Grodmin (2005)

User Rating:

7.7/10   

Director:

Jim Horwitz

Writer:

Jim Horwitz (screenplay)

Genre:

Drama

Tagline:

Good Art is Hard to Find

Plot:

While on location filming a narrative expose' at a prestigious east coast art school, the cast and crew...

Plot Keywords:

Grodmin

Cast

Adam Arnold	...	Will Darrow
Eef Barzelay	...	Jaded Art Student
David Becker	...	Prof. Paul Reed
Lucas Branum	...	Brian Cross
Dan Ibarra	...	Dave the Documentary Filmmaker
Rob Iulo	...	Marcus Haine - The Writer
Richard Paro	...	Jim Horwitz - The Director
Cyra K. Polizzi	...	Mira Kern - The Producer
Wes Rabey	...	John Kemps
Keith Streckenbach	...	Prof. Gary Hardin
John Wiederholt	...	David McKenna

Runtime:

USA:100 min (original release)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (NTSC Color)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Certification:

USA:PG-13

Filming Locations:

Madison, Wisconsin, USA

Company:

Half-Life Pictures

Trivia:

Features a brief, debut cameo by Eef Barzelay, front man for the popular alt-rock group Clem Snide.

Might have you banging your noggin up against the wall…but in a good way.

A dupe of this film—which I gather isn't terrifically easy to locate in your local video store— got passed to me through a friend of a friend of a friend (along with, somewhat incongruously, "Cocksucker Blues"), and though I admit I didn't get around to watching it until I was home sick with the flu and had watched all the other DVDs I had on hand, when I did, I found myself totally sucked in—or suckered, depending on how you want to look at it. Because this is a movie with a twist, though the *real* twist which is masked by the one hiding out of sight (that is, the one that is hiding in *plain* sight) might be that you never really know what you've seen, even after you think you've been told what you didn't think you saw in the first place. Make sense? Probably not, and neither, really, does this movie until you start to let it not make sense and achieve its own musicality, or at least let yourself decide that the making sense scarcely matters. It seems maybe to have descended from Zak Penn's film "Incident at Loch Ness," with definitely one crucial difference: while Penn's film, eschewing the blockbuster tendencies which he's known for, certainly has the spirit of an independent, it mostly relies on in-jokes linked to its star, the director Werner Herzog, for its entertainment value. That film, then, cannot help but be forever pointing out to a wider world beyond itself, or at least to the mediated representations which act as portals to it. "Grodmin," on the other hand, manages to be both ultimately more charming and a more severe viewing experience, because in its unfolding, it consistently points only within, imploding a little more with each frame that passes. More so than most of the familiar film- within-a-films out there, the total illegibility of these actors—or individuals, as it may not be right to call them actors at all—to any but the people who must have been around when the filming took place makes this an almost purely formal exercise. But while if I were to call a film with recognizable actors and a director or producer with a known history behind them a "formal exercise," it should be rightly taken as damning with the faintest of praise, the manner in which "Grodmin" is cut adrift from the normal media universe that most of us dwell in actually hearkens back to the excitement that marked, say, those cheeky "formal experiments" in literature in the first half of the 20th century. That is, it manages to be predominantly joyful in its delivery, its tendency to fold back in on itself *actually* suggesting something about the non-movie world outside, as opposed to those grim Hollywood films which reflect themselves and typically only suggest something about the not-so-riveting egos of their makers. Not a movie that would captivate the majority of people, perhaps, but could be considered a quiet masterpiece for folks who live for those moments when they find themselves captivated by a grainy, home-recording-sounding song playing off a college radio station while driving around at 3am, even if they never find out who it is that's behind it because the DJ seems to have fallen asleep at the switch. Also, the actor (?) John Wiedherholt bears an eerie resemblance to Keir Dullea, which can only bode well for him in future endeavors.