Film - Neo-Neo Realism

Today's reading.

First from 3QuarkDaily:

Ramin Bahrani is the director of such films as Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and the new Goodbye Solo. He was named, somewhat controversially, as being on the vanguard of the “neo-neo realism” by A.O. Scott in the New York Times and called “the new great American director” by Roger Ebert. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio show and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas.

I’ve been reading Roger Ebert for over ten years, and I’ve never seen him praise someone as much as he praises you. He’s given your films four stars, he’s put Chop Shop on his list of “the great movies”, he had this wonderful blog post about you. How must this feel, to get such accolades from a man like Ebert?

It’s very humbling, and I’m very grateful because Roger Ebert is a legendary critic, known as the most important in America for decades. I’d like to stress that it’s not just me; he’s said this about a handful of other important directors that I really learned a lot from, like Martin Scorsese, and that makes it all the more wonderful a feeling. Watching Mean Streets as a teenager was one of the most important cinematic moments of my life. It really got me interested in making movies, and what kind of movies, and how to make them. Roger has the ability to write about films in a profound way anyone could understand, and that’s a rare gift. I really appreciate all that he’s done for my films.

Trailers for Bahrani's films:







Then this piece from Roger Ebert:

Ramin Bahrani is the new great American director. After three films, each a master work, he has established himself as a gifted, confident filmmaker with ideas that involve who and where we are at this time. His films pay great attention to ordinary lives that are not so ordinary at all. His subjects so far have been immigrants working hard to make a living in America. His fourth film, now in preparation, will be a Western. His hero will be named Tom. Well, he couldn't very well be named Huckleberry.

Then this piece from A.O. Scott on Neo-Neo Realism:

The lives they illuminate, of fictional characters most often played by nonactors from similar backgrounds, are not commonly depicted on screen: the Senegalese cabdriver in Winston-Salem, N.C., whose friendship with a customer is at the center of “Goodbye Solo”; the aspiring baseball player in “Sugar” who is transplanted from the Dominican Republic to rural Iowa; the African-American shopkeeper in a sparsely populated stretch of the Mississippi Delta whose grief is the dominant mood of “Ballast”; the two very young Korean girls abandoned by their mother in an unfamiliar provincial town in “Treeless Mountain.” But these people and their situations are nonetheless recognizable, familiar on a basic human level even if their particular predicaments are not. And if the kind of movie they inhabit is not entirely new — the common ancestor that established their species identity is a well-known Italian bicycle thief — their unassuming arrival on a few screens nonetheless seems vital, urgent and timely.

And a piece critical of A.O. Scott's piece:

“Neo-Neo Realism,” A. O. Scott’s piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine (and already online), about a new trend in American independent filmmaking, offers lots to think about. His argument is based mainly on the recent films “Wendy and Lucy,” “Ballast,” and “Frozen River,” as well as the films of Ramin Bahrani (whose “Goodbye Solo” will be released on March 27), made on location in diverse American locations, about working-class characters, sometimes using non-professional actors. These are films made skillfully and sincerely under difficult circumstances; they are, in many ways, admirable. But I think that Scott makes a little too much of them. His ambitious article ranges widely over the history of cinema; I think it rests on questionable premises and reaches dubious conclusions.