Preston Miller’s Jones offers an outsider???s perspective on contemporary New York rarely seen on film, and almost never acknowledged by natives. As the camera tracks star Trey Albright strolling the streets in real time, through neon-overlit Times Square and streetlamp-orange midtown side streets, Miller transforms some of the most personality-devoid sections of the city into a kind of paradise of anonymity. Times Square may be a sanitized tourist trap to you and me, but in Jones, it???s a blank screen for an actual tourist???s fantasies of liberation.
Opening tomorrow night for a one-week run at the Pioneer Theater in New York, Jones is the kind of lo-fi, no budget, non-traditional narrative that, without the support of a festival like SXSW, has an extremely difficult time making waves. But Miller finds a few ingenious ways around his limitations, and the unprofessional look of the video is actually one of my favorite things about it. It???s shifty and unstable and, particularly in the eerie brightness it captures on real NYC streets, never film-like but often very pretty.
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