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Friday, July 24, 2009
St. Petersburg-made movie Loren Cass gets NY Times rave review
Posted by David Warner on Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 11:22 AM
Things are looking up for Loren Cass, the St. Pete-made indie movie previously covered in CL by Alex Pickett and Scott Harrell, and nominated last year by NYC's IFP Gotham Awards as Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You. In today's New York Times, critic Nathan Lee flat-out raves about the film, which opens today in Manhattan in a single theater. "This sharp, gutsy indie is one of the year’s great discoveries," says Lee, who goes on to say that writer/director/co-star Chris Fuller is headed for a career of "singular, exquisite promise."
Which is not to say that the film or the review, headlined "Down and Out (and Disaffected) in St. Petersburg," are likely to be used as lures for local tourism. (Video after the break)
Loren Cass is set in St. Pete circa post-race riot 1996, and Lee compliments Fuller for capturing the city's "endless, worn-out sprawl" and its landscape of "parking lots, packing crates, shopping carts, peeling wallpaper, broken bottles, cheap salads, over-lighted diners, oily garages."
According to Pickett's 2006 story, the Pinellas County Film Commission wasn't all that helpful to Fuller in making the film:
"The film commission hassled us a bit from time to time," Fuller says, "and kind of told us we were too ambitious. It's tough. Nobody takes you seriously when you're 21 years old."
But people are taking him seriously now. The Times critic compares Fuller to such luminaries as Gus Van Sant and Robert Bresson, and says: "Remarkable stuff for a debut film, all the more impressive in that Mr. Fuller wrote the screenplay at 18 and shot the film at 21."
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