(Feature)
Rating:
Director: Memo Salazar
Producer: Memo Salazar
Writer: Memo Salazar
Director of Photography: Memo Salazar
Cast: Aaron Banyai, Danielle L. DiDio, Dan Merriman, Andrew Sarno
Format: DV
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GEORGE MICHAEL JACKSON BROWNE (Feature) Rating: Director: Memo Salazar Producer: Memo Salazar Writer: Memo Salazar Director of Photography: Memo Salazar Cast: Aaron Banyai, Danielle L. DiDio, Dan Merriman, Andrew Sarno Format: DV |
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Review by: Warren
Curry
6/07/02
Boy George Michael Jackson Browne is a strange film. The accompanying press notes label it a movie impossible to describe, and I'll second that assessment. Episodic, esoteric, whimsical, offbeat, amusing, frustrating -- all of those words apply. And let's not forget bordering on brilliant; those words apply most fittingly.
A quick summary of the "plot" is a tough chore, but the film essentially follows two sets of characters, whose stories eventually overlap. The first group of people we meet are Matt (Aaron Banyai) and Melissa (Danielle L. DiDio), a young couple attending a movie. When Melissa decides to use the restroom before the film starts, an usher whisks her away to a bizarre room where she stumbles into a lively party. This party appears to be going on in some sort of parallel world, and before we know it, we're next introduced to an entirely different set of characters. Here, we witness a mounting crisis, as a gunman (Andrew Sarro) holds a couple (Dan Hannon and Danielle Roy-Becker) hostage, but this whole predicament appears to be staged i.e. "a film within a film."
What happens from this point forward is a mish mash of occurrences, which include a lecture about the diminishing entertainment value of The Simpsons, a musical interlude, the arrival of an alien (Jack Wimme), who helps Matt find his lost Melissa, a brief lesson about full frame vs. widescreen picture, the sudden censoring of profanity and a character known as The Guy Who Knows Everything (Dan Merrimen), who often enters the various situations to his own personal opening credits sequence. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Director, writer, editor, DP, etc. Memo Salazar employs the "everything AND the kitchen sink" approach to filmmaking (he also includes a bit of animation and has his characters break the 4th wall), and while there is a definite randomness to the events that transpire in the movie, the director displays an engaging and unique vision in just about every frame of this film. What's important here isn't story, but the art of filmmaking itself and all of the various directions artists can pursue if they don't feel a need to be bound by convention. BGMJB isn't necessarily thumbing its nose at those conventions, but instead very insightfully commenting on the boundaries (or lack thereof) of cinematic expression, while tossing in some pointed social criticism for good measure. It's cerebral and intellectual, but not at all exclusionary (proving that thinking can be fun).
The film originally aired on the Internet as a weekly series of 5-minute (or so) episodes, which may or may not have worked to the film's benefit. Admittedly, ingesting all of BGMJB at once can border on information overload. Conversely, some of the "episodes" work much better than others, and I wonder how much of the Internet audience may have tuned out before the final episode. Regardless, as a weekly series or a full-length feature film, BGMJB is exceedingly original and exhaustingly enjoyable.
Salazar is obviously a very well schooled
and cinema literate filmmaker, and his technical skill completely
matches his creative ambition. In BGMJB, he demonstrates
the ability and the imagination do something very exciting with
the art form, and marks himself as a talent that we can only hope
reaches a larger and larger audience in the future. I, for one,
can't wait to see what he has next in store.
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