MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY: The loneliness and longing may be universal, but the story is specific. |
Meadowlark
Somerville Theatre: April 24 at 10:30 pm + April 26 At 8 pm | Director Taylor Greeson
Two life-altering events overtook 12-year-old Taylor Greeson in 1993: he was seduced by an older boy and became the boy’s lover, and his 15-year-old brother was stabbed to death under mysterious circumstances. That’s a lot to cover in a 90-minute documentary, and director Taylor Greeson admits as much in his fumbling, painfully candid, and unassumingly shrewd voiceover narration. Greeson made four trips back to the scenes of the crimes near Billings, Montana, and the details of each become eerily intertwined as he nears some terrible truth and reconciliation. He talks with his mother, his sister, his dying grandfather; he interviews an eyewitness and officials involved in the murder trial. He looks through a box of evidence from the murder that includes graphic Polaroids and bloodstained clothes. At last he confronts both the man who seduced him (“my first boyfriend,” says the seemingly well-adjusted Greeson) and the convicted killer. Rough going, like all genuine traumas, and extremely powerful.
Medicine for Melancholy |
Medicine For Melancholy
Somerville Theatre: April 24 At 7:15 Pm + April 26 at 5:15 pm | Director Barry Jenkins
Barry Jenkins’s low-key romance has some of the spontaneity and political assertion of films like John Cassavetes’s Shadows and Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool — in short, it’s nostalgic. Micah (Wyatt Cenac) wakes up in a strange San Francisco loft next to a strange woman (Tracey Heggins). He shares a cab with her, she disappears, he tracks her down, and they spend some 24 hours together chatting about their lives (her boyfriend’s a white art curator on a trip to London; he’s divorced and designs aquariums for dentist’s offices), the gentrifying city, rent control, identity, and race. “You’ve got racial issues,” she notes disapprovingly and suggests they spend the afternoon at MoMA. He takes her to MoAD (the Museum of the African Diaspora) instead, but instead of a preachy weekend, Jenkins unfolds a brief encounter that embraces universal loneliness and longing in a specific social, political, and cultural context.
Mister Lonely
Somerville Theatre: April 24 at 7:30 pm | Director Harmony Korine
Harmony Korine aspires to the weird and revelatory but too often achieves the merely creepy. His latest is really two movies, one involving a community of impersonators in a Michael Jackson–like retreat (the Michael Jackson impersonator is the film’s protagonist) who want to put on a show. Since their talents are non-existent, it’s a tough assignment, and the segment is most intriguing for its casting, not just Samantha Morton as the faux Monroe but James Fox and Anita Pallenberg (last seen together on screen in 1970 in the weird and revelatory Performance) as “the Pope” and “Queen Elizabeth.” The second movie is a short featuring nuns who believe they can fly under the auspices of a drunken priest played by Werner Herzog — the weird and revelatory director Korine is trying to emulate.
