IFF Boston 2011: Final Installment

I had grand aspirations for the final days of the festival. There were several interesting movies scheduled, and I intended to see every one. Sadly, 5 successive nights up well beyond my curfew started to do me in. When the dust (and crowds) cleared Thursday morning, I had seen 11 movies, but skipped the final two on my radar, for reasons that can best be described as exhaustion. Sleep deprivation being the primary cause, but emotional exhaustion a close second. This years festival was especially documentary heavy, and after watching film after engrossing film, you approach the natural limits of your attention. Additionally, film festivals are not the place to search for levity, and 'The Trip' notwithstanding, true humor was hard to come by (though many films were certainly uplifting). My final three films were a microcosm of what one expects from a film festival. A documentary, a stylish, low-budget action flick and an offbeat, quirky coming-of-age story. After failing to find any duds in my first 8 films, my luck ran out with a couple here. Here's a quick rundown:

El Bulli - Cooking in Progress - Gereon Wetzel
El Bulli is a world-renowned Spanish restaurant regarded as the hardest reservation on Earth. Head chef Ferran Adria has been hailed as the most innovative and insane chef in the world. Under his watchful eye, El Bulli shuts down for six months every year to prepare their menu for the upcoming year. This documentary tells the story of a year at El Bulli. The preceding synopsis is more supplementary information than you will receive in the entire film. Wetzel throws you instantly into El Bulli's laboratory, where chef-scientist hybrids scratch results into lab notebooks and play with instrumentation seemingly on loan from Merck. Extracting flavors and juices from things that have no business being juiced, the chefs taste their results and distract Adria from his cellphone long enough to offer him a spoonful. Many chefs and Adria himself talk about magic of food, with an enthusiasm you would expect but strain to appreciate. I went into this film truly excited and hoping for something that would validate it, but what I got instead, was a virtually silent thirty-minute opening scene of these chefs vacuuming mushrooms. I understand this is the unsexy R&D side, but this was beyond unsexy, it was boring. Perhaps Wetzel would have been better served if he had spliced in interviews with these characters or food critics to tell us how original and amazing what we were seeing was, but I couldn't see it. As the film progressed and the dishes gained momentum and shape, the documentary picked up steam, but it is never able to dig itself out of the hole the opening scene puts it in. Opening with a brief background of the restaurant and its accolades would give the audience a better appreciation for the research phase and its necessity and maybe make the whole thing go down a little easier. Instead, Wetzel gives us moldy bread and expects us to hang around for dessert.  

Bellflower - Evan Glodell
'The end of a relationship can be apocalyptic"

This was the synopsis for Bellflower in our IFFBoston program. Vague? Yes. Pretentious? Maybe. Intriguing? Very.

Today, five days removed from seeing it, I don't think I could sum it up any better. Ostensibly, its about two 30-ish guys in California, drinking and fornicating their way through life. Not in a depressing way, but in a 'you-should-really-grow-up-and-stop-building-flamethrowers' way. The two men meet a group of women at their local watering hole, and a relationship blossoms between Woodrow (director Glodell himself) and Milly. Woodrow is the quiet, brooding type, and Milly is the 'spit-and-vinegar' type, but they work for a while. And then things turn sour, and the film defies explanation. The story is interesting and engrossing, but it is the spectacular style and assured direction that really keeps the film going and completely ensnares the audience. Filmed using a camera Glodell cobbled together from vintage parts, the shots have a yellow, grimy sheen that adds to the apocalyptic mood. Snatched up by Oscilloscope records and primed for a larger release, Glodell has been taking this film and 'Mother Medusa' (his fire-breathing muscle car) from festival to festival anyway to generate buzz. While Medusa probably won't be in attendance next time Bellflower comes to Boston, the film is loud and bold enough that you won't miss it.

Terri - Azazel Jacobs
Of all these films, Terri is probably the one most primed for a wide(ish) release. It stars John C Reilly as a no-nonsense assistant principal and newcomer Jacob Wysocki as the titular Terri, an aimless high-school student. Terri lives with his sick uncle and has taken to wearing pajamas to school for reasons that are unclear. He gets in trouble in class and meets with Reilly after school for sentencing. The two bond (sort-of), Terri loosens up and makes 'friends' with other misfit students. Azazel aims for charmingly quirky, but decides to ramp up the quirk in the absence of charm and falls short. There are probably stories about misfit teenagers painted on cave walls, so if you really want to add something new to the genre, you can't subscribe to the Napoleon Dynamite school of "Random=Funny" and hope that the rest will take care of itself. John C Reilly is terrific and the only thing here to salvage it from being a total loss, but he can't save scenes he's not in, which is far too many. I haven't seen any of Jacobs' other films (Momma's Man, The Good Times Kid), but I hope Terri was simply a failed experiment and not indicative of his overall canon.

IFF Boston 2011 Round-Up Pt. 2

I saw four movies on Sunday.This is where I get a little sleepy and complete sentences are challenging. It's pretty tough to gauge the quality of the movie you're about to walk into, so preemptive stimulants are are necessity. Starbucks or Diet Coke are commonplace, but having copped a Five-Hour energy (compliments of the MayFair), I was about to enter uncharted territory. I hoped it could carry me through the last two movies that evening, and it did; mostly because I thought I might die at any moment or maybe melt through my chair.  How did Four-Loko get the axe but menopause in a nip is at every gas station? I will spare you further details, but anyone who takes Five-Hour energy to study probably cuts their fingernails with garden shears or makes toast with a blowtorch. The good news was that the films were solid, and I am excited to tell you about them.

Make Believe - J. Clay Tweel
Kids are cute. Magicians are weird. At what point do magicians go from precocious to insufferable? In Make Believe, there are kids on both sides of this fence, and how you will feel about the film depends on whether you consider Penn and Teller creative geniuses or ponytailed creeps. Each of kids here got into magic for some semblance of control and attention, which is refreshing when the kid is 13 and would otherwise be a bully magnet, but tends to get grating when a kid nears twenty and has the hyperactive intensity of an used car salesman, and a bravado to boot. Confidence is a crucial element to magic, but more integral is the humility that gets them hooked from the beginning and inspires them record a grainy magic special on VHS and replay it until the tape breaks. For some of the kids, the swagger they are forced to adopt for their act, becomes fused with their person and is tough to swallow. The young and international talents are naive enough to have no idea how hard magic is, yet confident enough to believe they can figure it out with perseverance. Tweel does well to focus on their enthusiasm and keep the intensity building until the final scene, but I wish he had a few more tricks up his sleeve in the editing room.

Buck - Cindy Meehl
Buck is a profile of Buck Brannaman, a man who could not look more cowboy if he had a team of costume designers. He has the thick, slow voice of a country sheriff, but is a more empathetic man than you are ever likely to meet. At a young age, Buck and his brother traveled the country performing rope tricks under the stern tutelage of their father. Never a "horse" person, he stumbled into his calling nearly 30 years ago, and now performs small miracles 9 months out of the year through his horse training workshops. Buck's philosophy is based on sensitivity and respect, treating the horse like an equal, and anticipating their movements and allowing them to anticipate yours. For centuries, horses had to be 'broken' before they could be of any use, but Buck intends to change that, one timid creature at a time. He can do things on a wild horse in 5 minutes that take Hollywood trainers months to mimic. It isn't hypnosis or ESP, he is simply sensitive to the horses fears, and gains their trust. It is miraculous to watch, and leagues beyond a trite Animal Planet special. As we learn more about Buck's troubled past, his character gains depth and as his training philosophy broadens into life lessons, the horses aren't the only ones captivated.

Project Nim - James Marsh
Nim was the center of a landmark 1973 science experiment by Columbia behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace that investigated whether chimpanzees could understand and use American Sign Language to communicate with humans. Plucked from his mother at 2-weeks old, Nim was raised as a human in every capacity by the research team, but not in the sterile scientific confines you might expect. Terrace employs a revolving door of students who raise Nim affectionately and spend hours teaching him signs and tracking his progress. Many of these female students engage in romantic relationships with Terrace before being shown the door or excusing themselves after Nim's increasingly vicious attacks. After the experiment is abandoned that Project Nim takes on a dramatic new direction, and science becomes secondary. Director James Marsh (MAN ON WIRE) does a fantastic job of reconstructing an engaging story from very little archival video footage, instead relying on gorgeous photographs, interviews, and innovative art direction. As Nim's story gains complexity and the cast of characters thickens, Marsh charges ahead, and risks losing control of his central premise. By allowing his subjects to speak candidly, even about one another, he navigates these dangerous waters nimbly, trusting us to make up our own minds and wait to hear the whole story.

Another Earth - Mike Cahill
Another Earth takes a well-trodden redemption story and filters it through a unique science fiction premise to makes a film that is more than the sum of these two parts. Part Contact, part Donnie Darko, it's hard to believe that Another Earth is Mike Cahill's first narrative feature, but that's what it says in my program, so I will take him at his word. In any case, his film impressively strikes a delicate balance between dramatic tension and eerie sci-fi chills. Leaning on story and strong performances over CGI, Cahill uses the science as a means rather than an end, keeping the story insular and avoiding sci-fi tropes one might expect. It is surprisingly how well the whole thing works, and if you can suspend disbelief until the end you'll find yourself rewarded for your patience.

IFF Boston 2011 Round-Up Pt. 1

Four days in and IFF Boston has fully enveloped Davis Square. Muscle cars named Medusa breathe fire behind the Somerville Theatre, a gigantic queue of people snakes around the building and several blocks down Dover St. The theatre foyer is finely-tuned chaos, not unlike a Mumbai intersection. But oh, the films! 47 screenings thus far, and another 20 scheduled for today makes the ominous weather a little less troubling. Not that my complexion can carry a tan on normal days, but during the film-fest, I considerably more nocturnal. I've enjoyed 4 movies so far, and have another 4 scheduled today, but before I forget, I want to jot down a few thoughts on each, should any of you have the chance to see them in a larger release.

The Trip - Dir. Michael Winterbottom
I'm not sure if knowing that The Trip was already a successful BBC miniseries helped or hurt its charms. On one hand, it feels a little cheap to know that a TV series has been trimmed and stitched together to support a 2-hour running time, but on the other, Michael Winterbottom is an accomplished director and if anything, this film should be a potent distillation of the originals hilarity. As it turns out, I was right on both accounts. The film is quite funny and doesn't necessarily feel cobbled together, but at the same time, doesn't possess any semblance of an 'arc'. It is, by my accounts, a series of fancy meals and car-rides in which Coogan and Brydon riff off one another for 110 minutes. There are pitch-perfect Woody Allen impressions, an amazing spoof of 'costumed dramas' ("WE RISE AT DAYBREAK") and Brydons terrible yet endearing Al Pacino impression he cannot help himself from lapsing into. As a series of scenes, it is a riot, but as a film, its could use a bit more focus.

Green - Dir. Sophia Takal
Green opens with a scene that is does not ingratiate itself with the audience. It features Sebastian extolling the virtues of Philip Roth and flippantly dismissing his girlfriend's claims to the contrary. They are from Brooklyn, and I believe them. The couple then move to a sublet in West Virginia, where Sebastian intends to write an article on sustainable living for a blog. It plays about how you would expect, but is sufficiently frustrating due to the intentionally loose plotting, which lets Sebastian to ramble uninterestingly simply to fill a scene. Things improve when Robin (director Takal) enters the picture and a bizarre will-they/did-they? love triangle begins to take shape. Robin is more naive then dumb, but nevertheless, it takes a long time to warm up to her drawl and personality. I understand what Takal was trying to do by dropping a woman into the story who is at first the butt of inside jokes for the couple, and then a palpable threat, but it could have been better handled with a little more direction. The strong score and eerie shots of the woods add a fantastic sense of foreboding, but the story never meets it there, and eventually gets in over its head. I think Takal has talent and am interested in what she does next, but she could stand to put more trust in herself.

How To Die In Oregon - Dir. Peter Richardson
In 1994, Oregon became the first state to pass the Die with Dignity act, a law that makes it legal for terminally ill individuals to take their own lives (under supervision of their doctor) when their quality of life has diminished. In the 16 years since, 600 people have gone through with it. God did not smite them from on high, and no one was killed by their family in an inheritance grab as Republicans feared. Richardson makes it quite clear that this is not suicide, as suicide involves people with functioning bodies but whom are clinically depressed, whereas dying with dignity patients have complete mental faculties, but irreparably failing bodies. The first hour of the movie hops between several affecting stories, but these eventually coalesce into the story of 54 year-old Cody Curtis, a wife and mother of two with inoperable liver cancer. Her story arc starts with simple meditation on the principles of Death with Dignity, and shows her making preparations with her family, but takes a new shape as she exceeds her prognosis and 'Death with Dignity' becomes more of a dark cloud hanging over her family than a calm and logical way out. In less capable hands, the story could have unraveled, but Richardson strikes a wonderful balance between the celebration of life and the acceptance of death, never reveling in either too long to feel exploitative or uncomfortable. I wish the pacing of the film had allowed for the other subplots stretch to the end as well, if only for some small relief from Cody's story, but I can understand if he wanted to give the Curtis family the attention and concern they deserve. In any case, it's a powerful film.

Puppet - Dir. David Soll
When a documentary sheds light on a topic that you knew nothing of or had deeply seated misconceptions  about, it is an amazing thing. What King of Kong did for videogames and Wordplay did for crossword puzzles, David Soll's Puppet does for puppetry. As it turns out, puppets haven't always been a gimmick to shut up a whiny child. Every culture on earth has revered puppetry and it wasn't until the days of television and film that they began their descent into the margins. While Jim Henson and Sesame Street have performed small miracles in reviving puppetry, they also reinforced the notion that they are not to be considered a serious art. The puppetry that Dan Hurlin and his team perform in Puppet can best be described as an amazingly intricate dance, and seeing what goes into it makes it even more astonishing. I will resist delving into the plot of Hurlin's show, if only to say that it surrounds a photographer/hermit who finds himself literally shrinking as portrait photography as an art form metaphorically does. I will confess to being someone who never gave puppetry any serious consideration alongside other forms, but now feel like a complete boob. The level of craft necessary to breathe life into an inanimate object (and not just life, but personality and humor as well), cannot be overstated. And in many ways it is even beyond acting. Many times, an actors mannerisms and body language may simply be coincidental and unconscious, but with puppets, every shrug and sigh is the complex product of three puppeteers working together as one. Puppet does exactly what a great documentary should do: introduces you to something new, and makes you fall in love.

On Repeat: Lykke Li - Sadness Is a Blessing

I'm moving to Stockholm. Sweden has everything I need. The best pop music (Robyn), the best folk singer (Tallest Man on Earth), the most energetic rock outfit (The Hives) and now the best brooding, damaged femme fatale, Ms. Lykke Li. She won me over instantly with "Dance, Dance, Dance" off her 2008 release Youth Novels, but this years Wounded Rhymes has her ditching some of the cutesy, and going for the throat.

The just released music video for 'Sadness Is a Blessing' is the antithesis of the joyous "Dance Dance Dance', but no less affecting. Li has never been one for monologues, preferring to dance when the right words don't come. It's her celebration and her depression, whirling and twisting with the concentrated frenzy of a child. In Sadness is a Blessing, she seems somewhere in between, declaring her sadness both a pearl and a curse. It's something she has known well and is resigned to forever be near, like a doting boyfriend.

As she drinks heavily in a silent restaurant and begins her dance, there's still a glimmering happiness present in the song, even as she is subdued by waiters and tries to wriggle herself free. Even her most devastating songs always carry a hopeful glow, as though she is remembering these miseries with nostalgia, knowing that it made her who she is today. It's a spirit that cannot be restrained.

Bloom

Insider Guide: IFF Boston 2011

In 8 short years, the Independent Film Festival of Boston has grown from cultish gathering, to cinematic powerhouse, attracting acclaimed films straight out of prestigious festivals like Sundance and SXSW. It's no coincidence that this festival has grown so quickly and has been embraced by the city. They are not the first film festival to try to make it in Boston, but they have succeeded where others have failed because they are impeccably run by people who sincerely love movies. The tiny staff manages to organize the massive week-long festival while holding down day-jobs and being completely non-profit. When you care, it shows. Hundreds of volunteers offer their time to make the festival run smoothly (I am lucky enough to have taken part last year and be welcomed aboard again this year), and area venues like the Somerville and Brattle theatres hand over their keys to IFFBoston for the week, something they do not have to do and illustrates how contagious the staff enthusiasm really is.

Last year I managed to see 8 films, many of which made my Top 10 list and went on to win major awards (Winter's Bone, Cyrus, Down Terrace). Many I didn't see also went on to do big things (Marwencol, I Am Love, The Killer Inside Me, Life During Wartime, Tiny Furniture). Part of the fun (and work) of attending a film festival is figuring out what films are actually worth your valuable time. With nearly 100 films playing, it becomes imperative to do a little research, lest you find yourself stuck in an unbearable dark room for 90 minutes and your wallet $10 lighter. Mercifully, I've done the lion's share of the research for you this year, so you simply have to heed my advice and enjoy the show. The following are the shows I intend to see, or would see if I wasn't volunteering.


4/27 Wednesday (Opening Night):

7:30pm Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
The story of Kevin Clash, the man behind Elmo. Who doesn't love Elmo. I would pay $10 to see an extended Sesame Street featuring only Elmo, so this is the next best thing. Don't bring children or they will probably be scarred for life to find out Elmo is really a hand and two sticks.

4/28: Thursday 


To be honest, I'm not super jazzed about any of the Thursday evening films. There's a documentary called Convento that caught my eye, mostly because it looks rife with steampunk. There's also a documentary about the seminal Minnesota rock outfit The Replacements, but I think I might save up my energy for the weekend push.

4/29 Friday


7:15pm The Trip
Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play two traveling food critics and compete with each other about the level of their fame. I believe this was a miniseries in the UK and this film is the product of editing the episodes together. If the above Michael Caine-off is any indication, it looks like a lot of fun.


9:30pm Submarine
Wales' answer to Rushmore, complete with fantastic soundtrack, quirky characters, and awkward teenage love. Sign me up.

4/30 Saturday



12pm Green
Billed as a blurring of reality and paranoid fantasy, the trailer makes it look like a low-budget Antichrist, which makes me glad it's playing during the day. I hope they dropped the genital mutilation.

2pm How To Die In Oregon
A calm and even-handed look at the topic of physician-assisted suicide. Hopefully the US is beyond the Dr. Kevorkian nonsense at this point and can actually handle this conversation. Won top Documentary Prize at Sundance.


5:30pm Puppet
A documentary about a master puppeteer attempting to create a complex work and shake the stereotypes surrounding puppets. Looks fascinating.

I have to work the rest of Saturday night, but I highly recommend checking out Page One: Inside the New York Times, a documentary about the newspaper and the dying art of journalism. Playing at 7:15pm.

5/1 Sunday 

12:15pm Make Believe
A documentary about six kids competing for the title of Teen World Champion at the World Magic Seminar in Las Vegas. Hopefully it does for magic what Spellbound and King of Kong did for similarly nerdy pursuits. Won Audience Award at several film festivals.


3:15pm Buck/2:45pm Bobby Fischer Against the World
My first real conundrum of the festival. Two interesting documentaries, playing at the same time. Do I chose Buck, the moving story of "horse whisperer" Buck Brannaman, determined to end the age-old practice of horse "breaking", or Bobby Fischer Against the World, that traces the life of Bobby Fischer and tries to understand his eccentricities and whether chess helped or exacerbated them. It's a toss-up, but I've heard great things about Buck, so it gets my vote. Plus, who doesn't want to be a cowboy?

5:30pm Project Nim
From the director of the fantastic Man on Wire, comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who was raised as a human and communicated through sign language and taught the world more about humanity than chimpanzees. Man on Wire was amazing, so I have high hopes.


7:30pm Another Earth/8pm Oliver Sherman
Conundrum #2. See Another Earth, the sci-fi Sundance winner about the discovery of another earth and its repercussions or Oliver Sherman, the tense drama of an army veteran seven years off the battlefield trying to pull his life together starring Donald Logue and Garret Dillahunt. Both look wonderful, but I can't resist smart, low-budget sci-fi (Moon, Primer, etc).

5/2 Monday 

7pm El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
Another documentary, what do you know? This one goes behind the scenes of the world-famous restaurant and offers a glimpse into the magic of molecular gastronomy. Impossible to resist for scientists and foodies alike.

9:30pm Bellflower
The description of this SXSW hit film is ingeniously vague. I sleuthed a little more and found a video of P. Diddy giving the director of this film $1000 for some bizarre reason. Further investigation uncovered a loose plot surrounding two friends who build elaborate weapons in preparation for the apocalypse, culminating in a fire-breathing named Medusa. Apparently Medusa herself will be on hand at the Somerville Theatre. I love a good apocalyptic romp and will be there to get my eyebrows singed.

5/3 Tuesday (Both showings at the Stuart Street Playhouse in downtown Boston) 


7pm Terri 


John C. Reilly as a loveable fuck-up principal who teaches another loveable fuck-up the ways of the world? From the team behind Blue Valentine and Half Nelson? What God did I please?

9:30pm The Whistleblower
Billed as a political thriller, Rachel Weisz plays a police officer who risks her career to uncover a Bosnian human-trafficking scandal involving US Contractors and the UN. Monica Bellucci and David Strathairn also star. Terrible poster, but has some good buzz coming out of TIFF.

5/4 Wednesday (At the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline)

8pm Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
This documentary follows Conan along on his Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television tour that occured in the wake of his NBC fallout and before his TBS resurrection. Conan's self-deprecating humor  and resilience makes him impossible not to love, and even this 1 minute clip holds more wit and affability than the full sets of most comedians these days. Playing at his hometown theatre no less, I'm sure Conan's family will be there in droves, if not the wonder himself. Great way to close out the festival.

Jamestown/Spring

Old Song Review: The Four Tops - Bernadette

While I take great pains to be on the razors edge of indie music, that doesn't mean my radio dial is forever tuned into the trendiest. There are plenty of songs I don't like, and when this happens, I have no choice but to take my ears elsewhere. My tried and true back-up is 60's on 6, and they never let me down. There was a time when I was ashamed of enjoying Oldies, and my sister and I would roll our eyes as hard as we could and  sigh heartily from the backseat whenever our parents would turn it on. But today, I don't think any decade in music can hold a candle to it. It's been too long since I've shared a great song on here.

When one considers Motown, they inevitably think of The Supremes and The Temptations, and for good reason. They put it on the map, and are responsible for a staggering number of Top 10 hits. But there were several other groups whose music continues to influence, but remain in the shadows. The Four Tops had two Billboard No. 1's I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch) and Reach Out I'll Be There, and a string of other hits deep into the 80's, but in my opinion, Bernadette is their crowning achievement. Off their 1967 release Reach Out, it is the perfect evolution of Motown music, maintaining the dense efficiency while never feeling rushed or forced. Frontman Levi Stubbs sings with James Browns intensity but in a deeper register, giving his words added urgency. Gorgeous backing vocals add depth and give the song a steady rudder, while Stubbs is free to make his desperate case for her love. At around 2:30, the song reaches what seems to be a traditional ending with a brief coda and fade out, before bursting out for one more chorus. Of course false endings like this are commonplace today, but it was an edgy choice at a time when most songs followed a very rigid formula. Now its just another reason to love it.
           

Review: Marwencol

At its heart, Marwencol is a movie about the ways we cope. Everyone has measures they reflexively latch upon when the real world is too much to handle. Drugs and alcohol are popular. Food and exercise are attractive distractions. For some, making art is the only way they can find enough solace and control to function in their normal lives. Mark Hogancamp, the subject of the fantastic and moving Marwencol, had nowhere left to turn but in.

Mark was savagely beaten outside a bar in 2000. He spent nine days in a coma and surgeons had to rebuild his face. His brain injury was so severe he had to learn to speak, walk and write again. After 40 days of progress, Mark could no longer afford treatment was forced to leave the hospital, still a very much disabled man. After a brief stint in physical therapy, it too became impossible for him to pay for. Half a man and very much alone, Mark turned to dolls to continue his therapy.

By all accounts, the Mark before the beating was not a model citizen. Self-described as a drunk who rarely made it into work, Marwencol introduces the possibility that the beating and his reconstruction actually saved his life. When I say dolls, the mind inevitably turns to Barbie. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that he has several Barbies. But he also has an larger number of more sophisticated dolls with impeccable facial features and hand-made outfits. Mark has placed these characters into a fictional WWII-era Belgian town called Marwencol, where Americans and the SS live together, going about their daily lives in relative peace, punctuated with outbursts of violence. Most of the characters are based on, and look startlingly like people he knows in real life. An old neighbor, friends and family, his boss, himself. They all find their way into his town, and become narrative devices for his stories.

It would be one thing if Mark simply played with dolls and used them as a means to improve his dexterity and motor-skills (he also built every intricate building in the town, an unbelievable feat on its own), but Mark painstakingly arranges these dolls into jaw-droppingly realistic scenes and photographs them. In one series, Mark's likeness is abducted and beaten by the SS. The photographs are as gripping and chilling as real war photographs and often just as difficult to stomach. The dolls are flexible enough to accommodate extremely precise movements, allowing Mark to set them up to perfectly capture what he wants to portray. The results are often extraordinary.

The Mark today has no interest in alcohol. He drinks coffee and wishes he had a girlfriend. He takes photos, sends them out to be developed, and retakes them all over again if he doesn't like something. His life revolves around and for the most part exists in Marwencol, where he is in control and has a beautiful girlfriend and a throng of adoring women at his side. Marwencol has allowed him to finish what physical therapy and his doctor could not. Sure he could have gotten a dog, or read a self-help book, but Marwencol offers him an opportunity that nothing else does: a chance to escape his damaged life and become whole again, on a 1/6 scale.

On Repeat: Cults - You Know What I Mean

How many hits does it take for a "one-hit wonder" to shake that hyphenated plague? Are there two-hit wonders? Can you even a be "wonder" if you haven't even released an album yet? So many questions, so little material for snarky bloggers to anoint as "the next big thing" or to release the waves of backlash. Cults is a fitting name for a band who charmed the blogosphere (yours truly included) in 2010 with "Go Outside", and then proceeded to release next-to-nothing with the indie world at large ready to eat out of the palm of their hand. Everyone drank the Kool-Aid, and we wanted more, damn it. Well last week, Cults quietly released a new song on their website that somehow managed to improve upon the perfect and recapture their buzz in advance of their album release in May.

The title "You Know What I Mean" sounds like something the Bloodhound Gang would release, complete with countless euphemisms and probably some animals thrown in for good measure, but in the capable hands of Cults, it sounds like an uncovered Supremes song. The gentle guitar swirl and the irresistible Unchained Melody-inspired picking are like a 50 year old time-capsule, a feeling that continues once Madeline Follin enters with her gorgeous voice. She achingly and breathlessly croons about her shaky, fearful brain, begging to be saved from the light and the prospect of sleeping alone. She sings with an earnestness miles away from sultry and more reminiscent of a scared child climbing into her parents bed after a bad dream, calmed just by the whispered assurance that "everything's ok". It's a feeling nobody grows out of.