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Reviews
Variety
This second feature by Alejandro Adams confirms him as an arresting talent. [Viewers] may be fascinated to the point of repeat viewings to sort out its myriad characters and half-buried clues.
Village Voice
Micro in budget, macro in ambition, accomplishment, and scope, Adams's slyly withholding film prompts multiple viewings--and deserves them.
indieWIRE
Alejandro Adams' AROUND THE BAY is a true find...[a] quiet, beautifully realized story. Every single moment of the story rings true, aided by uniformly excellent performances.
Richard von Busack
It's easier to write about plots than about Adams' intense yet allusive focus, his intelligent sound design, his probing yet cooled-down use of inflammatory material and the pensive quiet force he lets loose in the actors.
Karina Longworth
With a density of thought and image that makes multiple viewings virtually mandatory in spite of (if not because of) its troubling aftertaste, CANARY is, for my money, a must-see.
Box Office (Schieron)
It's truly seldom you see an aesthetic, particularly one as overused as the handheld video-cam, employed so judiciously and with such artless efficiency. It's not hyperbolic to suggest the direction could influence or be part of a new trend in filmmaking...Make no mistake: this camera is a weapon.
Twitch (Guillen)
[AROUND THE BAY is] evocative and lovely...thoroughly enthralling and technically masterful. There are moments of such spare beauty in this film that they register in the body like pebbles dropping into the deep waters of grief. Alejandro Adams articulates the dysfunction of a fractured family with eloquent precision and exact focus. The effect is polished and lapidary, but not without warmth and hope.
Richard von Busack
Though AROUND THE BAY is an intimate film, this is no small story. This remarkably talented [director] makes a compelling story out of well-chosen images and unsaid, unheard or overheard words. Adams shows that he's that rarity among beginning filmmakers. He is someone who understands all the tools of the cinema. Adams exhibits superb control of his actors. Voldseth's first-rate performance and Adams' direction match the much-praised exposure of soul-barrenness in THERE WILL BE BLOOD, with none of the attendant melodrama.
Film-Think
Adams is deft enough--via a Leigh dramaturgical luckiness, a Dogme aloofness, a quietly uncollected Cassevetes determination, he is a name-dropping choose your own adventure--that any meta-critique of cinema as a Platonic arbiter of otherwise genuine flickers of those seemingly untappable gestures of broken humanity becomes a means rather than an end. This is fine, indulgent cinema. I was shaken by the final strokes of AROUND THE BAY...
Josh Avram
There's an imperative quality to the films of director Alejandro Adams that undergirds them like an organic substrate. Yet his films are often oblique and perhaps even evasive, as if Adams is averse to being pinned down to anything as didactic as a "statement." His sensibility is one of circles and repetitions, of fervency resigned to determinism and veiled by abstruseness.
Nick Rombes
Like the best "little" films, CANARY is a very big film...full of wonder and menace. It is a film to be reckoned with, to be savored, and not to be forgotten.
Hammer to Nail (Tully)
Adams has made a film that is jam-packed with ideas and is thus defiantly open to interpretation, yet not frustratingly so...I have seen CANARY twice and it has made my brain spin in uncomfortable new directions.
A.A. Dowd
Alejandro Adams, scrappy visionary at the helm of this hell-bent vessel,...breathes his soothsaying outrage in ominous whispers and embeds modern malaise in the modern mundane.
Chuck Tryon
CANARY is one of the first films I've seen in ages that sent me scrambling to learn more...because it engaged me on so many levels.
Mike D'Angelo
[Adams's] work is so much more ambitious and intelligent and accomplished than most of the Amerindie films that come out of Sundance every year...
Bayflicks
Sparse and utilitarian, Alejandro Adams' low-key drama gets right to the point, then tells its dysfunctional family story without pyrotechnics. This sort of story depends on the acting, and Adams' cast delivers.
Steve Rhodes
A marvelous and intriguing character study. What a wonderful little film. It would be worth several more viewings, as you are rewarded by pondering its fascinating nuances.
Richard von Busack
Mysterious, elliptical, Bresson-like. [CANARY] is to biotech what PRIMER was to time-travel.
Twitch (Perkins)
[CANARY is] consistently fascinating, even where it purposefully attempts to distance the viewer.
Interviews
Spout (Longworth)
I make films because I hate films...I'm fortunate to know some real critics, as vicious as they are perspicacious. It's probably a foregone conclusion that they're my core fanbase. One glance at my films and they can see I hate films as much as they do.
Flavorwire
I like my productions to consist of three or four second-unit cameras and no first-unit cameras, neutralizing the director role. I like it when half the people in the scene and the sound guy don’t know we’re already rolling.
Hammer To Nail
Even if I reject Godard or feel that he is not a great filmmaker or an influence, I still feel that somewhere in there he has influenced the course of cinema history and probably influenced a cut of mine without my knowing it.
Hell on Frisco Bay
I think when you tell a real story, when you care about dramaturgy, you're going to be accused at some point of tending toward melodrama. Oak Street Films
I wanted to treat the alternate universe as a setting like a beach or a chalet. Which is the main reason Canary doesn’t go out of its way to say, "In 2015 many people lease organs from a powerful biotech company." I wouldn't say, "During the summer, many people go to the beach where they strike up brief but intense relationships." Going out of your way to define a geographical or temporal setting is just a way of admitting its fragility--as if it needs all this scaffolding of information and explication to hold it up.
Live for Films
In my own personal vision of the future, the horror isn't a world dominated by corporations per se, the horror is terminal alienation, the absence of coherent interpersonal communication--in scene after scene, this film addresses those concerns. Canary is sci-fi not at the societal or political or global level but at the personal level. I think that's a quality which both versions of Solaris have too.
Brian Spaeth
People often use the term "self-indulgent" when they encounter a degree of sincerity that this threadbare culture hasn't trained them to recognize or to reciprocate. Now you can make incredibly personal films with total, uncompromising sincerity, and you can easily ignore the remonstrations of those critics and viewers who demand chewing gum. Canary is not chewing gum.
Millimeter Magazine
Find your favorite gatekeeper and convince him or her that your film should get through the gate. I can tell you from first-hand experience that this approach works. What doesn’t work is treating the gatekeeping establishment like a big impenetrable cloudbank and throwing stuff vaguely upward and hoping it gets all the way to God. SF360
The kinetoscope was a means for an individual to watch cinema. You’d stick your head in it and watch by yourself. Now you watch by yourself on a laptop or phone. Our tools now are re-primitivized.
Writing
Cinema, Jr.
The cinema should reacquire some of its former impermanence. Once upon a time, a film had its brief theatrical run and then was lost and forgotten for decades...It was a given that if you didn't see a film theatrically YOU DIDN'T SEE IT.
Inhabited/Inhibited
There are cinematic spaces which are inhabited, which "give good performances" as spaces through which people move and in which events occur; and there are cinematic spaces which are inhibited, which are denied even their ontological value, whether because they're poorly construed or because they lack any discernible relationship to other spaces. The Cult of Naturalism
The cult of naturalism is concentric with the most liberating and, simultaneously, most oppressive cult of our era: the cult of the amateur--that is, the cult of the talented non-professional whose impressive array of moderate ambitions replaces the single consummate ambition which has defined significant artists of past centuries (including most of the twentieth)...These days everyone is a musician, everyone is a web designer, everyone is a journalist, everyone is a filmmaker.
Web-hosted Cinema
We have been trained like lesser primates to busy ourselves with studying each new piece of equipment, each new scrap of software issued under the rubric of an upgrade, and though this rigmarole may not occupy our creative energies per se, it certainly subdues them with formidable consistency.
Errol Morris Review
The Interrotron has helped Morris "purify" his interview footage by preventing subjects from looking here, there and everywhere as they chat freewheelingly before the camera. Now they stare at the camera as diligently as a doe stares at oncoming headlights. Morris’s be-all, end-all Interviews now require a studio, meaning that there will be no more of the sorts of casually captivating monologues which suffuse Gates of Heaven, in which the milieux of the interviews are integral to their content.
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Tuya de hun shi (Wang, 2006)12.27.2008
posted by Alejandro Adams @ Saturday, December 27, 2008
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