Category Archives: Film

Coming to theatres today, Friday, July 17: STEAK (R)EVOLUTION

Franck Ribière’s quest for the world’s best steak had its world premiere at San Sebastian last year. It has gone on to screen at Tribeca, Seattle, Göteborg, Vilnius, and BAFICI, among other events.

This ode to beef takes the first-time director, whose family raises cows in eastern France, on a trip around the world to countdown the top ten steaks he encounters, motivated by a palate-awakening experience after sampling a Peter Luger porterhouse. In contrast to his nation’s obsession with lean beef, Ribière comes to understand the need for fat marbling to impart flavor, and soon sees that perhaps the French way has been off all along. Traveling with Parisien butcher Yves-Marie Le Bourdonnec, he investigates famed beef from Argentina to Spain, Japanese kobe to Scottish Angus, learning of the loving care and regional techniques that help account for variations in taste. While overlong and too often slowly paced at close to two hours, this doc accomplishes its simple objective: providing a tour for meat-loving foodies and a personal, idiosyncratic ranking that is sure to inspire those viewers to conduct their own taste tests.

Coming to NYC’s Rooftop Films this Friday, July 17: FIELD NIGGAS

Khalik Allah’s immersive look at life on the Harlem streets made its debut at True/False earlier this year. It has also screened at Sarasota, Maryland, and FID Marseille.

Street photographer Allah trains his camera on the people he runs across at the corner of 125th St and Lexington Ave at night, primarily African Americans, many who speak plainly about using alcohol, drugs, or K2, a popular smokeable synthetic cannabis-like substance, and about a life of poverty in a society that remains unmistakably racist. Aesthetically, Allah makes the unusual choice of disrupting the synchronization of his sound and images – interviews with his subjects play over fragmented, often slow-motion, visuals, never quite synching up – making for an unsettling but somewhat hypnotic effect, at least initially. Within short order, however, this trick, and the film as a whole, feels like an extended, and ultimately repetitive, experiment that hasn’t been fully thought through, netting the same returns at 15 minutes as it does at its full 60 minute running time. Matters are not helped at all by Allah’s running commentary, which grows more intrusive and less interesting as the film proceeds, devolving into self-indulgent semi-mystical philosophizing. It’s unfortunate, as the director clearly has an eye, producing breath-taking moments of unexpected beauty and ugliness within the same frame, and his subjects themselves would seem to have much more of substance to say.

New to VOD and to select theatres this week: CAFFEINATED

Hanh Nguyen and Vishal Solanki’s exploration of the speciality coffee world debuted at Santa Barbara earlier this year. It has also screened at the Amsterdam Coffee Festival and has had limited theatrical bookings in Germany. FilmBuff now releases it on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Xbox, Vudu and all major cable providers, as well as a limited theatrical run.

Focusing on coffee in a comprehensive manner, this film takes viewers around the world, tracing the development of the beverage from the picking of the fruit and cultivation of the bean to its enjoyment by end users in a generally conventional survey approach. Whether accompanying coffee buyers as they visit farmers in coffee producing nations like Nicaragua, interviewing coffee house patrons as they happily wax poetic about their addiction, or learning about the development of micro-roasters from coffee historians, Nguyen and Solanki and their subjects treat coffee with such reverence it borders on the pathological, at least for non-coffee culture audiences. For their target audience, however, they have made a very slick-looking documentary – essentially coffee porn – that will be consumed happily and smoothly.

Coming to DVD and expanding its VOD availability today, Tuesday, July 14: CAN’T STAND LOSING YOU: SURVIVING THE POLICE

Andy Grieve and Lauren Lazin’s history of The Police from guitarist Andy Summers’ perspective, debuted at DOC NYC in 2012. Additional screenings followed in the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas fests, with a recent theatrical tour prompting the DVD re-release, a Blu-ray debut, and VOD expansion from Vimeo on Demand to also include iTunes and Amazon.

Based on Summers’ 2006 memoir, ONE TRAIN LATER, Grieve and Lazin intercut the musician’s recollections of the trajectory of his career, with his voice-over accompanied by a treasure trove of archival footage from the 1960s-1980s, with more recent footage of The Police’s 2007-2008 reunion tour. While the latter offers fans an opportunity to catch up with the band more or less in the present, the film is at its best when its focused on the past, providing a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the surprising success of the trio, which, in addition to rare performance clips includes more off-the-cuff clips of early promotional interviews and personal material of Summers’ family life and competing on-the-road life. Although the tensions that led to the dissolution of The Police are mentioned several times, these never quite get the space to breathe on screen, robbing the film of a more dramatic edge. Perhaps even more interesting is the too-brief review of Summers’ very early foray into life as a working musician in the mid 1960s, before he hooked up with Sting and Stewart Copeland.