I recently got invited to photograph the awesome buildOn students at their fund-raising event in Williamsburg.
Photo: BIB
The Iron Triangle, a/k/a Willets Point (above), is the setting for Ramin Bahrani’s movie Chop Shop, which gets a theatrical run at Film Forum February 27 to March 11.
If you were drawn into Bahrani’s previous film, Man Push Cart (Friend of BIB Dennis wrote about it here), we can highly recommend Chop Shop. It is also a chance to see a pocket of New York that sustains many people on the fringes of the workforce, but will soon be re-developed.
In the new issue of Cinema Scope, Jason Anderson writes: "Precisely and sensitively rendered, Chop Shop was one of the standouts in the [Cannes] Directors’ Fortnight in 2007. As the film wended its way through the fall festival circuit, it continued to fight above its weight class. But what’s most remarkable about Chop Shop is not its intelligence or humanity, or Bahrani’s increasing fluency with the cinematic language he learned from the gods of neo-realism (Italians and Iranians in particular). It’s how convincingly he fuses his characters with their environment."
Also in the latest Cinema Scope (web-designed by yours truly), read Andrew Tracy on Fassbinder, the Lady BIB on No Country for Old Men, and Tom Charity on There Will Be Blood. (The Lady’s own capsule review: "THERE WILL BE AWESOME.")
Still courtesy of Noruz Films
