Sunday, August 10, 2008

Can You Believe This?

Azazel Jacobs has a new feature, Momma’s Man, about a married man who comes home to New York to visit his parents and decides not to leave their apartment, which was a big hit at Sundance earlier this year. Azazel also happens to be the son of American avant-garde film icons Ken and Flo Jacobs.

Source

And he calls himself Aza for short.

(If you don't get it, go here or here).

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UPDATE

From a review by someone who

Although my most vivid memories of Aza Jacobs are as the unnamed infant installed in a crib in a Johnson City apartment and called, for what seemed like a very long time, "Mr. Baby," I've known his parents for nearly 40 years, going back to my undergraduate days at the State University of Binghamton, where Ken Jacobs impressed me as possibly the most brilliant film teacher in the world.

I'm also familiar with the Momma's Man milieu, specifically the Jacobs' loft—a fantastic assemblage of suspended bicycles, hanging chairs, film cans, wind-up toys, and philosophical machines, that—part studio, part archive


and this:

Thirtyish guy—bit of a schlub but married, with a newborn baby—comes back from California to visit aging parents in New York and, overtaken by a mysterious lethargy, moves into his tiny childhood room...Much comic pathos arises from the realization that Mikey has no perspective on his parents. They are as mysterious in their idiosyncrasies as anyone's. (And with his doughy physique and placid moon face, Boren gives the impression of an eternal child, if not one produced by this particular Mom and Dad.) Mikey's prolonged visit is not so much a regression as a blissful immersion in some pre-analytical Eden...He ignores the increasingly desperate messages left by his abandoned wife (Dana Varon), preferring to sit in wintry Hudson River Park or lie on his narrow little bed in his semi-private corner of the loft, reading comic books, warding off dread, and letting his beard grow...The loft seems at once vast and claustrophobic and, although the viewer is treated to many slow pans, its geography is never clear. Mikey is forever spotting portents in the clutter or receiving mysterious bulletins (from the TV, the cell phone, and his own unconscious). In one unsuccessful attempt to leave the loft, he waits until his parents are asleep; perhaps they'll think they only imagined his visit...

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