NY Press features “Williamsburg”

Exerts: “No other recent Brooklyn product defines its people by the nature of their neighborhood more than Brad  Saville’s  Williamsburg. A riff on Richard Linklater’s Slacker, Williamsburg basically unfolds as a series of static shots following various despondent personalities, each of whom claims to be an artist but fails to produce any actual art.

Saville, a playwright in his late twenties, is originally from Virginia. He dreamed up his black-and-white condemnation of aimless Brooklynites in response to a perceived laziness overtaking the neighborhood. “People come up here looking for something to do and attach themselves to other people who have like-minded ambitions,” he explains. “They have those stagnant two years after school where they try to get out of their system whatever they need to get out of their system, like being an actor. So they spend a couple years up here, and then they get married and move away. They form these groups of people who hang out and they all prop each other up. You surround yourself with seven or eight people to help legitimize yourself. I think [Williamsburg] lends itself to that.”

Saville rejects the sitcom vision of the Williamsburg elite popularized by the shortlived web series The ‘Burg.“It’s like, let’s take the joke and rape it,” he says in a rant. “OK, I get it, a stockbroker lives with a guy who has black-rimmed glasses, and they don’t get along. What’s next? I was interested in doing something about ambitious people in Williamsburg who were failing miserably.””

Continued: “Saville notes that the Williamsburg manifested in his film has vanished to the extent that he wouldn’t make his movie today. “I think the circumstances have changed, and the people have changed,” he says, noting that

Anytime Cafe, which used to offer cheap drinks and provided a space for his production free of charge, no longer exists. “It’s gotten to be so expensive that I don’t know how anybody that can call themselves artists and live there. At the time, it was interesting, but I don’t feel the flame the way I felt it four years ago.””

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN ITS ENTIRITY.

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Splice Today’s film critic John Lingan: “Great cast and a Sympathetic Director”

Williamsburg is “a comedy dressed in Noir clothes…  A great cast and a sympathetic director.”

-John Lingan, SpliceToday.com

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Syracuse New Times review of Williamsburg: “Plenty of sharp dialogue to spare… Hilarious.”

“The chronology hops all over the map in this Brooklyn-based indie comedy, which somehow links the travails of insufferable writer Truman (Penny Bittone) with a chain-smoking sidewalk painter named Brother James (Russ Russo), music-video director Will (David Marcus), budding filmmaker and part-time mugger Miguel (Evertz I. Saenz-Perez), his sister Anna (Anna Lamadrid) and sultry Slovakian beauty Adella (Olja Hrustic).

Director Brad Saville’s non-linear lark uses as its McGuffin a stolen screenplay, which gives new meaning to the industry phrase “script in turnaround,” yet the interconnected vignettes mostly provide satiric jabs at the pretentious behaviors of these artsy types.

Saville prefers master shots of his black-and-white canvas to allow his cast lots of room to roam, and there’s plenty of sharp dialogue to spare, such as Truman telling his bedside playmate, “A writer must stay objective. Objectively speaking, love is impossible.”

There’s also a hilarious segment involving Will’s creative conference with Bed-Stuy rapper G-Train (Rayon Lawrence) about the casting for an upcoming music video titled “Land of a Thousand Hos,” with G-Train demanding, “I like my bitches exotic.” Whether or not this sequence is still funny during the post-Don Imus era, however, will be up to the viewer.”

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Film Threat Magazine gives Williamsburg 3.5 stars! “Memorable Achievement”

WILLIAMSBURG

by Phil Hall
(2006-07-31)
2006, Un-rated, 99 minutes, Cadillac Films

Aspiring cinematographers would do well to seek out a small indie feature called “Williamsburg” to study and gain inspiration from what cinematographer Will Sargent and director Brad Saville achieved from behind the camera. Shot in black-and-white, “Williamsburg” has a striking visual style that is uncommon in today’s independent cinema – a series of bold, artistic compositions that uses monochromatic hues to create an extraordinary play of light and shadows. Too often, filmmakers just aim and shoot – in this case, the camerawork brilliantly mirrors the yin-and-yang of its complex characters.
“Williamsburg” takes place in the hipster Brooklyn neighborhood and its plotlines are populated by artists and artistic poseurs who try (with varying success) to be true to their own creative purposes even if it means destroying themselves. The film follows the story concept of the French classic “La Ronde,” with one character going about his or her life before interacting with another, at which point the film’s focus changes to the second character’s life…until a third character wanders in, and so forth.

While the film is brilliantly framed, the filmmakers too often keep their camera locked in single, extremely extended takes. This requires a great deal of the cast to keep the dialogue flowing longer than usual. Fortunately, the able cast brings their characters to life and provide a memorable tapestry of lives on the artistic fringes. Best here are Russ Russo as a chain-smoking painter selling his art on the sidewalk while he seems to cough and choke himself into a slow death, Penny Bittone as a would-be writer who insists would-be girlfriends read aloud from his writing before they make love, and Evertz I. Saenz-Perez as an unrepentant teenage thief who finds his inner-Cassavetes after acquiring a stolen video camera.

All told, “Williamsburg” is an impressive and memorable achievement.

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