Chelsea Walls VHS/DVD

Tadpole VHS/DVD

Personal Velocity VHS/DVD

Indigent 2003

The digital revolution is upon us. Much like technological advances in home recording have revolutionized the availability of underground music, and advances in layout software have made the fine publication you hold in your hands possible, so too is digital video changing the way films can be made. Making an underground film has suddenly become economically feasible.

Now that doesn’t mean they will all be good. Nor does it mean that the publicity and distribution network required for success will be behind them. For that, you may need a little help.

Enter In•dig•ent, short for Independent Digital Entertainment, which is rapidly becoming the studio to look to for small budget art films in the digital media. You may have seen last year’s Tape, featuring Ethan Hawke’s best performance ever (probably partly because he played someone you weren’t supposed to like), which was one of the early Indigent films. If you haven’t, you should. Not only is Indigent providing the machine necessary to fund, make, and distribute these films, they are making some bold, yet wise choices in what scripts to produce, and through their production are helping to train what will probably be the next generation of great filmmakers. And they’re making some damned fine films in the process.

Chelsea Walls features a powerful ensemble cast, including Vincent D'Onofrio, Uma Thurman, Kris Kristofferson (who is surprisingly intense and moving), Rosario Dawson, and many more who all turn in stellar performances. The story, if you can call it that, centers around the Chelsea Hotel in New York, the famous hotel where artists, writers, musicians, and other creative types have made their home, holed up to find their muse, and created some of the great works of this century. It’s also where Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy, just FYI. There’s no real, linear story here, and instead the action cuts rapidly between about a dozen different slices-of-lives, all happening simultaneously, interacting with each other, and seemingly all showing different reasons why you shouldn’t fall in love with a creative type (though the movie itself obviously deeply loves them anyway). The real reason this movie succeeds is that a good half of it is made up of amazing little vignettes of poetry, music, and beautifully composed visuals. In most movies, this sort of thing comes off as pretentious crap, but here it is saved by the fact that the poetry, music (largely by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco), writing, and painting is actually really good. The swirling inter-cut of stories is a little dizzying sometimes, but in the end, it creates a whole that somehow floats outside of “story,” and more in the realm of “identity.”

The filmmaking in Tadpole is definitely the most amateurish of the three, falling victim to the occasional whimsical film-schoolish fantasy sequence, as well as stilted acting by peripheral characters and even by Sigourney Weaver, one of the leads. Weaver plays Eve Grubman, the stepmother of the extremely precocious, articulate, and über-educated Oscar Grubman (Aaron Stanford), and the object of his intense boyhood crush. Whatever weaknesses this movie exhibits early on, however, are more than made up for by the series of deliciously, stomach-clenchingly uncomfortable, and sardonically laugh-out-loud hilarious scenes set in motion when Oscar has a one-night stand with Eve’s best friend, Diane, played by Bebe Neuwirth (“Lilith” from Cheers and Frasier), who is absolutely riveting in her seductive and unapologetic portrayal.

Personal Velocity is made up of three separate stories, all about women who are at some sort of crossroads in their lives, usually against their will, often because they have reached an absolute breaking point. Nothing is resolved in these stories - they all feel like just pieces of a much larger story. Instead we are given just a glimpse that the step we have just witnessed will be just the first, and we are somehow left with the sense that they will get where they’re going, even if they don’t know where that is yet. The cameras are often handheld, and combined with the intense realism of much of the acting, especially by the leads of the three stories - Kyra Sedgewick, Parker Posey, and Fairuza Balk, who are finally given the meaty material they each deserve - you almost get the feeling of documentary, though a documentary that is allowed behind not just the scenes, but the emotional boundaries people generally keep up just so they can function in the world. Instead of fighting to make the digital medium look like the film that came before, it is here used as an asset, pointing to a different way to view film. Just in case you’re wondering, this Mr. Soderbergh, is what I meant by “compelling”.

- Michael Houghton