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To say that Blanche's Dan Miller is ambivalent on the subjects of trust, faith and hope would be an understatement. The shock-haired singer/songwriter/guitarist is not the type of person who hears such platitudes as "the sun will come out tomorrow" and takes them at face value. Thing is, that gray area between despair and hope, where human connections are fragile things that often behave according to their own fatalistic whims, is where we find the music of Blanche ? looking for hope amidst strewn half-remembered fragments of a happy life that always seems just two steps ahead. As one NPR commentator noted, "Just as 'jazz' no longer aptly describes all of its offshoots, the term 'country' is no longer a sufficient label for bands such as Blanche who make atmosphere as well as music." But it?s the point of entry that makes the most sense for the emotional landscape Blanche paints with their haunted words and the oddly-swinging, just-off-kilter-enough music to be found on their debut release, If We Can?t Trust the Doctors? The title is about faith, according to Miller, about the faith that you eventually must stumble down to meet. When Dan and his wife, Tracee, met tragedy and ailment on their doorsteps numerous times over the last two years ? the years in which they recorded this full-length ? they had to plumb the depths of trust, hope, faith and the other rock bottom human emotions that get you from sunrise to sunrise. "I was in a hospital waiting room and I just started thinking, 'Well, the doctors know what they're doing, right?' But once you start to doubt that, you ask yourself, 'What can you trust? What can you hold on to?' Your prayers don't always get answered, and you realize that everything and everyone you thought you could trust and depend on is vulnerable." Folks you think I'd be happy and delighted/ 'cause all my dreams are finally coming true/ but did I mention all my dreams are nightmares/and in my head I feel a storm about to brew ? "So Long Cruel World" Dan cut his musical teeth with country-punk band Goober & the Peas, releasing two albums, before the band broke up. Next was the short-lived Two Star Tabernacle, (in which Dan shared front man and guitar duties with Jack White), with Tracee playing bass and Detroit Cobra Damian Lang drumming. The band?s only release was a 7-inch they did with legendary R&B singer Andre Williams, recorded at White?s house. Although they never recorded an album, many of the Two Star songs took new shape and ended up on both the White Stripes? White Blood Cells and Blanche?s If We Can?t Trust the Doctors? Blanche was, literally, born in Dan and Tracee Miller's living room. "Our idea was to start a band with friends who shared our love for old country and blues music, and rock music that had that same feeling (i.e. Bad Seeds' Kicking Against the Pricks). We wanted to almost embrace everyone?s inexperience on their instruments," said Dan. "Once we started working on the songs, the lack of polish seemed to kind of enhance the emotion of the songs." Tracee, still fairly new to the bass guitar, was nudged into some singing duty as well, while Dan was still trying to figure out how to play guitar and sing at the same time without getting dizzy. Patch Boyle had never played an instrument before hurriedly grabbing his banjo learner?s permit, and Lisa Jannon, also a musical novice, jumped into drumming after an old snare, drumstick and maraca were grabbed from the basement. The man known simply as Feeny, although experienced on several other instruments, grabbed the reigns of the pedal steel and taught himself how to play. (His eerie/teary style would land him the pedal steel job on the Jack White-produced Loretta Lynn album Van Lear Rose a few years later.) "It felt like an odd family reunion," said Dan. Oh, what a long way Blanche has come. Tracee says that the band chose to ?practice on stage.? And to judge by their hypnotizing live performances, the process of wood-shedding new material in front of paying customers has paid off. They?ve recently completed two critically-acclaimed tours of the UK ? one with the Arizona-via-Chicago kindred spirits, the Handsome Family and another with longtime Detroit pals and collaborators, the White Stripes. Blanche live is like a weathered, sepia-toned tintype family portrait come to life and injected with Technicolor. If the Carter Family made an appearance on the Lawrence Welk show when country music iconoclast Lee Hazlewood and Nick Cave were co-hosting, it would look and feel a lot like Blanche does. But even that reduces the alchemy of these five strange people to an equation. Blanche is more than the sum of their parts. With Dan, frenetic yet stern, the preacher gone slightly astray from the flock leading the congregation and Tracee, a Stepford wife by way of Appalachian sweetheart at his side, you can?t take your eyes away. No one expects the Millers, but they?re undoubtedly striking. But what fills out the portrait is the long-gone family reunion of characters that are the rest of Blanche. Patch Boyle cradles his banjo and autoharp like a lost sweetheart or a dear, departed child and rocks it to life. Feeny teases only-he-knows-what from his pedal steel, bound to his seat but set fit to jump up and testify at a moment?s inspiration. Behind it all, Lisa Jannon manages to alternately tap and then pound out rhythms that let it all hang miraculously together. It has been said that they look like they?re out on Saturday night with Sunday morning never too far off, and that?s about apt. They are the portrait of Americana Gothic, Flannery O?Connor by way of a chill Detroit November. And for all the sorrow that provided a foundation for the band?s songs, Blanche?s music is not without joy. But the joy seems to come in the exorcism of dark secrets. When it came time to get this sound on record, the band divided time among three different Detroit studios. Warn Defever (His Name Is Alive, Ida, Tarnation) had just christened his new studio, Brown Rice, and Blanche was the perfect lab rat for Defever?s cryptic instincts. Next, the band headed for steel player Feeny?s recording laboratory, The Tempermill (P.W. Long, Demolition Doll Rods) for further recording. Lastly, the band knocked on the door of resident Detroit pop genius Brendan Benson. They holed up for a couple days of ?live? recording at Benson?s Grand Studio, dramatically reworking a song Miller wrote and played in Two-Star Tabernacle, ?Who?s to Say??, which would become the band?s first release, a 7-inch single. The song that you?ll hear on ?If We Can?t Trust the Doctors? takes the song down tempo and lets Miller?s stark vocal of a lovelorn man gone lost drip with longing and pathos. And it afforded Blanche the opportunity for an on-record family reunion of sorts, with White contributing a guitar solo and accompaniment and Benson singing backup harmony. It is, as one pundit put it, ?A haunting mess of beauty.? And it brings the band full circle as it prepares to share the snapshots of what Miller has found when he?s been looking in the far corners of his attic.
The kiddies will have a hoot with their own little Jesus Christ figurine, now with special "walk on water action." Spear of destiny not included.
Chris (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a once-promising high school athlete whose life is turned upside down following a tragic accident. As he tries to maintain a normal life, he takes a job as a janitor at a bank, where he ultimately finds himself caught up in
Pela is an American rock & roll band. At a time when the word 'America' has never been more fraught with meaning, songs that speak to our basic feelings and emotions about life could never be more resonant. Lost amongst all the geo-political tumult are the stories of every day America; the aches and pains and the beautiful possibilities. Yet amidst all the turmoil and uncertainty, new stories are being written and told by a new generation of American bands. Pela is clearly one of those voices.
Wolfkin: "These Are Illusions"
Wolfkin is a non-ordinary rock-outfit who'll take you down for a trip through their fantasia. A place where mirages of orchestras, string-sections and otherworldly sceneries are invoked amidst the duo's hall-of-mirrors band.
SF IndieFest trailer: "Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher"
This documentary by David Di Sabatino is a part of the SF Indie Film Festival. What do you do when the Jesus freak who started your church dies from AIDS? Simple, erase him from history.
Lonnie Frisbee was a young hippie seeker fully immersed in the 1960s counterculture when he claimed to have experienced an encounter with God while on an acid trip. The event so transformed him that Lonnie became an itinerant Christian evangelist, something of a John the Baptist of Southern California who compelled thousands toward a profession of faith in Jesus Christ.
Fascinatingly, his call into Christian ministry came while deeply involved in the Laguna Beach homosexual scene. And because he died as a result of AIDS in 1993, he's been marginalized from history by the very men whom he helped establish with their evangelistic ministries.
Controversial throughout his life, the brief but dynamic career of evangelist Lonnie Frisbee is a powerful story of biblical proportions. "Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher" captures the dramatic journey of this spiritual seeker turned Jesus freak who thousands remember as the agent through whom they experienced spiritual transformation.
This is a part of the SF IndieFest.
Click here for more trailers, interviews, and videos from the 8th Annual SF IndieFest.
Academy award-winning producer Brian Grazer ("A Beautiful Mind," "Apollo 13") teams up with two-time Academy award-winning actress Jodie Foster ("Silence of the Lambs," "The Accused") in the taut psychological thriller, FLIGHTPLAN, directed by Robert Schwentke and written by Peter Dowling and Billy Ray. Flying at 40,000 feet in a cavernous, state-of-the-art 474 aircraft, Kyle Pratt (FOSTER) faces every mother?s worst nightmare when her six year-old daughter, Julia, vanishes without a trace mid-flight from Berlin to New York. Already emotionally devastated by the unexpected death of her husband, Kyle desperately struggles to prove her sanity to the disbelieving flight crew and passengers while facing the very real possibility that she may be losing her mind. While neither Captain Rich (SEAN BEAN), nor Air Marshal Gene Carson (PETER SARSGAARD) want to doubt the bereaved widow, all evidence indicates that her daughter was never on board resulting in paranoia and doubt among the passengers and crew of the plane. Finding herself desperately alone, Kyle can only rely on her own wits to solve the mystery and save her daughter.
SF IndieFest trailer: "Jimmy and Judy"
Welcome to American suburbia, a place where the image of the ?perfect family? is so meticulously cultivated that friends, neighbors, even the closest of family, have no idea what truly lies beneath the surface.
For JIMMY (Edward Furlong), a hyper-intelligent, college dropout, exposing the truth is something he does only by accident. He?s obsessed with his handheld video camera which he uses to tape anything and everything in his life, playing God with the lens. He manipulates his parents, their friends, even his therapist, entirely for his own amusement. There are even rumors that Jimmy was expelled from college because he talked his roommate into committing suicide on camera.
Things take a turn when Jimmy refocuses his attentions on JUDY (Rachael Bella) a timid ing?nue who?s constantly bullied at school. Hoping to gain her affections, he exacts revenge upon her enemies at school, taping himself in the act. When Judy sees it, she quickly falls in love with her passionate protector, and the two become entangled in a whirlwind romance.
Exploring sex, drugs, gunplay, even petty theft, the two fall desperately in love, videotaping everything they do, but their escalating antics inevitably lead to disaster. After a freak roadside accident and a desperate encounter with the cops, Jimmy and Judy find themselves on the run from the law and are forced to seek refuge in the underbelly of America just to survive.
JIMMY AND JUDY is a film that highlights what Middle America so desperately tries to hide?mental illness, violence, sexual perversions, drug abuse, and family dysfunction?all captured entirely on HOME VIDEO by two misfit teenagers who fall in love while rampaging their way across the country in search of an elusive teenage nirvana.
Click here for more trailers, interviews, and videos from the 8th annual SF Indiefest.
In an effort to find his place in life, a troubled young man enlists in the Coast Guard, where he's taken in by a renowned rescue swimmer who's hardened by the loss of his team from an accident years back.
DragChrist returns with a new record and a video to match.
