Medium-sized, be warned as Chris Wilcha’s “Flipside” goes off without a hitch: Before this essayistic, private documentary about creativity and engagement hits your beat, indulge in a compassionate feeling about the great dream of artistic achievement you’ve set out to realize. . a source of income. (Personal note: there’s still time to write this mysterious, murderous musical. )
However, “the flip side” is miserable when it comes to disused (or even unpaved) roads. Using the malleable metaphor of a thrift record store, where love and nostalgia tame this age-old clash between art and commerce in a friendly tie, and where Oblivion meets the consummated, Wilcha casually explains why life can seem so promising, even if it is sadly incomplete. Add a message of gratitude that tinges this slyly moving film with an indulgent sense of color and light.
The store named after the film is a cramped vinyl altar in New Jersey, a favorite haunt of young people obsessed with Wilcha’s music. And yet, as the years passed, his efforts to immortalize him on film (to help him stay alive) continued to stagnate, until it began to symbolize for him a tendency to hang out in the filmmaker’s life: many significant documentary concepts began and never came to fruition, while expense-paying concerts (making announcements) filled his schedule.
Wilcha’s guilt, which tells the story of “Flipside,” a brilliant collection of archival clips, is exacerbated by her proudly anti-consumerist stance and fueled by Gen X irony. He established his independent bona fides with his first feature film that won the Slamdance Award in 2000. The Target Shoots First,” which chronicles his first year in the music business.
A career in advertising wasn’t what I expected, although the 30-second global put food on the family’s table and allowed vital tasks to be performed. (Wilcha won two Emmys for the short-lived television edition of the popular radio show “This American Life. “) He owes his move to the West Coast to the job opportunities of Judd Apatow, who speaks on camera about his own vision of marginalized ambition, as a hungry young man who learned that writing for others was his true calling.
There are also other mini-portraits of artistic personalities that cross Wilcha’s orbit and speak to the film’s special connection between success, circumstance, and introspection, such as the comedian Uncle Floyd, whose fame was brief but whose cult prestige encouraged a David Bowie song; television entrepreneur David Milch, beset by demons and Alzheimer’s disease but driven by generosity; and the outstanding jazz photographer Herman Leonard. Leonard’s music videos, which speak eloquently about his art form’s reliance on patience at the right time, come from (what else?) a film commission about him that Wilcha never finished.
However, of all the hard drives on the shelves, the film from Wilcha’s record store seemed to be the one that had escaped. We see him revisit the store and its cool and challenging owner, Dan, and is informed that it has become even harder for him to do so since he opened a newer, brighter, internet-connected thrift LP store just around the corner. As Wilcha renews his commitment to his deserted film, he wonders if becoming a sold-out salesman could also save a beloved bastion of his youth.
He’s also smart enough to know that the real story rarely refers to whether Flipside is still in business, but how an opportunity in life that looks like an A-side can turn into a B-side, and vice versa. Everything is music, Wilcha says softly. The philosophical film turns out to say and offer enough to listen to.
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