ROUND-UP October 10-29, 2018

Hello readers! Happy November! Enjoy the rest of my writing from October.

• "'Paper Year' Shows A Married Couple's Troubled First Year." BUST Magazine, October 10, 2018.

"In Paper Year, we watch a beautiful young couple go through an entire marriage cycle in a year. We watch Franny and Dan attempt to be adults in the way they’ve seen modeled around them, only to realize that they’re not as grown-up as they think, which has to be pretty relatable for everyone on the younger millennial end of the spectrum."

• "[Review:] The Song of Sway Lake." Moviejawn, October 17, 2018.

"The most moving scene in the film takes place when, stumbling in the darkened lake house during a blackout, Ollie discovers his father’s hidden cache of records—all worn and scratched with use—and childhood catalogue of his record collection, with not a rating in sight. Timmy hid the Sway Lake record there, too, as it turns out, perhaps thinking that neither his perfectionist mother nor son would think to find them there, and after Ollie finds it, there’s naturally a bit of hullabaloo of who’s going to end up with it. Despite the beauty of the imagery, The Song of Sway Lake is a film that conflates that artsy, impressionistic cinematography with profoundly deep and emotional storytelling, as if one can turn the correlation into a kind of causation."

• "Ambitious wonderland, Heather Ujiie’s Terra Incognita at Rowan University Art Gallery explores nature, culture, the divine feminine." Artblog, October 27, 2018.

"The extensive explanatory text accompanying each piece in Terra Incognita does little to clarify the aims of and intentions behind Ujiie’s works, ultimately raising more questions than it answers. It’s particularly unclear how the artist is attempting to link the earth and the capacities of real and mythic female bodies, and what purpose these linkages serve. Are we harkening back to the traditional association of femininity with nature, and of the destruction of the earth by artificial means with masculinity? Does the destruction of the earth amount to the desecration of women, and vice versa? If femininity is, in Ujiie’s vision, one with nature, where does the purposeful artificiality of fashion and textiles, as viewed in 'Demon,' fit in?"

• "[Review:] Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable." Moviejawn, October 29, 2018.

"Indeed, it’s while discussing two of Winogrand’s (apparently) less-acclaimed books, The Animals (1969) and Women Are Beautiful (1975) that the most complex and invigorating moments of the movie take place. The Animals, published in the years after his divorce to Adrienne Lubeau (his first wife of three), is initially downplayed by the interviewees, who often appear to disagree in their assessments of the book’s significance (another refreshing touch). While it may seem to simply be a collection of photographs of people and animals at the zoo, Freyer reveals (along with her interviewees) that The Animals is about Winogrand’s experiences as a divorced father—by taking his children to the zoo, he can both spend time with them and do his job as a photographer—ultimately showing that as a lost, aimless father with no accompanying mother, he feels “animal” to himself."