Bird Watching
Bird Watching – Constance Marks’s “Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey”
Though there was a resurgence of vocal Muppet devotion with the release of last year’s film The Muppets, one can’t really call that a “comeback.” Pretty much everyone I know has always loved the whole spectrum of Jim Henson’s creations, and millions upon millions of…
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Bird Watching – Lena Dunham’s “Tiny Furniture”
As the tagline says: Aura would like you to know that she’s having a very, very hard time. The main character of the indie comedy Tiny Furniture (2010)—played by writer-director Lena Dunham—has just graduated college with a major in film theory, moved back in with…
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Bird Watching – Ava DuVernay’s “I Will Follow”
Where the pathetic numbers in big budget Hollywood are stagnant at best concerning female filmmakers, women in indie film continue to prove that it is the system, not a lack of ability, that keeps women from these positions of creative power. It is, of course,…
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Bird Watching – The Success of Aline Brosh McKenna
It’s often much more difficult to evaluate a screenwriter’s career than that of a director or an actor. Sure, movies are always collaborative—the actor hopes the director and editor choose good takes, the director hopes the producer doesn’t insist on modifying their vision, etc, etc—but…
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Bird Watching – Jennie Livingston’s “Paris Is Burning”
For a period of time in the mid-to-late 1980s, first-time documentarian Jennie Livingston took her camera into the world of New York City’s “ball” scene, a phenomenon amongst minorities in the gay community of that area and time. Many participants competed in the raucous events;…
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Bird Watching – Claire Denis’s “Trouble Every Day”
I’ve written in this space about Claire Denis before, discussing the remarkable film White Material (2009). Just from that one film, I knew that she could be classified as a master of creating tension. I’ve wanted to go back and watch more of her work,…
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Bird Watching – Cindy Sherman’s “Office Killer”
Among the rules of life if you are a character in a movie is: always be nice to the office freak. This person is about 5000% more likely than other characters to either go on a killing spree or become incredibly successful, by my scientific…
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Bird Watching – La Morte’s and Mendoza’s “Entre Nos”
One of my favorite things about writing this column is the motivation it gives me to poke around the depths of Netflix’s streaming catalogue, searching for women-directed films I may not have heard of, that I can check out instantly from the comfort of my…
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