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August 04, 2006
Screening Gotham: August 4-6, 2006
A few of this week's worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:
--It would be awfully easy to dismiss director Hans Canosa's latest film, Conversations With Other Women, as a pretentious conceptual stunt even without it being edited entirely in split-screen (or "dual-frame," as the director is wont to call it). Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart portray star-crossed old flames reunited at a wedding in a New York hotel; they talk deep, retreat to a room upstairs, and you can probably imagine the attenuated talkiness and groping that follows.
Dual-image? Split-screen? Whatever--Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart in Conversations With Other Women, previewed this weekend at the SoHo Apple Store.
But in the end, Canosa's split-screen stunt does what it needs to do: allows simultaneous flashbacks; close-ups as two-shots; and a redistribution of space that bestows an oddly comforting theatricality on the tired old hotel-room set. And though Conversations does not open for another week, Canosa will be at the SoHo Apple Store on Saturday afternoon to explain how (and why) pulled the whole thing off on a Mac. If only Apple could have written his script.
--RockDocs continues at Lincoln Center this weekend, showcasing Stewart Copeland's Everyone Stares: The Story of the Police Saturday night. This was perhaps my least favorite film from Sundance '06, but considering what it could have been--assembled from seemingly miles' worth of unseen Super 8 concert and backstage footage from the great rock trio's doomed run--Copeland's autoerotic failure makes the film the type of unironic, delicious disaster that has CULT FUCKING CLASSIC written all over it. Dig his narration, and then feed it back to the filmmaker/former drummer during the post-screening Q&A to see if he laughs as hard as you did.
--Fix your lipstick and get your best groupie sneer on: Magnolia boss Eamonn Bowles takes a breather from the Jesus Camp snafu to rock with the Staggering Gents tonight at Magnetic Field in Brooklyn.
Posted by stvanairsdale at August 4, 2006 04:06 PM
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Comments
This can sometimes work. There was a great bolivian-american movie a few years ago called Sexual Dependency that uses the split screen technique to really good effect.
Posted by: White Label at August 7, 2006 01:24 PM