Kyle Martin Movies

Brock Enright is a multi-media artist who has earned a reputation for challenging and confrontational works. Enright made the news in 2002 when he formed a group called Videogames Adventure Services, in which he staged "designer kidnappings" with Enright and his compatriots abducting people who had paid for the privilege, and he's also helped produce a stage adaptation of the well-known porn film Debbie Does Dallas when not busy creating video works and gallery installations that revel in images of violence, sex and the disreputable. In 2006, New York's Perry Rubenstein Gallery invited Enright to present his first solo show, to open in March 2007. Enright and his girlfriend Kirsten Deirup traveled to her family's vacation home in California to create video pieces and sculptures for the show, but Enright's uncertain temperament, his often stormy relationship with Deirup's family and his inability to stay on a schedule or a budget threatened to throw the project off the rails. Cinematographer and filmmaker Jody Lee Lipes, who worked with Enright documenting his staged kidnappings, went to California with Enright to record the journey and his creative process, and Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same is a documentary portrait of a singular artist and his uneasy relationship with his work and the world around him. Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same received its world premiere at the 2009 South by Southwest Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

With his documentary Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, director Matt Wolf etches out a biographical portrait of avant-garde musician, artist, and disco producer Arthur Russell, who died of AIDS at age 40 in 1992. Though Russell was a classically trained composer and cellist with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of indigenous Indian music, this performer quickly branched off in a more offbeat and unusual direction. The Oskaloosa, IA, native fixated on such counterculture icons as John Cage and Timothy Leary at an early age, then ran away from home during adolescence and joined a Frisco-based Buddhist group. Russell became acquainted and associated with poet Allen Ginsberg, then moved to New York City, where (like Cage) he established himself as a veritable fixture in the underground music scene and worked as the music director for The Kitchen. By the mid-'70s, Russell began producing prescient disco records in the pre-Gibb days, under colorful pseudonyms such as Indian Ocean and Loose Joints. Unfortunately, he never culled the devoted following that he deserved until about 15 years after his death. Wolf employs a fractured film-essay style throughout the film, intercutting such materials as archival footage, extracts of musical compositions by Russell, and revealing interviews with Russell's family. Thematically, the director uses the tale of Russell's colorful life as a springboard into investigations of broader subjects and themes including gay lifestyles in the early AIDS era, the sociocultural landscape of Manhattan (and the cultural underground) during the 1970s and '80s, and the importance of staking out new directions in art and music for an innovative mind such as Russell's. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi