Writer-directors Ronald Bronstein and Tom Quinn are two new talents in the realm of self-financed and distributed American cinema who have emerged with striking and highly unusual features in recent months. Bronstein’s Frownland has elicited responses of great admiration, but also outrage from its character study of one of the least likeable protagonists ever showcased in a feature-length movie. Making his screen debut is Dore Mann as Keith, a chain-smoking, stammering, excessively needy, terribly annoying, yet fascinating nobody. The last person you’d want to have a face-to-face conversation with, Keith works a miserable door-to-door sales job, spends time with a roommate and girlfriend who don’t seem to like him very much, and generally tries to survive in an impossibly indifferent New York City.
To view Frownland as a mere freak show, however, is to miss what The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis has observed as “its filmmaker’s commitment to the here and the now of this solitary life, one below the radar and seized by rage, sorrow, and bleating humor, but a life nonetheless.” The film has also won the admiration of Roger Ebert, who wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that “To call [Frownland] uncompromising is to wish for a better word…its only purpose is to do justice to Keith by showing him as he is. I will not forget him.”
Another movie filled with compassion for its outsider characters,
Tom Quinn’s The New Year Parade won the Best Narrative Feature award at the Slamdance Film Festival earlier this year. It focuses on 16-year-old Kat (Jennifer Welsh, in a breakthrough performance) and her older musician brother Jack (Greg Lyons). When their parents separate, Kat is unable to find an outlet for her emotions and Jack is forced to mediate between parents and carry the family finances. While they both embark on new romances of their own, Kat and
Jack find their greatest sources of support in each other.
A tender and moving look at how divorce can affect young people, what makes Quinn’s film really special is its setting. The story is told against the backdrop of Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade, an annual New Year’s Day tradition where neighborhood musicians compete for prizes wearing outlandishly designed costumes. Quinn and his cast and crew shot The New Year Parade over a year’s time, capturing the 12 months of real planning and rehearsing that lead up to January 1. The way that Quinn ingeniously, seamlessly mixes documentary footage with a fictional story makes for a truly fresh experience.
Frownland screens November 8 and The New Year Parade screens December 12. Ronald Bronstein and Tom Quinn will both be on hand to introduce their work and answer questions following the screenings.
