Ramin Bahrani‘s lovely 18-minute whirlwind, Plastic Bag documents the existential and eye-opening afterlife of a poster-child for pollution. It is voiced by Werner Herzog. The Bavarian auteur — who has been in the blogosphere of late with a new, $1450-priced seminar called the Rogue Film School — lends his familiar brogue to the plain-brown plastic as it goes from the checkout line into its “Maker’s” life.
The “Maker,” as Herzog refers to her throughout, appears to never have heard of other sorts of bags (zip-lock, canvas, so on) and she re-uses our protagonist to hold lunch, tennis balls, ice, and even dog food. Read More »
Yesterday we told you about Goodbye Solo, the latest from Ramin Bahrani — a filmmaker who stands out as one of the true US auteurs under age 40. Now we’re sitting down with him to swap quotes and get the scoop on how this project — the tale of an unlikely friendship between a Senegalese taxi driver and an aging white Southern man — developed. Read More »
Iranian-American writer/director Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo opens with the initial greet-and-meet between Solo (Souléymane Sy Savané), a cheerful Senegalese cabbie, and his latest fare off of Winston-Salem’s mostly-empty streets: William (Red West), an old, morose, buttoned-up Southerner who — en route to a movie theatre where he could be considered a habitué — commissions Solo to be his on-call Kevorkian. Read More »
