Movie Review: Home, James (2014)

Directed by Jonathan Rossetti

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell
   
James (played by director Jonathan Rossetti) is an aspiring fine art photographer who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He pays the bills by working as a sober driver, trolling the pubs of the downtown area, offering rides to inebriated club goers. It is in this seedy milieu that he meets Cooper (Kerry Knuppe), a woman who likes her liquor and high times. James plugs away at his photography career while dating the carefree Cooper, until he gets a break with a major gallery owner. Matching Cooper drink-by-drink, James stumbles and falls and realizes he must divest himself from what is essentially a toxic, dead-end relationship.

Home, James is a microscopic budget indie romance and labor of love currently making the film festival rounds. Its story is simple and stark, and the performers are able to pull off the subtle gradations of infatuation, romance, love and alienation in a compelling manner. Director-writer-star Rossetti seems a bit too old to be playing a conflicted twenty-something artist. Co-star Knuppe has probably tired of being told how much she resemble Julia Roberts. As befitting a story about a photographer, the cinematography by George Su is gorgeous. Especially noteworthy are the scenes set at dawn, where the young lovers are bathed in exterior scenes doused in rosy hues of peach and red.

Movie Review: "Rewind This!" (2013; Filmbuff/MPI Media Group)

...wow!! How so very far, we've come, in such a short period of time, with regards to society's embrace of the home video venue. Heck, in the not-too-distant past, this viewer fondly remembers a time when conceiving the possibility of actually building a personal movie collection, was a pipe-dream fantasy, exclusively realized and relished by the much more well-to-do, who had the financial resources, in maintaining a temperature controlled warehouse, chock full of multiple-reel feature films, on the standard filmstrip format (...at the time, my father, who serviced the Hollywood business community at the time, would often snag distributor movie catalogs in his ventures, which advertised the storage and rental of these multi-reeled films...and we'd waste countless hours and longing sighs...marking and dog-earing the catalog pages...dreaming of the unheard-of actuality of owning a home movie collection). Not too long afterwards, the short-lived war between Beta and VHS (...shhh!! Don't tell anyone, but this viewer actually eschewed Beta, altogether, as an introductory home video format, in favor of the stylus-based CED disc format, before succumbing to VHS), with the latter format, winning out in the end, gave way to a veritable boon, to prospective film collectors, as far as selection, as well as an embrace of the awesome artwork on the tape boxes, large and small...cut-to-fit and clamshell...which often rivaled the original theatrical release poster art of the film, if any...

...and of course, just as films on VHS became fully complacent (...or 'disposable', as director George Romero was once quoted, in saying), with both ardent collectors, as well as the mainstream public, merely wanting to watch the occasional movie, along came the digital format, with DVD giving way to BluRay and online digital download. But that's getting way too far ahead of ourselves; it is that phenomenon of the VHS format, which has exuded an extraordinary longevity...totally unexpected, by the initial purveyors of the format...a 'phenomenon' which, amazingly enough, has refused to die, in light of video store closures & rampant online accessibility...and herein, the focus of which is informatively celebrated, in "Rewind This!"...

Cinema Head Cheese: The Podcast! #94 - No Scrubs

Dave talks about a horror convention he attended in Detroit called Motor City Nightmares, which seems to have needed a little work.

He and Kevin also talk about Streamageddon, which pits the Warner Archives up against the mighty Netflix.

They get deep into the subject of Zach Braff's Kickstarter project and how it effects the landscape of crowd funding. Is it wrong for the rich and famous to go this route? The guys make some interesting points on the matter.

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