Big sister is watching – eavesdropping, border patrol, the usual
Jacqueline Marque (gal pal photographer extraordinaire) and I enjoy perfect breakfast burritos at that new place Bliss Grocer and Café on Broadway and Bliss (where people still go in and angrily try to get mocha cakes thinking the old bakery is still there). The rest of their menu looks so good we think about going back for lunch and dinner. Highly recommend.
Entertaining conversation abounds before my first screening today. There are teenagers scattered throughout the audibly leaking theater and I wonder if they’ll be shouting to each other for the next hour and a half. (I also wonder if the Opera House won that ebay auction I so angrily lost for that six-sphere hanging swag lamp).
GIRL (to boy in back): You smell mold? Go and get some and look at it under a microscope.
BOY (in response to pre-movie onscreen messages): What are Jujubes?
GIRL: You hear that WATER? Somebody should TELL somebody.
MAN: When I go to Toronto I see seventy films in seven days. It’s an emotional rollercoaster.
LADY: I hope everybody stops talking.
I’m checking out two feature-length (roughly) films this afternoon at the Opera House. Laura Richard’s short “Breach,” playing before “The Other Side,” is a moving personal account of a very pregnant woman struggling to decide whether to cross from Mexico into the United States. The actress’ physicality is such that by the sheer force of her moving those little legs, lurching around with that bursting belly on an American golf course, the viewer becomes committed. Her husband sneaks to meets her but has no papers and is escorted away before the birth.
GIRL: Why they taking that guy away?
“The Other Side” is not quite as successful or evocative as “Breach” – forty-six minutes of landscape and long neighborhood shots of Texas and Mexico, sometimes penetrated by the filmmaker himself, running in and out, bopping, similar to how I’ve seen several art schoolboys dance to They Might Be Giants. His voice, which seems to annoy many people in the audience, accompanies the film throughout, and I have to admit, even though my love for well-meaning art schoolboys is vast, I find myself drifting off.
When filmmaker Bill Brown briefly gives up the microphone to other people, the film comes alive. We learn more in the five minutes that an expert speaks about how the border has been for all intents and purposes moved out of sight, to the desert, and what the authorities consider justified “collateral damage,” than we do during the whole rest of the film.
Bill Brown does have some interesting, quirky, fantastical things to say about the nature of immigration. He describes a house burning right over the border in Mexico and says he can’t help thinking that it knows exactly what it is doing, transforming itself to cross the border. All of the border patrol with a whole bunch of vacuums can’t possibly contain it and send it back where it belongs, he muses. But his interest feels peripheral because it is – he is very obviously on a road trip with a camera.
The film fades out.
BOY: Thank GOD.
LADY (with a strong sigh of relief): Oh, thank GOD. I reviewed [inaudible] and I can’t believe they got through the whole thing after hearing his annoying voice for more than [inaudible].
Damn. Poor filmmaker Bill Brown! Isn’t his obvious influence by Ira Glass and soft-palate lisp worth some endearment? Didn’t the people see? He bounced for us! Though, I suppose in a film about immigration no amount of bouncing can make up for a pervasive dryness not caused by the deserts filmed.
We trudge out of the theater and I try to nudge past them so I don’t miss too much of the beginning of “51 Birch Street” playing upstairs.
GIRL (pulling a Parliament out of her bomber jacket): The first one was good but that one just SUCKED.
Jacqueline Marque (gal pal photographer extraordinaire) and I enjoy perfect breakfast burritos at that new place Bliss Grocer and Café on Broadway and Bliss (where people still go in and angrily try to get mocha cakes thinking the old bakery is still there). The rest of their menu looks so good we think about going back for lunch and dinner. Highly recommend.
Entertaining conversation abounds before my first screening today. There are teenagers scattered throughout the audibly leaking theater and I wonder if they’ll be shouting to each other for the next hour and a half. (I also wonder if the Opera House won that ebay auction I so angrily lost for that six-sphere hanging swag lamp).
GIRL (to boy in back): You smell mold? Go and get some and look at it under a microscope.
BOY (in response to pre-movie onscreen messages): What are Jujubes?
GIRL: You hear that WATER? Somebody should TELL somebody.
MAN: When I go to Toronto I see seventy films in seven days. It’s an emotional rollercoaster.
LADY: I hope everybody stops talking.
I’m checking out two feature-length (roughly) films this afternoon at the Opera House. Laura Richard’s short “Breach,” playing before “The Other Side,” is a moving personal account of a very pregnant woman struggling to decide whether to cross from Mexico into the United States. The actress’ physicality is such that by the sheer force of her moving those little legs, lurching around with that bursting belly on an American golf course, the viewer becomes committed. Her husband sneaks to meets her but has no papers and is escorted away before the birth.
GIRL: Why they taking that guy away?
“The Other Side” is not quite as successful or evocative as “Breach” – forty-six minutes of landscape and long neighborhood shots of Texas and Mexico, sometimes penetrated by the filmmaker himself, running in and out, bopping, similar to how I’ve seen several art schoolboys dance to They Might Be Giants. His voice, which seems to annoy many people in the audience, accompanies the film throughout, and I have to admit, even though my love for well-meaning art schoolboys is vast, I find myself drifting off.
When filmmaker Bill Brown briefly gives up the microphone to other people, the film comes alive. We learn more in the five minutes that an expert speaks about how the border has been for all intents and purposes moved out of sight, to the desert, and what the authorities consider justified “collateral damage,” than we do during the whole rest of the film.
Bill Brown does have some interesting, quirky, fantastical things to say about the nature of immigration. He describes a house burning right over the border in Mexico and says he can’t help thinking that it knows exactly what it is doing, transforming itself to cross the border. All of the border patrol with a whole bunch of vacuums can’t possibly contain it and send it back where it belongs, he muses. But his interest feels peripheral because it is – he is very obviously on a road trip with a camera.
The film fades out.
BOY: Thank GOD.
LADY (with a strong sigh of relief): Oh, thank GOD. I reviewed [inaudible] and I can’t believe they got through the whole thing after hearing his annoying voice for more than [inaudible].
Damn. Poor filmmaker Bill Brown! Isn’t his obvious influence by Ira Glass and soft-palate lisp worth some endearment? Didn’t the people see? He bounced for us! Though, I suppose in a film about immigration no amount of bouncing can make up for a pervasive dryness not caused by the deserts filmed.
We trudge out of the theater and I try to nudge past them so I don’t miss too much of the beginning of “51 Birch Street” playing upstairs.
GIRL (pulling a Parliament out of her bomber jacket): The first one was good but that one just SUCKED.
posted by Jenn Sutkowski at 8:06 PM
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