From Lender’s Bagels To Hollywood

Jay Lender (Better Served Cold Productions photo)

March 24, 2016 - Born into a family that revolutionized American breakfast culture by popularizing the bagel, Jay Lender — whose feature film debut, They’re Watching, comes out in limited release on Friday — knew from an early age that he wanted to be an artist.

The son of Murray Lender, the innovative, long-time marketing director for New Haven’s Lender’s Bagel Bakery, Jay found succor for his budding creative interests in watching one of his father’s employees illustrate the marketing campaigns that helped “bagelize America.”

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Two Filmmakers Preserve New Haven’s Stories

Travis Carbonella (Lucy Gellman photo)

November 13, 2015 - You’ve seen Travis Carbonella before. Jumping on and off stage at Jose Oyola’s show at the College Street Music Hall; trailing along with the giant puppet parade in Westville; interviewing people all over downtown about their lives, their backgrounds, their passions and talents. Carbonella is a freelance videographer, and a dedicated storyteller. He’s New Haven’s Man with a Movie Camera, capturing the essence of this city one video at a time.

“I like showing the human experience, whatever that means, vulnerabilities and all,” Carbonella said during the first segment of an episode of WNHH’s “Deep Focus.” “Everybody has such amazing gifts. If I can create an opportunity for someone’s voice to be heard, especially when that voice is normally not heard, overlooked, marginalized, I think that’s the most fulfilling thing for me.”

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A Love Letter To A Dancer And Activist

November 12, 2015 - In The Passionate Pursuits of Angela Bowen, which will be playing this Thursday night as one of the opening movies in the 2015 New Haven International Film Festival, director Jennifer Abod documents the many challenges and triumphs of a woman who continually sought to reinvent herself as she came to know and embrace each aspect of a complicated identity. Indeed, the film is a sort of love letter — a well-deserved and carefully made one —  to the New Haven dancer, feminist, civil rights activist and scholar offers a loving portrait of a life defined by difficult transitions, hard-won success and lasting personal and professional influence.

Abod, a feminist media producer who has also been Bowen’s partner for the past 35 years, called into the latest episode of WNHH radio’s “Deep Focus” to talk about the life and legacy of someone who never yielded to the persistent forces of racism, sexism, and LGBTQ discrimination.

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On Broadway

Elihu Rubin (Thomas Breen photo)

October 9, 2015 - There’s a picture of Robert Moses tucked behind Book Trader Café on Chapel Street. His arms are crossed and he’s smiling, though there’s something a little uneasy about his pose: his tie is slightly off-center, his face half-hidden in shadow. He looks eager to get back to work.

For the observant pedestrian, here hangs a picture of a man who was never elected to public office, but who nonetheless exerted so much power, built and destroyed and reshaped so much of New York City over the course of the 20th century, that cities throughout the country are still wrestling with the influence of his vision: one of swift, merciless, inescapable modernity.

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New Amistad Doc Offers A People’s History

Ghosts of Amistad (2014)

September 24, 2015 - Marcus Rediker sat just barely above water in a canoe weighed down by three historians and a fisherman. The narrow wooden vessel struggled to stay afloat as it ferried its passengers through the shark and hippo-infested mangroves of southeastern Sierra Leone.

Rediker, a celebrated historian of the Amistad revolt, and his two American colleagues were desperately searching for Lomboko: the infamous, makeshift slave depot that was the point of departure for untold masses, including the captives who would eventually take over the Amistad, as they made the harrowing transatlantic trip from freedom in West Africa to slavery in the New World.

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How Margulies Mined A Hit

Donald Margulies (Paul Bass photo)

September 15, 2015 - Donald Margulies knew right away that Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself , a book about five days’ worth of conversations between Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky and novelist David Foster Wallace, contained a story that he wanted to tell.

A Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and Theater Studies professor with years of experience writing movie screenplays for hire, Margulies saw in this book two characters with unique voices, powerful anxieties, and a complex relationship predicated on admiration and mistrust.

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The Sexual Confusion Express

The D Train (2015)

May 13, 2015 - The D Train, a new comedy about sexual identity and male bonding that is now playing at the Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas in downtown New Haven, uses a familiar genre to make a familiar point, but in a very unfamiliar way. Although the movie ends up with views of marriage, family, and friendship that are far from subversive, it gets there through an admirably — and sometimes hilariously — thorough commitment to its version of the bromance: that ambiguously sexual relationship between two straight dudes that drives most of the comedy and affection in everything from The 40-Year Old Virgin to 21 Jump Street.

First-time directors Andrew Mogul and Jarrad Paul manage to bring to life the sexual relationship between their two male leads while at the same time tempering their sexual identities, leaving the odd impression of a movie that is conventional, surprising, clunky, and exciting all at once.

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Avengers Dissemble

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

May 8, 2015 - “Movies are no longer about the thing,” wrote critic and journalist Mark Harris in a December 2014 essay forGrantland.“They’re about the next thing, the tease, the Easter egg, the post-credit sequence, the promise of a future at which the moment we’re in can only hint.” Harris argues that this encouragement of moviegoers’ eternal anticipation is a thin veil for the cynicism, fear, and purely commercial motivations of today’s studio executives. Why take a risk on something original that could turn out to be unpopular, too topical, or anything other than a franchise capable of easy replication and unimaginable profits?

Avengers: Age of Ultron, the latest box-office titan in the ever-expanding Marvel cinematic universe, complicates and plays into this narrative of Hollywood stagnation and decay.

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The Girl From The Machine

Ex Machina (2015)

April 28, 2015 - “It’s legitimate to ask questions that actually not only do you not know the answers to, but there are no answers to,” writer-director Alex Garland said in a recent interview with The Dissolve. “There is value in posing unanswerable questions.”

Garland’s directorial debut, Ex Machina, a contemplative sci-fi thriller playing at the Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas in downtown New Haven, is captivating in both the unanswerable questions it poses as well as in the unequivocal answers it puts forth.

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Young, Or Something Like It

While We're Young (2015)

April 17, 2015 - “I’m losing my edge,” intones James Murphy in LCD Soundsystem’s 2002 breakout single. The stuttering bass line behind his voice provokes anxiety and defiance.

“I’m losing my edge / to better looking people / with better ideas / and more talent ... / and who are actually really, really nice.” As the bass, drums and synth get louder, Murphy digs in his heels deeper, refusing to concede even an inch to those young folks who are quickly creeping up from behind.

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“It Follows” Summons The Walking Dread

It Follows (2015)

April 10, 2015 - In It Follows, the thrilling new horror film from David Robert Mitchell, walking — so often slow, deliberate, and relaxing — is something much more sinister than a stroll through the park. It becomes the mode of death itself: patient, focused, relentless, inevitable, a haunting presence that is slow but smart, and will never stop following you.

As the film, now playing at the Criterion, opens, Jay Height (Maika Monroe) is a beautiful, bored college student who lives at home in a sleepy suburb north of Detroit. She is on the cusp of adulthood, safely beyond her teenage years and beginning to yearn for whatever is supposed to be next. The film introduces her from across the street, partially obscured by a line of hedges, as she climbs into a plastic, above-ground swimming pool. She floats in a black bikini in the afternoon sun, her mind adrift, a little like Jeffrey Beaumont at the beginning of Blue Velvet — restless and naive, eager to discover something unpredictable in an idyllic and stultifying neighborhood.

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“Song Of The Sea” Offers Truths, Huge And Hand-Drawn

Song of the Sea (2015)

March 26, 2015 - “Children deserve not lesser films but greater ones because their imaginations can take in larger truths and bigger ideas.” So film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his review of 1994’s The Secret of Roan Inish, a story of a young Irish girl who learns that her family tree includes a few selkies, the magical half-human, half-seal creatures of Irish folklore. As The Wizard of Oz, The Iron Giant, and the best works of Pixar and Studio Ghibli attest, however, when made well, these children’s films resonate just as deeply with adults.

As does Song of the Sea, the new Oscar-nominated animated film from director Tomm Moore. It creates a splendid and disturbing world in which children triumph, not through naïveté or some immaculate purity, but through courage, love, and an openness to that which they cannot easily understand. (The film is Song of the Sea currently playing now at the Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas, 86 Temple St.)

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“‘71” Takes On Northern Ireland’s Troubles

'71 (2015)

March 20, 2015 - Here’s an old joke about Northern Ireland: A Jewish man stopped on the street in Belfast is asked whether he is a Protestant or a Catholic. When he responds that he is Jewish, the rejoinder comes: “Aye, but are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?”

In other words: Are you with us or against us?

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“Timbuktu” Shows A City Pulled Apart

Timbuktu (2015)

March 6, 2015 - The Atlantic recently published an article by Graeme Wood entitled “What ISIS Really Wants.” In it, Wood argues that the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the vicious group of Sunni militants that has captured the world’s attention through its knack for barbarity and publicity, is first and foremost a religious institution, drawing ideological sustenance from a well-established millenarian vision.

“The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic,” he writes. “Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.”

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The Most Genius British Genius Movie

Mr. Turner (2015)

February 20, 2015 - This year’s Oscar nominations contain three (!) biopics about British geniuses: Mr. Turner, The Imitation Game, andThe Theory of Everything. The one that isn’t up for best picture just might be the best.

Both The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything are anchored by strong lead performances, by Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne. But both films can be seen as depicting their protagonists’ social and physical challenges — not to mention towering intellectual accomplishments — as plot points on the road to satisfying, crowd-pleasing and, in the case of The Imitation Game, emotionally (and perhaps historically) dishonest conclusions.

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