Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
ScreenDaily.com offers a mixed, mostly negative, review of Asheville director Chusy Haney-Jardine’s made-in-Asheville independent film, an award winner at Sundance a few weeks back:
The film should have a nice ride on the festival circuit in the US and internationally, but its pretentious tone and monotonous stories won’t draw the crowds, even with some critical support. Foreign interest is likely to be confined to festivals.
…
Haney-Jardine is also a non-professional, sometimes on target, but often just experimenting with something. Like the ad hoc directing, camera work by Patrick Rousseau ranges from the home-movie look to occasional polished effects. Production design by Bob Zimmerman seems like the cinematic equivalent of the found object.
Some of the performances do get you laughing. Mike Ellis plays Gene, the embattled husband in a trailer couple in Penance, who flies off the handle when, Little Rickie, the dwarf (Brian Fox), conducts a guerrilla surveillance campaign on Gene’s wife. Homeland (or is it Down-Home?) Security has never been quite this absurd.
Yet the absurdity is not sustained so enjoyably in the later sections, with rambling dialogues and soliloquies, oddly confused emotions, endless pauses, and shots that meander away from the action. Moments in the painfully long film call to mind the work of another North Carolinian, David Gordon Green, but next to Haney-Jardin, David Gordon Green is a man of tight structure.
Nothing if not personal, Anywhere USA charmed Sundance audiences as a movie that defied the low-budget cloning of Hollywood formulas. It should play well in an Asheville theatre. Anywhere else will be a challenge.
