Friday, April 25, 2014

FILM NEXUS Vol. 6: Teenage


While working on getting everything in order for Cinema Center’s premiere of the documentary “Teenage” tonight, I thought a lot about how important of a role films played in my life during those formative years. It was the first time I looked at filmmaking as a process that I could possibly learn, the behind-the-scenes commentary and documentaries were new special features on many DVDs, and I have to admit I learned almost as much from listening and watching those as I did the whole time I studied film in college.

The following films, all available on Netflix streaming, are not necessarily the best films of the era, but they are the films that opened my eyes the widest to the possibilities of film. After catching “Teenage” at Cinema Center this weekend, I strongly recommend going back to some of the favorite films of your adolescence. Here are mine:


Clerks (1994)
More than any movie from the 1990s independent film explosion, “Clerks” made me believe I could pick up a camera and make a feature-length film. Kevin Smith’s debut film about a day in the life of foul-mouthed convenience store clerks Dante and Randal was hilarious, as well as a call to action to filmmakers everywhere. The film showed that with the right characters in the right script, deficiencies in things like lighting, sound, and even camera movements could all be forgiven as long as the audience was entertained.


Pulp Fiction (1994)
Before it was cool to be nerdy, it was really not cool to be a film geek. That all changed when director Quentin Tarantino burst onto the independent film scene with his genre classic “Reservoir Dogs” in 1992, and suddenly movies were cool. However, it was Tarantino’s follow-up, “Pulp Fiction,” that I first saw a few years after it was released, when it felt like I was watching films from a master filmmaker. I watched “Pulp Fiction” pretty much on repeat for a summer, trying to understand all the intricate knots the story tied. For probably a decade after its release, its impact was felt with every edgy, crime film Hollywood released, but none came close to its ability to humanize, and offer possible redemption, to very bad men. In recent years, its influence has started to wane, but that will change as teens across the globe watch it for the first time and spend summers studying just what makes it so good.


Pi (1998)
When I was a teenager, I suffered from pretty severe headaches, and to a certain extent I still do. As a weird kid who stayed inside most days watching movies, I didn't really connect with anyone else who had this problem, but when I first watched “Pi,” I was convinced Darren Aronofsky understood it completely. His debut film is a story about a mathematician who just may have used numbers to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Shot in a gritty black and whites, the film is paranoid, a bit hallucinogenic, bizarre, a lot of fun, and in my opinion, Aronofsky’s best film.








Jonah Crismore is Executive Director of Cinema Center and after looking back, thinks he had pretty good taste for a sixteen year old.

“Teenager” opens on Friday, April 25th  at 6:30.



Friday, April 11, 2014

FILM NEXUS Vol. 5: Nymphomaniac


Day of doom. Armageddon. The apocalypse. I believe you can tell a lot about how a filmmaker sees the world in how they envision its destruction. In recent years, it seems most view it in terms of looting, unprecedented urban and environmental destruction, and survivors only carrying on by exhibiting the worst of human nature.

Picture for a second that you are an alien life form and sitting front and center for Earth’s last minutes, if the certainty of absolute impending annihilation was thrust upon the human race, would you want to watch all the widespread panic, or would you be more interested with how the puny humans below are coping with this knowledge, and all the last, smaller stories that are born.

For director Lars von Trier, he is much more interested in the latter of the two options, and finds ways of incorporating personal apocalypses in many of his films, whether the end of the world for his characters is literal or figurative. Today, April 11th, Cinema Center opens “Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1” with “Vol. 2” to open next week.

The film follows Joe, who is found beaten in an alleyway at age 50, and she tells the story of her very sexual life to a Good Samaritan. While there is much to celebrate, as well as be appalled by, find funny, and sympathize with Joe’s life as it is recounted over the course of two feature films, the beginning of the film most definitely signifies the end of the world as Joe has known it up until that point.


Von Trier is excellent taking his characters up to points when they cannot progress any more, and then showing what happens when they attempt that one last step. One of his greatest recent films that is streaming on Netflix, and provides a perfect complement to “Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1” is “Melancholia” from 2011. The film stars Kirsten Dunst as Justine, a depressed woman living with her sister’s family when a rogue planet is going to collide with Earth, ending life on the planet.  

In “Melancholia,” von Trier’s take on the end of the world resembles more of the Greek translation of apocalypse, meaning knowledge of something that was hidden. Justine, through her depressed state, is able to find an almost unnerving calm about the end of life on Earth. While her family panics in their own ways about the planet’s demise, Justine becomes a stabilizing force, and exhibits strength when perhaps it is put to it greatest use. When Earth’s collision with the rogue planet, Justine faces it with grace, and does not turn from it.

While it takes nearly all of “Melancholia” for Justine to realize she needn’t look away from the inevitable, Joe in both volumes of “Nymphomaniac,” never looks away throughout the entire saga. The apocalypse for Joe, is not so much a question of if she will change her ways, but whether she even needs to entertain the notion. The end of the world for Joe is playing by someone else’s rules.



Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1 opens today at Cinema Center.
Nymphomaniac: Vol. 2 opens April 18th

Jonah Crismore is the Executive Director of Cinema Center and hopes you will take a chance with Nymphomaniac, even though it is rated NC-17.