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May 01, 2006

Saturday Night Fever: On the Town with 'Air Guitar Nation' and 'Brother's Shadow'

The Reeler continued its peripatetic Tribeca Film Festival campaign last weekend, taking in a handful of films around town before slipping into a few related parties to see what else there was to see. None were more devastatingly cool than the whole atmosphere surrounding Air Guitar Nation, Alexandra Lipsitz's documentary about the charming people (and pathologies) inhabiting the world of competitive air guitar. The doc claimed South by Southwest's Audience Award in March before moving on to Tribeca, where a sold-out room enjoyed its New York premiere Friday at midnight.


Bjorn Turoque wows the Air Guitar Nation premiere party crowd; filmmaker Alexandra Lipsitz further cements his legend (Photo: STV)

The film follows the rise of air guitar in the United States in 2003, when a small group of New Yorkers banded together to send an American competitor to Finland's world championships. Where any decent documentary by its nature confers an elevated sense of legitimacy to even its most aberrant subjects, Air Guitar Nation exalts whiff-riff kingpins like David "C-Diddy" Jung and Dan "Bjorn Turoque" Crane as folk heros. Their tilts through New York's regionals and then the US finals in Los Angeles are as pioneering as they are outrageous, and the American air guitar culture that emerges from their efforts represents one of recent memory's more ironic, outlandish triumphs of performance art.

Alas for Crane, a New York writer who penned his alter ego's memoirs for publication later this year, "triumph" may be a more abstract term. "I've given up competition," he told the disappointed crowd following Friday's premiere. "It's true. I've competed in 10 competitions since we've started all this. I've come in second place five times. So I've kind of learned a lesson at a certain point. But I can't get away from air guitar. Where would I go? I thnk the fighting spirit will always be there, but I defintely have been experiencing signs of aging: arthritis, a little deafness."

The audience groaned again. "I know, I know," Crane said. "I look good, but the warrior inside has taken some tolls."

You wouldn't know it from Turoque's performance the next night at Rare on West 14th Street, where Air Guitar Nation hosted its premiere party with a balls-out session of "Aireoke." Brooklyn resident (and 2003 world champ) C-Diddy also performed while Lipsitz kept her camera rolling. "Watching people like C-Diddy--just meeting him--such amazing, rich human beings get involved in there," she told me. "You think, 'Oh, air guitar, probably a bunch of idiots.' ... But if you do something, and you really enjoy it, then you know you're doing the right thing. And everybody else says, 'That's really fun,' and it explodes. And this is something that everybody does on a primal level."

Across town at the premiere party for the NY, NY competition film Brother's Shadow, people were mingling on a primal level; the packed bar at Public on Elizabeth Street demanded a lot of bellowing conversation and more than a few close encounters as attendees diffused from one end of the room to the other. "You just came from where?" one shouted to me from about five inches away.

"The Air Guitar Nation party," I shouted.

"Why did you leave?"

Oh, come on. Why should I have stayed when I was virtually guaranteed an audience with the one and only Judd Hirsch? "One day I'm just doing nothing," he told me, recalling how the film's leading man (and former Numbers co-star) Scott Cohen roped him into Brother's Shadow. "I'm riding a train. I'm taking my little boy--he likes trains--I'm taking him up the Hudson River. I get off in this little town, walking along the Hudson River--right at the river, this dopey little park--and I get a cell phone call from Scott Cohen, who said, 'Will you play my father?' 'Why not? So what is it? Describe it to me.' That whole day, he's describing this movie to me and why he wants to do it. And I say, 'Hands-down, yes, of course. I will play your father.' I said, 'What kind of a relationship do we have?' He said, 'Bad.' I said, 'Kind of like we did on that television show?' He said, 'Worse.' "

Indeed, Jake Groden (Cohen) and his father Leo (Hirsch) could be on better terms when the film begins; as a parolee burning one last chance after another, Jake returns home to Brooklyn prodigal son-style only to find that his twin brother--a renowned furniture maker--has died. His widow (Susan Floyd) plans to sell the family shop over Leo's protests, while his son (Elliot Korte, above with Cohen) withdraws into a mournful resentment. Meltdowns and healing ensue; you can probably figure out where the story goes from there.

But despite the dramatic formulas and bizarre woodworking montages at hand (not to mention a cloying score by Duncan Sheik that instantly lapses into indie cliché), director Todd Yellin achieves one of the best-looking--and thus thoroughly watchable--New York films screening at Tribeca. "I so connected to living in Brooklyn," said Yellin, who spent six years in Carroll Gardens during the 1990s. "And Brooklyn inspired me from a visual perspective. ... What's really hip is the shaky, hand-held, gritty stuff; I wanted to make something more polished, even though it's low-budget. I wanted to show the grace of New York. I talked to the DP, Kip Bogdahn, and said, 'Give me a $20 milion look for a low-budget film.' "

You can appraise the result for yourself, but Yellin is also fortunate to have newcomer Korte in front of the camera. As 14-year-old Adam, he stalks through the film with an ambivalent, world-weary slouch that graciously balances out his castmates' hamminess. On the few occasions he does overdo it, you get the immediate sense that it is first-time filmmaker Yellin whose earnestness might be to blame.

Anyway, Hirsch was not going to let that get me down, instead regaling me with the lure of shooting back in Brooklyn. "It gives me an opportunity to go back to a place that I never really knew well enough," said the Bronx native. "I saw how people lived all the time I lived in New York. I was born here. I heaerd about all these places. I lived in Coney Island--in its heyday! And if you do a movie about Coney island, I'm in it. I'm in it. If it's bad, I don't want it. But I hope its good. Do a movie about the history of Coney Island--a movie, not a documentary. The documentary has already been done."

And just like that, I had Judd Hirsch attached to my movie. Now who is knocking me for checking out of an air guitar concert early?

Posted by stvanairsdale at May 1, 2006 09:34 AM

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