The utterance of the name "Ken Jacobs" might not limit off alarms in the casual picture fan's brain, but to any adorer of the avant garde (or survivor of 1960s Manhattan), you might as well be taking the lord's name in nervure. Known for cinema collages that mix all varieties and manners of artistic manipulation and filmic language, Jacobs came about as a esurient collector of cultural rarities around the same time Jack Smith and Andy Warhol ruled the NY art scene with a powder-white clenched fist. Earlier this year the filmmaker released Razzle Dazzle, a manipulated study of repetition that I first saw at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, just he's most known for spectacles care Blonde Cobra, The Georgetown Loop, and Star Spangled to Death, the experimental cinema equivalent of Gravity's Rainbow.
The quintessential New York maniac who all over up precept film studies in Binghamton, Jacobs appears on blind as the pater familias of a son world Health Organization can't pull up stakes his childhood home in downtown Manhattan in Momma's Man, the third feature by the filmmaker's son Azazel Jacobs. Both metaphorically and literally a womb, the elder Jacobs' queerness of an apartment serves as the setting where Mikey (Matt Boren) arrives to visit his parents (Jacobs and mother Flo) for a weekend in their one-time school fine art space in Tribeca, where he spent his formative years.
What begins as a forward retreat back to his married woman Laura (Dana Varon) and newborn child back in Los Angeles turns into an obsessive overstay as Matt begins to dig through his old comic books, toys, and habiliment, taking in long bouts of sleeping in betwixt. A flakey encounter with an honest-to-god friend and trips to famous ultra-dive bar The Patriot german mark his only connection with the outside world save brief spats with his wife. The awkward heyday comes when he meets up with an old high school flame at a coffee berry shop to apologize for a long-forgotten incident.
One of the highlights of both this year's Sundance Film Festival and New York's New Directors/New Films Festival, Momma's Man eludes convention at well-nigh every move around. The logical thinking behind his prolonged absence from his family and life is never full discussed. Matt's mother passive-aggressively nudges him towards his wife piece his father takes the direct approach path, asking him often why he's silent there. Matt possesses an index of excuses for his job, his married woman, and his parents merely the absence of well-fixed reasoning to his residency gives Jacobs' film a subtle hint of terror.
Boren plays his character with a sluggish obnoxiousness, a pig's esthesia and a strange streak of na�vet�. He's a comic horror but he's oddly endearing. Matt could be whatsoever number of things: the great shape of the baby boomers, the whining, sniveling child that all men are at the end of the sidereal day, maybe level the snake god prince of Giuliani's spick-and-span New York. That the director never plays towards his metaphors shows matureness and self-assurance as a filmmaker. It reveals young Mr. Jacobs as a born narrator rather than a bag full of ideologies.
Perhaps Azazel isn't the mad scientist his founder is, but one thing becomes clear after Momma's Man: It's in the blood. Shooting in techy 35mm conjures up the ghosts of '60s movie theatre, when his father was coming up, and to say that there isn't an autobiographical bent to this film would be foolish. Past that, encircled by pulley systems for clothes lines, rusted fetch up toys, collections of useless tools and playthings, kitchenware from every decade, and two loopy artist parents lies the rejected east coaster on holiday from being an Angeleno. In his simple-minded, minimalist direction, Mr. Jacobs has fashioned the quintessential interior New York film.
It's time for you to get your own room, son.
More info
