SUNSET EDGE (Daniel Peddle, 2014)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, August 9, $10, 7:30
Series runs August 8-10
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.ruralroutefilms.com
In Daniel Peddle’s debut feature narrative, Sunset Edge, four disaffected teens go slumming in a supposedly abandoned North Carolina trailer park and run into an unexpected part of its sordid past, with the park itself serving as a character all its own, a constant threat always lurking right below the surface. Just looking for something to do, Jacob (Jacob Kristian Ingle), Blaine (Blaine Edward Pugh), Will (William Dickerson), and Haley (Haley Ann McKnight) hang around the dilapidated park and the surrounding woods, riding their skateboards, shooting paint-ball rifles, and making an enormous, vile mixture of soda and sickeningly sweet candies, trapped between childhood and adulthood. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, local boy Malachi Smith (Gilberto Padilla) is slowly uncovering terrible things about his family history as a mysterious old woman in white (Liliane Gillenwater) appears and disappears in the background. As the two tales begin to intersect, an uncertain immediate future awaits them all.
North Carolina native Peddle, who is also a high-fashion casting director and documentarian (The Aggressives, Trail Angels), was inspired to make Sunset Edge after his parents showed him the deserted trailer park; Peddle served as writer, director, producer, production designer, and casting director, sharing that last credit with his nephew, Jacob, who plays Jacob and brought along his real friends to play his cinematic ones, all of whom are nonprofessional actors. Peddle does an excellent job of developing the dark, foreboding atmosphere, evoking a kind of mix of Larry Clark’s Kids and Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s Blair Witch Project. The creepy film looks and sounds great, courtesy of cinematographer and editor Karim López and sound designer and engineer Ian Hatton, who also composed the moody score with James Corrigan. The sparse dialogue works well, but the ending is an anticlimactic letdown. Sunset Edge is having its world premiere August 9 at 7:30 at the Rural Route Film Festival at the Museum of the Moving Image, preceded by J. Christian Jensen’s White Earth and Àlex Lora and Antonio Tibaldi’s Godka Cirka (A Hole in the Sky) and followed by a Q&A with Peddle and members of the cast. Celebrating its tenth anniversary, the Rural Route Film Festival runs August 8-10 and includes such other place-centric films as Matjaž Ivanišin’s Karpotrotter, Josephine Decker’s Butter on the Latch, and Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.
Now we’re talking. Hardboiled action director and comic Takeshi Kitano takes on the Zatoichi legend that was a Japanese favorite from 1962 to 1989 (starring Shintaro Katsu), updating the story of the blind swordsman, gambler, and masseuse magnificently, adding a lot of blood while staying true to the heart of this classic tale. Beat Takeshi, the name Kitano uses as an actor, stars as the unlikely platinum blonde superhero who shuffles across the countryside battling the bad guys and rescuing damsels in distress. This is the first period film of Kitano’s career, which has included such bloodfests as Violent Cop, Brother, and Boiling Point and such moving dramas as Sonatine and Kikijuro. He has combined all the elements of his previous work to create this unforgettable masterpiece, a thrilling, beautifully shot, and wonderfully realized cinematic achievement that suffers only at the very end with a silly coda that is just way too out of place. Zatoichi is screening August 8 as part of the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Movie Medicine: A Film Series about the Healing Factor in Cinema,” being held in conjunction with the “Bodies in Balance: The Art of Tibetan Medicine” exhibition, and will be introduced by Stephen Globus. The series continues August 15 with John Cromwell’s Of Human Bondage, introduced by psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist Harvey Roy Greenberg, and August 22 with Shohei Imamura’s Dr. Akagi, introduced by Gregory Hosho Abels.
Florian Habicht’s Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets is a brilliant inside look at the long-lasting relationship between a band and its hometown. In December 2012, British alternative band Pulp returned to the place of its birth, the rugged, working-class city of Sheffield in the north of England, for what was being billed as its last-ever concert on dry land. Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker hooked up with Habicht (Love Story, Woodenhead), conceiving a project in which the time and place, along with the fans, would be just as important as the band and its music, if not more so. In the nonchronological film, Habicht cuts between archival footage of Pulp, clips from the final concert, interviews on the street with old and young fans, and brief chats with Pulp tour manager Liam Rippon and the other band members: guitarist Mark Webber, keyboardist Candida Doyle, bassist Steve Mackey, and drummer Nick Banks, who are pretty much taking it all in stride. But at the center of it all is the soft-spoken, enigmatic Cocker, who founded Pulp back in 1978 when he was fifteen years old.
