If you were around the Valley in the summer of 2012, you might recall running into a superstar or two while strolling around Shelburne Falls. It was in June of that year that filmmaker Jason Reitman (Juno; Thank You for Smoking) brought his troupe of players—a cast that included Kate Winslet, Josh Brolin, and others—to the area to shoot Labor Day. For a few weeks, they transformed one of our most picturesque towns into a Hollywood set. This week, the final product returns to Shelburne Falls for a pair of weekend screenings, courtesy of the town’s Pothole Pictures.
The film, which screens Friday and Saturday nights, tells the story of Adele Wheeler (Winslet), her young son Henry, and Frank Chambers, a mysterious stranger who changes their lives (Brolin). Chambers, who, it turns out, has just broken out of jail, careens into their lives bloody and battered but with his heart intact after a tragic death—Chambers isn’t exactly innocent, but he’s also not as guilty as he has been made out to be.
Frank and Adele’s attempt to make a go of it may not go quite as planned—and may take quite a bit longer than they hoped—but for either to change, they’ll need the other by their side. The meditative tone of Labor Day is a change of pace for Reitman (the film opened to mixed reviews), who is more familiar to filmgoers for his knack for the knowing wink, but it’s one that is well supported by our rural backdrop.
That said, at least a few locals were disappointed that more of our surroundings didn’t make the film’s final cut. For a look at some of what ended up on the cutting room floor, Pothole Pictures is screening the half-hour documentary End of Summer before each screening of Labor Day. Filled with shots of the local landscape and interviews with the filmmakers, the film explores why Reitman and his crew settled on Shelburne and its environs as the place to make their film. For anyone interested in filmmaking, it’s a nice look behind the curtain; for locals, it will feel that much more enlightening.
Also this week: If you’re a fan of the under-the-hood documentary, you might enjoy the work of Tony Zhou, whose short looks at modern film techniques—collected online as part of his Every Frame a Painting series—are available through his Vimeo channel (http://vimeo.com/tonyzhou). Zhou’s game is to focus on some relatively small aspect of filmmaking and illuminate why it does or doesn’t work through the use of well-chosen examples, thoughtful commentary, and snappy editing. Most of his videos clock in at under 10 minutes, but they pack a wealth of knowledge into their short running times.
Particularly enjoyable are his takes on the use of texting and the Internet in film (in which he praises the BBC series Sherlock for its stylish use of floating fonts to indicate text messaging, while lambasting the ham-handed solutions of other films), a look at Martin Scorsese’s use of silence in a half-century of filmmaking (in which Scorsese talks about using silence in his boxing picture Raging Bull “like a numbing effect… as if you were hit in the ear too many times”), and his deconstruction of the explosively overripe directorial style of Michael Bay (the Transformers series, among others), which Zhou dubs “Bayhem.” To Zhou’s credit, he doesn’t dismiss Bay; instead, he points out that “like WrestleMania, like Anna Nicole Smith, like Jackass, Michael Bay has created something.” And even if, as he admits, it isn’t something he himself enjoys, Zhou is an even-handed commentator, and erudite enough to draw a fascinating comparison between West Side Story (one of Bay’s favorite films) and the director’s work on the Transformers films. Zhou’s work is illuminating in the way that a favorite professor’s might be: he often puts into words a feeling you knew was there, but couldn’t quite describe yourself.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
