Dragonslayer

A rigidly structured yet free-floating documentary of a well-known skateboarder on the West Coast, "Dragonslayer" is slight yet disarmingly even-handed, never reaching the judgmental or hagiographic extremes it easily could have in more cynical/reverent hands. Not only that, but it feels as though director Tristan Patterson has unparalleled levels of emotional access with his subjects, who seem at times to disregard the fact that a camera is trained on them (or maybe not?). Either way, it's just as rough-hewn and well-soundtracked as a skater would make it, and it serves as a thought-provoking treatise on the netherworld between adolescence and adulthood.

Josh Sandoval, more commonly known as "Skreetch," is extremely well-connected on his circuit, and seen as a generally nice guy who used to be excellent at skateboarding. Now, he's a struggling father who moves from place to place, getting some skating gigs, trying to put together money for he and his new girlfriend to have a good life. He still skates and he still drinks and smokes weed. His teenage years haven't ended yet; the only job he can land is at the bowling alley, and his lack of self-respect seems to stem from parental neglect (he mentions some turmoil at home when he was young; his mom calls during the film but his relationship with her seems strained).

The film is all the more involving for its brilliant use of indie music (so good there was an article in "Film Comment" on it), which is commonly used in skate videos. The music itself isn't quite as effective when separated from the image, but when the two are married, greatness ensues. But the film thankfully isn't all gloss; there is some real pathos and wisdom here. B

Bellflower

Messy, incredibly pointless, but jarringly well made, Evan Glodell's "Bellflower" (named after the street in Los Angeles on which most of the action takes place) pays no attention to film conventions. Rules are meant to be broken, sure, but all the same, it's good for a narrative feature to have some structure. Like the lives of its characters, "Bellflower" is devoted to ridiculous, involved ventures and ultimately goes into ambiguous territory, lacking a regard for the audience and not really giving a shit.

Nothing substantial is known about roommates Woodrow (Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) except for the fact that they have an intense obsession with "Mad Max" and are willing to go to extreme lengths to make that film into a reality. With the excuse that an apocalypse will come, they've set aside a lot of time and money (the latter of which is weird, since they don't seem to have jobs or family to inherit from) to build a flamethrower and pimp out a car they call Medusa. They also have time to try to pick up women at a dive bar. Woodrow, the more (at least initially) personable of the two, loses a cricket-eating contest to Milly (Jessie Wiseman) at said bar and a kinetic relationship begins. I say kinetic because after Milly says she wants to go somewhere trashy on their first date, the two take an impromptu cross-country road trip to Texas to eat at a dingy redneck establishment that Woodrow and Aiden visited a while back. This sojourn takes up roughly 1/5 of the film's running time, and veers sharply into precociousness. It's touching, but further emphasizes that "Bellflower" is (deliberately or not) far out of touch with reality.

Perhaps due to the fact that Milly spends so much time with Woodrow at the onset, or because Woodrow is a little too soft-spoken for his own good, but their setup eventually caves in with Milly cheating on Woodrow with her roommate. This sends the film down a road seething with aggression, where delirium abounds.

This film makes the viewer do acrobatic jumps through hoops probably more than any recent example that I can think of, at one point splintering off from an image of decision to explore a terrifying narrative detour before coming back and heading off in an entirely different direction. This can be much better appreciated as an idea than as an actual technique, especially since nothing really comes when both shoes have dropped. Glodell needs to realize this before he makes more movies like this one. However, "Bellflower"'s craft, from the ultra-saturated photography to the techno/spare-acoustic juxtapositions on the soundtrack, is astonishing and something that Glodell can lean on for his future works as keystone. If only all other components of the film could have gripped me so intensely. B-

Weekend

"Weekend" by Andrew Haigh is built on strong acting and Urszula Pontikos' careful, brilliant cinematography that works well to pierce the viewer. It follows a guarded lifeguard named Russell (Tom Cullen, in a gloriously natural performance), as he begins to form a relationship with Glen (Chris New, also very good), an outspoken, high concept artist who makes works concerned with sexuality. Russell is looking for a boyfriend to alleviate his loneliness, whereas Glen has just gotten out of something very messy and believes himself unfit for such romances. But wherever they stand on what will ultimately come of things, the two see that they fit together with an unparalleled chemistry.

This territory has been mined before, and "Weekend" is hardly groundbreaking in terms of plot structure. What sets it apart is Haigh's superb execution of his excellent script. The film says a lot about what it means to be gay right now and how suffocating the secrecy even those out are privy to. One of the film's most powerful images, a long-range view of Russell's apartment building with activity only occurring in his flat, not only underscores the intimacy at the center of the story, but also emphasizes the isolation of gays as a minority group.

The movie would also fall short without its lead performers, who invigorate the material and draw the necessary emotions to give the film a startling impact. "Weekend" does has its flaws: one scene in particular, involving Glen's roommate Jill (Laura Freeman), drags mightily and should have been revised by Haigh. But the film is a tremendous character study with some of the most vital character observation this year has had to offer. B+

Green

"Green" by Sophia Takal has the opposite problem of one of the three main characters, Robin. While she constantly (though maybe in the interest of trying to be polite) overstays her welcome, the film that she's in ends up being way too short at 75 minutes. It offers up a lot of interesting ideas about social structure, but doesn't go about explaining them to the extent that it should. This and the fact that many elements of the film feel strained are its biggest problems. If only these issues had been fixed somehow.

The film takes place almost entirely in a small town (possibly in Pennsylvania, judging from a license plate), opening with its only scene set in New York. We come in medius res, as people heatedly discuss Philip Roth and Proust. The camera darts between various angles before settling on Genevieve (Kate Lyn Sheil), who will continue to be examined throughout the movie. This seems like a strange way to start things off, but we come to see how it establishes the dearly held intellectual status of Genevieve and her boyfriend Sebastian (Lawrence Michael Levine), her moderate distance from him, and how their life is full of consistent social interaction.

After this, the action moves to the rural home where the two are subletting for around a year as Sebastian writes an article about sustainable farming. They seem to think they're alone, and thus prepare themselves for a particular sort of intimacy. But soon, their neighbor Robin (played by writer/director Takal) comes stumbling into the picture. The way that Takal integrates her character into the plot exhausts credibility as much as her put-on Southern sounding accent does (you definitely can see from this interview that her voice is nothing like the one in the film). The difference in attitude of Genevieve and Sebastian regarding Robin from the first to second scenes struck me as kind of odd. However, it's a testament to Takal's much-remarked-upon strength as an actress that she can somehow make Robin into more than just a stereotype, even as at the same time she explores the way that both of the Manhattanites see her as one.

Robin again and again seems to be prying into their lives, offering to go on walks with them and show them around the town (though it's usually just with Genevieve) and becoming a regular at their table. Although Robin seems to get at a fun side in Genevieve's personality (eventually getting her to reveal certain personal stories), Genevieve feels her time slightly more and more disrupted. This happens especially when she starts to pick up on undertones of romance between Robin and Sebastian (which I took to be entirely imagined until the very end of the film, which I think Takal misplays). This she takes as an insult to her pronounced braininess.

Her intense disdain for Robin and her supposed mental incapacity comes out in the film's strongest scene (both thematically and technically), when, during a lunch, she asks Sebastian about returning to New York to attend an art show. Done in an unbroken take where the camera moves back and forth across the table, at times resting on Robin but seeing her as more a catalyst than a participant, this scene is the movie's most successful distillation of the tension between the three characters. It showcases Genevieve's iciness and quickness to laugh, Sebastian's abundance of humor, and Robin's knack for (perhaps strategically) saying things at the wrong times. It's in moments like this that "Green" excels.

It helps that Takal has a real eye for good dialogue (especially for Levine, who ironically supposedly is her fiancee in real life), arresting images (the transposition-heavy campfire scene is a stunner), and engaging techniques (the voiceover conversations between Genevieve and Sebastian are strong). Her main cinematographer Nandan Rao (Benjamin Nicholas and Kim Takal did additional photography, making it slightly hard to tell who shot what) creates a lot of nice compositions in the forest that often have interesting facets of focus. I'm less hot but still somewhat appreciative of the work of her composer Ernesto Caramo, who makes transitional textures that sound often like noises of aliens. The best job is done by the sound designer Weston Fonger, who makes certain features of the sound come out very palpably and thus produces an additional layer of friction between the leads.

What the director doesn't have down is how to put together the introverted and extroverted components of her story. Within each of the modes, the scenes jell quite nicely, but when Takal wants to switch from personal to public, the film feels awkwardly put together in a way that sort of screams Mumblecore (and probably actually is, due to the film's extremely small looking budget and type of content). This is a hitch that, along with the other flaws noted above, hurts the film as a whole. If Takal can avoid these weaknesses in the future (and maybe hire an editor other than herself), she could be an extremely strong filmmaker. B-