« Family Photos And Orthodontics | Main | There Will Be Blood »
February 6, 2008
Quiet City, Dance Party USA & One Gorgeous DVD
Aaron Katz's two feature films, Dance Party USA and Quiet City, are now available in a sun-drenched double disc edition from Benten Films, the boutique distributor who've made good on the promise of their inaugural release, Joe Swanberg's LOL, with a gorgeous set that's very clearly just as much a labor of love for the distributors as its contents were for the filmmakers.
Quiet City fittingly gets top billing here. It was one of the benchmarks in last summer's New Talkies series, and of all the films lumped together under the dreaded 'M'-word, it received the warmest welcome; the general critical consensus could be best summed up by Stephen Holden's review in the New York Times, in which he deemed the film a "fully realized work of Mumblecore poetry," and the film earned Katz and producer Brendan McFadden an Independent Spirit nomination (and, hopefully, an award when the ceremony occurs the end of the month). I would add that, in addition to its many other graces, it contains one of the best haircut scenes ever.
The film is augmented here by a strong selection of features, including a lovely commentary by the two stars, Erin Fisher and Chris Lankenau, and a Bizarro World version of the movie directed by Joe Swanberg (all the funnier because of the back story). But the best feature on the entire set, to my mind, is the feature film on the second disc: Katz's first film, Dance Party USA. This 65 minute masterpiece had a substantial enough festival run back in 2006, but it never accrued quite the acclaim that its successor would. Now's it's time to shine, and packaged as it is with a more well-known picture, maybe it'll have the chance to sneak up on people the way it did on me.
Let me say now that I outright love Dance Party USA. It's a great film, and part of it's greatness lies in the way it manages to capture the onset of nostalgia without indulging in a single note of sentimentality. Allow me this: the first time I saw the film was on a screener, when I was sick with the flu. My girlfriend at the time came over to take care of me; she braved my germs and squeezed into a chair next to me and we watched the movie together. It was one of those nights, and so the best compliment I can pay Dance Party USA is that it's better than my memory of seeing it for the first time.
So. The DVD is available here.
Posted by David Lowery at February 6, 2008 10:14 PM
Comments
Just dropping a comment on how good the layout of your website is, been looking into making a blog similar to yours and might make mine similar, did you hire a coder or did you design it yourself?
Posted by: Krystina Antuna at September 2, 2010 3:34 PM