Recent Stories with tag linas phillips

"There's a point I've been hitting in the last few years--I'm finding dance very ephemeral, as many people would say. You do it and it's gone. And you need people, you need space, there are a lot of different limitations," Leah Schrager told me, sitting on the back patio of a Park Slope bar recently. "And this, I can just do."

Schrager was explaining the odd process that's taken her from graduating with a double-major in dance and biology from the UW back in 2007 to this coming weekend, when her first art show, called Pretty Whatever, opens at CoCA Ballard this Thursday (reception at 6 p.m.; show through August 7), 2,500 miles from Gowanus, Brooklyn, where she now calls home.

A native of someplace called Steamboat Island, which I am assured is nearer Olympia than Shelton, Schrager has had an oddly eventful artistic career since graduating. While she performs with a few small companies in NYC and apprentices with Zvi Gotheiner's ZviDance, in Seattle, she's best known for her role as the body of "Rimas," filmmaker and artist Linas Phillips' (Bass Ackwards) mentally challenged brother in Lasagna, or: How I learned to stop slipping towards the prison of permanent darkness, a collaboration between Phillips and theatre artist Jim Fletcher, which went up at On the Boads in January 2009. Aside from a couple walk-ons, either as whatever female was required at the moment or to appear as an alien at the end, she mostly trotted around stage with a television for a head, through which Rimas appeared as video.

But of course, performance opportunities from artists you run into in airports (as was the case between Schrager and Phillips, travelling from New York to Seattle; they'd met previously through working with 33 Fainting Spells) don't come along every day. As Schrager pursued her dance career in New York, she began turning to other creative outlets from which the work in Pretty Whatever grew out of.

Dubbed "phoems" by Schrager, the work in show is the simple combination of photos and text. The earliest material, which she began concocting in fall 2009, paired shots from her dance and modelling portfolio with snippets of text from her journals. From there, Schrager cast a wider net, repurposing Facebook status, collaborating with other photographers, and developing an increasingly large body of work which has previously shown in small venues in New York and Kyoto, Japan.

Often, the relationship between text and image is vague at best. In one image (most of which are simply known by their text), a voguish, vaguely Eighties looking editorial shot of Schrager blowing a kiss is counterpointed with the phrase, "People loved it. I'm fucked."

"I was sitting in a theatre, watching a dance performing that I was writing a review of," Schrager recalled, "and people really loved it. So that's what I wrote in my notebook." Months later, searching for text, she came across it and it became part of the body of work.

Other pieces are strongly biographical. While Schrager seems to have moved beyond some of the earliest pieces, which paired cityscapes with her poetry about her travails as a young artist in New York, the more subtle ones will probably show up in the up-to-fifty works in Pretty Whatever. One of the earliest, in fact, is a simple photo of the Brooklyn Bridge with the attendant text: "My pen has run out. I guess I live here now."

"One day I was writing in my journal and my pen ran out," she recalled simply. "And it was two weeks or a month into living here. And my living situation was pretty bad. I was subletting--no! I was waiting to sublet a place, and this woman just kept putting me off, for like two months. She'd be like, 'You can move in in two weeks,' and then, 'You can move in two more weeks...'" She shook her head trying to recall the details, but overall, the anecdote reveals a lot about her development in creating visual art: from the earliest, heart-on-her-sleeve poetry and drama images, Schrager has proved willing to relax and let more subtle combinations of visual image and textual content come together.

Some of the most interesting works in Pretty Whatever, in fact, are the least autobiographical, relying instead on the almost random interplay of repurposed images and texts. At one point, Schrager moved on to creating pieces based on people's Facebook statuses, and indeed, when I first saw some of the images in Pretty Whatever, what most struck me was their similarity to the randomness of Facebook news feeds, with the mixture of inane and emotional, random and sentimental all jumbled up together.

Schrager agreed, and admitted that she's been trying to plan some sort of surprise based on the concept for the show's Thursday night opening at CoCA's gallery space up on Shilshole Bay. I'm not sure if you have time still, but it's probably worth RSVP-ing via Facebook.

It's the long holiday weekend, so it's good that there's lots of new movies out on DVD.  Let's run down the list of new films, care of our friends at Scarecrow Video (now with video games!).

The biggest release this week is definitely Hot Tub Time Machine, which I saw in a theater of people laughing so loudly that I will need to see it again, just to catch all the jokes I missed the first time.  There's also Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, based on the popular children's book series, and the remake of The Crazies, in which virus-infected water makes Timothy Olyphant something-something.

In terms of foreign films, there's the Oscar-nominated black-and-white looming dread of pre-WWI small-town Germany in The White Ribbon, which director Michael Haneke accurately described as "a horror film without the horror." There's also The Eclipse--no not that one.  This is an almost-perfect Irish ghost story set at a writers' conference.  Spooky scary!  Let's hope that there's never an American remake.  Same goes for Everlasting Moments, a delicate look at a female photographer challenging societal norms in early 1900s Sweden.  And for something completely different, Warlords features Jet Li and lots of epic Chinese battles....

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From left: director Linas Phillips, actress Davie-Blue, and SIFF's Carl Spence (Photo: Victoria Holt)

Bass Ackwards (fresh from a SIFF run, and playing June 12-17 at the Northwest Film Forum) "follows a floundering hero without floundering itself," as the Hollywood Reporter puts it.

It is director Linas Phillips' first non-documentary picture (Walking to Werner, Great Speeches from a Dying World), though it documents plenty in its own way, and has some memoir in it, including footage of Phillips as a baby.

The film contrasts making plans with being guided by the immediacy and joy of living in the moment. It has a string-of-beads structure, one thing after another, loosely contained by the fact that a road trip has to start somewhere and end somewhere, at least geographically.

If you're in the mood for it, the movie can open up to you like one of the random strangers Phillips meets on his way, as he navigates his way into adulthood via what looks like a retreat toward home. "Even though I'm an actor and it's all phony, in certain ways, I wanted it to feel like it wasn't, to create that atmosphere," Phillips told me.

We were upstairs in the Harvard Exit, talking with actress and co-writer Davie-Blue, who'd respond to and clarify some of Phillips's more sweeping statements. "That's your job as an actor, to create spaces in which you can feel like you're being honest." Davie-Blue, also a theatre actress, was seen here in 2008 in the musical Medea Knows Best, and looks the part of a brunette Mad Men ingenue.

"When we started shooting in Seattle, it wasn't even clear we were going to make a whole movie," said Phillips. "We had the first 20 pages, until he gets on the road, and then we didn't have anything written." He was friendly and funny, but he'd trail off in answering questions as if he'd suddenly lost faith in the power of words to communicate and perhaps the effort of the last five minutes was totally wasted....

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Now that SIFF is in full swing, all of us here at The SunBreak weighed in with our picks and pans of the festival thus far.

Josh: Opening night film The Extra Man made up for what felt like overlong running time for the very light plotting with enough funny moments and good/weird performances to sustain the big audience until the very crowded gala. I'd say that anyone who says nothing good ever comes of MTV hasn't seen John Jeffcoat's generous and human document of Seattle's music, Amplified. The city looks beautiful through a Canon 5D Mark II in this diverse crash course in the backstories, motivations, and personal histories of fourteen wide-ranging talents.  (screening May 26, 9:15 p.m. @ the Neptune)

In Cyrus, the Duplasses go a bit mainstream, yet retain the quirky appeal from their lofi filmmaking roots. Marissa Tomei's character would be too perfect for John C. Reilly's barely rebounding divorcee if it wasn't for her meddling codependent son (screening today, 4:15 p.m. @ the Neptune). In Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, prejudice, mistaken intentions, and collegiate ineptitude make for a gory, hilarious, and heartwarming flick in desperate need of US distribution.

Tony did not enjoy The Extra Man as much as Josh: While it showcases a highly entertaining comic performance by Kevin Kline, who's aging with the rascally grace of a David Niven, in the end, the movie's too vaguely-sketched to stick to your ribs. The Extra Man sure feels like the first saved project on that Indie Comedy Maker 1.0 Program for Windows and Mac. 

Friday night, I took in the inaugural Midnight Adrenaline entry, Survival of the Dead, the sixth zombie opus from George Romero. I'll defend the first four Romero Living Dead features to my dying breath (haven't seen the fifth, Diary of the Dead, yet), but this one falls pretty damned short.

Seth: I saw The Crab Trap from Colombia. Made me nostalgic for South America...slow, ponderous, lots of characters and community strife. Kind of John Sayles-y (screening today, 4:30 p.m. @ Pacific Place).

Audrey: The Milk of Sorrow was well-shot, but kinda a downer, as you might expect from the title.  I had a lot of fun with restaurant comedy of errors Soul Kitchen, and I Am Love was just as lush and well-acted as you might expect (screening May 28, 9:30 p.m. @ Everett Performing Arts Center), but probably my favorite film so far was The Concert (screening May 28, 7 p.m. @ Everett Performing Arts Center). It's a pretty basic story--of course the ragtag group of Russian musicians trying to pass themselves off as the Bolshoi Orchestra will manage to pull it off--but director Radu Mihaileanu still infuses the film with sly wit, unexpected surprises, and music that says more than words. Also highly recommended for moms. ...

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The 30th annual Sundance Film Festival is in full swing in Park City as of last night, so I've been deluged with emails all week about upcoming films, press lines, happy hours, and luncheons with Barbara Boxer and Wilmer Valderrama.  (I wish the latter wasn't true.)  I'm heading out to the fest on Sunday, so check in here all next week for my Sundance recaps.

As part of this year's festival, Sundance has teamed up with YouTube to allow the dissemination of movies via YouTube's new film rental service.  During the fest itself (now through the 31st), you may rent three films (at $3.99 apiece) appearing as part of this year's Sundance--in the fest's new Next series, spotlighting low-budget films--as well as two favorites from last year.  The highlights include local filmmaker Linas Phillips' road trip comedy of errors Bass Ackwards and Louie Psihoyos' dolphin fishing doc The Cove, which I would call 2009's best documentary, as well as 2009's best horror film. 

Full press release after the jump....

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