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Twenty-four hours in the tentative relationship of two young San Franciscans also dealing with the conundrum of being a minority in a rapidly gentrifying city.

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Criterion have transferred Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for Melancholy to Blu-ray. It is cited as being from a “New high-definition digital master, approved by director Barry Jenkins and director of photography James Laxton”. Shot in sepia-ish desaturated video (Panasonic AG-HVX200) the image on Medicine for Melancholy is the softest I have yet seen from a Criterion 1080P transfer. I strongly assume this is a direct function of the production. The filmmakers went through the film shot by shot and pulled out the majority of color. It’s hazy and mostly flat but the film’s expression comes through even in this modest appearance. It, obviously, was not meant to look tight, crisp and glossy.

Barry Jenkins - Medicine for Melancholy (2008).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 28 min
Size: 	2.56 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x576 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 960 kb/s
BPP: 	0.209
Audio
#1:  	English 5.1ch AAC LC @ 793 kb/s
#2:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Audio commentary from 2023 featuring director Barry Jenkins)
#3:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Audio commentary from 2008 featuring Jenkins, producers Justin Barber and Cherie Saulter, and editor Nat Sanders)

https://nitro.download/view/BC945517ABBEE96/Barry_Jenkins_-_Medicine_for_Melancholy_(2008).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Barry Jenkins – Medicine for Melancholy (2008) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“Everything about being indie is tied to not being black,” says Micah (Wyatt Cenac), half of the accidental kind-of couple whose one-day romance is chronicled in “Medicine for Melancholy.” He is making an observation — and also registering a complaint — about the quasi-bohemian way of life he shares with Jo’ (Tracey Heggins), his temporary other half. It bothers Micah that their embrace of the folkways of urban hipsterism seems to require the suppression of their African-American identity.

But his words, which Jo’ doesn’t quite agree with, also suggest a degree of self-awareness, and self-questioning, on the part of Barry Jenkins, who wrote and directed this small, incisive film. Most recent movies about culturally savvy, affectless 20-somethings hooking up and being cool are very much tied to not being black. They are about diffident, underemployed white boys and the women who (sometimes inexplicably) go to bed with them.

It wouldn’t be entirely fair to say that Mr. Jenkins, a 29-year-old director whose immersion in movie history is both ardent and understated, is making a black version of a Joe Swanberg or Andrew Bujalski film, or even, to stretch the comparisons a bit further back, a mash-up of “Before Sunrise” and “She’s Gotta Have It.” But it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate, either, because the tricky questions that govern “Medicine for Melancholy” are how, why and to what extent race should matter in relationships between black men and women.

At one point Micah asks Jo’ if her live-in boyfriend (conveniently overseas on a business trip) is white. “Does it matter?” she asks him.

“Yes and no,” he says, and his ambivalence is both the theme of the movie and a crucial element of its curious, ruminative attitudes toward love, race and urban life.

We first meet Micah and Jo’ in a bed that belongs to neither of them, where they have awakened together on the morning after a party. Both act shy and embarrassed, and Jo’ seems in a particular hurry to put this brief encounter behind her. Micah, though, proposes breakfast and a shared cab ride home, which Jo’ accepts more out of fatigue and some sense of post-coital decorum than out of genuine interest.

Micah tries to counter her aloofness with low-key humor, and when Jo’ leaves her wallet in the taxi, he tracks her down, bicycling from his apartment in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco to her place in the Marina.

“Medicine for Melancholy” is a two-hander, occupied entirely with the day Jo’ and Micah spend together, chatting, flirting, arguing and seeing the sights of San Francisco. But the city’s lovingly captured neighborhoods (shot by James Laxton in high-definition digital video from which all but the faintest hints of color have been drained) make the story as much a love triangle as a romance. ”
by AO Scott / NYTIMES

http://nitroflare.com/view/757DD51286FD90A/Medicine_for_Melancholy.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Barry Jenkins – Medicine for Melancholy (2008) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Taken from NY Mag
His 2003 short My Josephine is a lovely, impressionistic look at an Arab man and woman who work in a laundromat, washing American flags for free. That may make it sound like a Message Movie, but it’s not. Told from the perspective of the lovelorn male in this relationship, this is a quiet, unassumingly lyrical film, shot with the kind of detail that reveals both the director’s understanding of human nature and his keen eye for evocative imagery.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/86D1F803096B99C/My_Josephine.m4v

Language:Arabic
Subtitles:English

The post Barry Jenkins – My Josephine (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Barry’s BFA thesis film.

Barry Jenkins is a filmmaker born and raised in the inner-city of Miami. After completing a bachelor’s degrees in film and creative writing, he relocated to Los Angeles where he worked as a director’s assistant and development associate for Harpo Films. Barry currently resides in San Francisco, working for the rent check by day and writing, writing and writing by night. He is the writer-director of the short films My Josephine and Little Brown Boy. Medicine For Melancholy is his first feature film.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/ACB35BAA61DAD69/little-brown-boy.m4v

no pass

The post Barry Jenkins – Little Brown Boy (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.