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Under discussion:

Hohokam  (2007)

Present Company  (2008)

Present Company is ostensibly about two young parents in a fading relationship who suffer cohabitation in a parent’s basement for the sake of their toddler, but director Frank Ross tells us what his film is really about in the first scene. The director stars as Buddy, an insensitive, immature twenty-something who is apprenticing in construction. We meet him on the job, where his co-worker has just opened a can of some kind of hazardous chemical. Not wanting to inhale the fumes, Buddy recoils. “I’ve got a long life ahead of me man,” he protests. A few lines later, assessing the work they’ve done, Buddy says, “We kind of glued ourselves into a corner, huh?” “Not me, man–you did it,” his co-worker responds.

This is a movie about a boy stuck in a situation that feels interminable, who instead of taking responsibility for having glued himself in a corner, tries to share the blame with everyone around him. Too on-the-nose? Maybe, but it’s forgivable as a kind of thesis statement for a film that otherwise refuses a black-and-white analysis of its characters and their behavior. Somewhat less concerned with physical space than his last film, Hohokam, Present Company concentrates on making tangible the invisible space between people, and the lying, cheating and play-acting that we do to either transverse the space or willfully ignore it.

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Under discussion:

Velvet Goldmine  (1998)

Hedwig and The Angry Inch  (2001)

Rainbow Around the Sun  (2008)

Rock musicals about rock stars are almost as tiring as independent films about independent filmmakers. They’re too self-involved and too self-satisfying, and they typically have nothing for an objective viewer to grab hold of. But at least with rock musicals, if the audience can dig the music, they can maybe dig the movie, too. This has been the case, for me at least, with such films as Velvet Goldmine and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, neither of which I would have been so into were it not for their excellent glam rock soundtracks. And now the same goes for Rainbow Around the Sun, a neat little low-budget musical fantasy, which interestingly enough also has a touch of glam in its songs, about a very cliché band leader and his very cliché drinking problem and his very cliché story of heartbreak.

Here, more than the songs, though, it’s the musical numbers, many of which work on their own as great music videos, that really kept me interested. That tired tale of the troubled, tortured artist/poet/rock star is merely a thin thread for Rainbow Around the Sun, which was adapted from an autobiographical album of the same name by Matthew Alvin Brown, who also stars in the film as singer-guitarist-drunk Zachary Blasto. The plot is like an afterthought, concocted only to connect the album tracks and their “videos”, and though the songs seem like they’re supposed to comment on the story, it’s really apparent that it came about the other way around, that the story is in fact meant only to put the songs into a context. I’d probably have enjoyed it as much, if not more, though, without the loose narrative and its underdeveloped scenes. The film could still have been what it actually is anyway: a cinematic concept album.

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