digital video in a way that isn't with film. AtB used a lot of close-ups.
Both films have an emotional distance. In TGE, you can feel that she's one step removed, distant from everything about her life except her relationship to money. In AtB, you get the distinct emotional distance of the father from everyone around him, and how it is so pervasive that it begins to affect the first degree relationships too. The interesting thing is that Adams is so able to create this distance largely through close-ups, generally used for increased intimacy.
There were some issues I had with the film, and they were the director's choices: there were periods of no sound, which I found distracting, and non-sync sound (e.g. where an actor was speaking over a shot of them not speaking). Both break the cinematic illusion for me. Soderbergh does non-sync sound too sometimes, and it doesn't work for me when he does it either.
Because so much was closeups, sometimes the film would cut from one closeup in one scene to a different one in another scene in a way that felt jarring, and sometimes the timing felt a tidge off. However, since I haven't exactly been producing my own movies, I'll call the last a minor gripe.
In a non-directorial sense, I'm also really accustomed to the high contrast of film, and so the lower-contrast of AtB's video meant I noticed that issue from time to time. TGE was shot with a RedOne digital video camera, but those aren't free. Yet.
Overall, Around the Bay is a remarkable film about a broken family and the attempts to keep it together.
However, I haven't gotten to what really really impressed me about Around the Bay: I've never seen anyone capture an out of control child on film so remarkably well. I've lived in that family, I've seen that child, and the film gave me some clarity on what had happened now that I'd had time and distance.
For me, a great film is one that offers insight into my own life or the life of those around me. Around the Bay is one of those films. It took a while to write about it because it was cathartic and I needed to think about it separate from the catharsis.