Not to dog all over that lovely photo of Brad Pitt on our cover but, it being Thanksgiving and all, some holiday film fare is in order. Sure, some of you are practically aging in reverse over Pitt’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But the rest of us? Well, we have other Benjamins to button.
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C-VILLE Playlist What we’re listening to… “Black Rain,” by Ben Harper (from Both Sides of the Gun) “Kill Switch,” by DJ Krush and Aesop Rock (from Jaku) “Starry Configurations,” by Jets to Brazil (from Orange Rhyming Dictionary) “Cappuccino,” by The Knux (from Remind Me In 3 Days…) “Young Pilgrims,” by The Shins (from Chutes Too Narrow) “In Spite of Ourselves,” by John Prine with Iris DeMent (from In Spite of Ourselves) “Happy,” by Sarah White with Ted Pitney (unreleased)—So, we don’t actually have a recording of this song, a new track from White propelled by Pitney’s guitar fills, which press up through cold ground like saplings hungry for light. But we hope that’ll change soon. New record, anyone? |
Or maybe more local ones. Familiar Strangers, produced by Cavalier Films and filmed in Staunton, Virginia, opened on November 14 at Regal Downtown Mall 6 and has branched out a bit more each week since its premiere: The film opened at Staunton’s Visulite Cinema last week, hits Kansas City this week (Familiar Strangers screened alongside ATO Pictures’ Choke at the Kansas International Film Festival), and spreads to Richmond and a few Tennessee theaters on December 5.
Unlike Pitt’s character in Benjamin Button, Familiar Strangers—a wryly shrugging comedy about the Worthington family, forced to deal with abandonment issues ranging from career choices to dogs to fathers and sons during Thanksgiving—is a film growing in the right direction. It started small, with a $1 million budget, nabbed a few underutilized actors (Tom Bower from Oliver Stone’s Nixon and the spectacular mock rockumentary, Brothers of the Head—nice choice), avoided fees associated with working with big distribution companies, and otherwise avoided things that might send Cavalier Films up the financial creek.
By staying relatively local, the film is still small enough to be affected by word of mouth. So let’s start some: Yes, Familiar Strangers is pretty darned enjoyable.
Sure, it’s part of that genre of family film in which every member brings an offbeat neurosis or compulsion home to share. Actress Ann Dowd (Garden State, “Freaks and Geeks”) has too frequently played the patient mother to bratty kids, and here either quietly glows or quietly suffers, without chance to do much else. And, for reasons including car troubles and the presence of a precocious young actress (Georgia Mae Lively), people will compare the flick to Little Miss Sunshine.
But Familiar Strangers never focuses on single performers or conflicts long enough to get ponderous. Two of the three Worthington kids, Kenny and Erin (DJ Qualls and Cameron Richardson), gripe and nip at each other’s heels with the sort of sarcasm that keeps a dinner table of emotional distance between them. Big brother Brian (Shawn Hatosy, who kicked bodysnatcher ass in The Faculty) can be a bit corn-pone, but his simple stubbornness holds up well against Bower’s older insecurities.
And the movie is comfortable within its Staunton skin: The Worthingtons watch the Washington Redskins but don’t know why, and drink beer from Starr Hill Brewery. (The logo appears roughly 100 times throughout the movie.) Feels like a local Thanksgiving to me. One-and-a-half drumsticks?
And all the fixins…
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Dog days of the holidays: Georgia Mae Lively dons protection against the family drama in Familiar Strangers. |
For the second consecutive fall, locally founded record label ATO Records has stuffed the cultural cornucopia by signing a big music act. Of course, like a cornucopia, nobody knows exactly what the hell to make of it—do we eat it? Play it like a horn? Just gawk?
On November 12, 2007, Billboard announced that Radiohead inked a deal with some ethereal, smoke-and-mirrors label named TBD Records, which would distribute the band’s album In Rainbows in the U.S. Things grew a bit more exciting when we learned that TBD Records was a new offshoot of ATO; unfortunately, distribution deals aren’t the sort of contracts that bring bands like Radiohead to our ’hood.
So let’s try not to overcook this fall’s news, that Sir Paul McCartney inked a similar contract with ATO Records to release the latest album from his project The Fireman, titled Electric Arguments, in the U.S. on November 25. In this instance, saying “ATO Records signed Paul McCartney” is like saying that Gotham City signed Bruce Wayne and gets Batman as part of the deal; at present, ATO Records has made no announcements to release an album under the Cute Beatle’s name.
What the deal does mean is that ATO Records has the ear of the Cute Beatle and that the degrees of separation between McCartney and Coran Capshaw are fewer in number. And that can’t hurt our chances of bringing Sir Paul to John Paul Jones Arena, can it?
What’s more, National Public Radio streamed the full record on its website last week, and the record’s a pleasure to listen to: Electric Arguments brings McCartney’s blues- and soul-heavy melodies into a world of electronic noise and beats for an album that’s fresh—a bit of Beck, a touch of Broken Social Scene—rather than self-consciously modern. So let’s be thankful for what we’ve got.