Frownland.

"Like a signal flare rising above the streets of Lower Manhattan, Frownland announces that underground cinema is alive and well and taking up residence - at least for the next week - at the IFC Center," announces Scott Foundas in the Voice.

"We're not the only ones mad about this film," writes Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay. "It has received a Spirit Award nomination, a French theatrical deal, and praise from critics ranging from Amy Taubin to Scott Foundas to, now, The New Yorker.... In short, the film is a trip. It crawls under your skin, and you'll be thinking of its grubby little world and the characters who live within it for days afterward. Please go see it and support what has sadly become a lost vision of American independent cinema."

Updated through 3/8.

"An up-close, painfully intimate portrait of a hapless, manipulative schlub, a Loser with a capital L, the film offers for our horror and our empathy a creature whose very existence is a rebuke to the stultifying uniformity (the niceness, the neatness) of what now often passes for American independent cinema," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Written and directed by Ronald Bronstein, making his feature-film debut, this is personal cinema at its most uncompromising and fierce."

"This is perhaps the most wrenching portrait of inarticulateness and desperation I've ever seen," writes Brandon Harris. "It is the story of a completely unappealing, near rabid man told without compromise. Run and see for yourself. You might regret it, but you won't forget it."

"It might make you angry, it might give you hope that films this weird and fucked up can still get made with a little persistence," agrees William Speruzzi. "At the least you will take away one simple fact; Juno it ain't."

But for Bill Weber, writing in Slant, "The anomic gloom that envelops Frownland, a miserabilist, micro-budgeted 16mm freak show, fatally impedes its seeming aspirations to the mercurial grit of Cassavetes - or even to attaining a grainier, black-comedy kinship to the razor's-edge psychodramas of Lodge Kerrigan."

"If David Lynch remade Taxi Driver with equal doses of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, the result might look something like the drab existential loneliness of Ronald Bronstein's Frownland," suggests Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

"It's as raw and as offbeat as independent film gets - which is exactly the kind of stuff that the studios' so-called indie divisions won't touch with a 10-foot pole," writes Martin Tsai in the New York Sun. "Mr Bronstein has managed to come up with an absorbing little film under extremely limited circumstances. It will be interesting to see what he can one day do with a budget."

Updates, 3/8: "The comedy/drama of discomfort may have evolved into pure rhythm indifferent to its own content, but Frownland forgoes this evolution, and the result is a film whose effect is cumulative and energy-based," writes Daniel Cockburn at Reverse Shot.

"Frownland offers the flipside of American independent cinema's common glorification of all things and people quirky and eccentric," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News.

Brandon Harris talks with Bronstein; so does Jeremiah Kipp for the House Next Door.

Posted by dwhudson at March 7, 2008 12:41 PM