Quote:
“In all chaos there is a cosmos. In all disorder a secret order.” Experimental theater director Evangeline (Molly Parker) says this to her troubled teenage star Madeline (Helena Howard) early on in Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, and it’s a sentiment the movie both takes to heart and persistently questions. Decker’s film, the best thing I saw at Sundance this year, is built around tension and chaos: Its unruly scenes emerge out of disorder, out of chants and shrieks and fractured images, and always threaten to fade back into abstraction. The focus slips; the camera drifts. Whispers and wails intrude. A simple dialogue exchange might suddenly splinter into tight-angled close-ups of a face; a shot might disintegrate into a shimmering field of red. But one senses a method in this madness. The narrative might be shattered, but the film’s slipstream of emotion is powerful and inescapable.

As Madeline, the nineteen-year-old Howard — an explosively gifted performer — seizes your attention. She plays a precocious teen with what may or may not be mental issues (there are mentions of a psych ward stint, and glimpses of pill bottles and medical bracelets, but as with so much in this film, we’re never sure how much of what we’re seeing is real). Madeline’s talent is being both nurtured and exploited by Evangeline. Improvisational role-play exercises in rehearsal come too close for comfort to Madeline’s volatile relationship with her caring, fragile mother, Regina (Miranda July). The girl immerses herself in the part, then takes her work home: Acting exercises in one context become troubling behavior in another. Is she building a character, or is the character building her? At times Madeline pretends to be a cat, a pig, a sea turtle. She attacks her mother with an iron. (Was it a dream? A memory? A desire? A fear?) Mom observes her daughter with anticipation and fright; July cracks the most mysterious of smiles, perched between terror and bewilderment. A flash of pride can, in an instant, become a moment of deep humiliation.

Evangeline’s theater work is built around dance and poetic movement, and Decker and her cinematographer, Ashley Connor, shoot the bodies in motion with an eye toward sensuality and distortion. They do the same for reality, too. The camera constantly wanders among faces and gestures, as if overwhelmed by all the possibilities of where to go. For a viewer, it’s a curiously lovely feeling — that sense of being suspended between clarity and entropy.

Decker built the picture around Howard after seeing her at a teen performance contest in New Jersey. Much of what’s onscreen was developed out of improvisations with the young actress and others. But whereas directors like Mike Leigh use this form of collaboration to create self-contained works of immersive realism, Decker deconstructs the very nature of a closed work of art. Who is Evangeline to tell Madeline’s story, and who is Decker to make a movie around Howard? Slowly, Madeline realizes her power in Evangeline’s world. The latter brings her into her life — does she want to displace the girl’s mother? — and hesitant, haunted Madeline begins to seize control. And onscreen, Howard comes to dominate the frame more and more. Who’s telling this story? you might wonder, and therein lies the radical, breathtaking beauty of this film. Madeline’s Madeline is at once intoxicated by the world and deeply terrified of it. — Bilge Ebiri (The Village Voice)

	
Josephine Decker - (2018) Madeline's Madeline.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 33 min
Size: 	2.65 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x576 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
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https://nitro.download/view/C3B74173F5D5A46/Josephine_Decker_-_(2018)_Madeline’s_Madeline.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Josephine Decker – Madeline’s Madeline (2018) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Flames is a nesting doll of performance art. That should already tell you if this documentary is up your alley.

Directors Josephine Decker and Zefrey Throwell videotape their romantic relationship for five years – the ups, the downs, the sex (the up-down-up-down?) – while also pursuing thought-provoking public displays of art. Decker and Throwell are very open in front of the camera, giving the audience raw insight into their romance and spontaneity. Their art, while interesting for passing onlookers, are only multi-layered for the viewer watching this doc. For example, the filmmakers meet up with fellow artists to play strip poker in a windowed room where people can look in. When Josephine starts showing signs of awkward discomfort from the gawkers outside, this display soon transforms into a piece about voyeurism where she acknowledges the ogling eyes.

The documentary is obnoxious, hyper, and envisioned through an unconventional style, but I still enjoyed Flames because Decker and Throwell are amusing; even when the fly-on-the-wall perspective was a supremely uncovered experience – literally. The problem with Flames is that the film can’t be trusted. The filmmakers overload their doc with so many layers, that it becomes detrimental to their credibility as storytellers. When they openly break the fourth wall and discuss the conception of this movie – and their relationship – as a possible art project, the film had locked me out.

Sure, I could be taking this all too literally. But, I mean, Zefrey is wearing a shirt with Andy Kaufman’s face on it when he’s discussing the documentary with Josephine. C’mon!

– Addison Wylie

Flames.2017.1080p.WEB-DL.h264.AAC.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 24 min
Size: 	3.08 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1912x1072 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	5 108 kb/s
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https://nitro.download/view/487F427DF2AF615/Flames.2017.1080p.WEB-DL.h264.AAC.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Zefrey Throwell & Josephine Decker – Flames (2017) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Young Bodies Heal Quickly, Andrew T. Betzer’s first feature after a storied career as a short film-maker, is about as personal as a narrative fiction can get: Betzer wrote, directed, produced, edited and even color-graded the film. But in this case, “personal” doesn’t mean a regurgitation of the filmmaker’s latest breakup or childhood ups and downs. It means a highly idiosyncratic take on storytelling, in which the viewer is thrown in the deep end from the enigmatic first shot and carried along by the hurtling young bodies of two brothers who do a bad thing and have to get out of town fast. Set in godforsaken parts of Maryland and structured as a picaresque road film in five main episodes, Young Bodies Heal Quickly is as unpredictable as the boys’ off-the-grid father yet crystal clear in its intent to present an unflinching exploration of masculinity and the transmission of violence. If there is anything else out there like it, I haven’t seen it.

At the age twenty, Older escapes incarceration and seeks out his ten year old little brother, Younger. Clearly the bad influence, Older gets the boys mixed up in the “accidental” killing of a young girl and they are forced to go into hiding as they wait for their mother to rescue them. Thanks to their mother, the brothers now have a car and enough money to begin their bizarre road trip. Along the way, they encounter a host of people ranging from their unwelcoming sister to a troubled maid and her violent lover. Eventually, they wind up on the doorstep of their father’s compound, wherein the three of them are quickly reminded why they are estranged in the first place. Just as the walls are about to close in, their father packs up his brood and takes them on a road trip of his own. They join several militaria enthusiasts in a remote forest where they re-enact actual Vietnam War battles. Once in the “jungle,” the three of them revert to hostile tendencies building up to a final confrontation between father and sons, leaving the audience to decide what is real and what is make believe.

https://nitro.download/view/89FED8E7C20ACC1/Young_Bodies_Heal_Quickly_-_Andrew_T._Betzer_(2014).avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Andrew T. Betzer – Young Bodies Heal Quickly (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.