Little Sister

Coming Home

Colleen (Addison Timlin) used to be splatter-goth; now she cleans up in modern ash cardigan accented by a silver crucifix. She's come to Asheville to visit her brother (Keith Poulson) who has also arrived home, living in an apartment detached from the main property. The entirety of his head has become disfigured by burns suffered during a tour of duty in the Iraq War and its associated conflicts. Now he's a recluse with a drum-kit and a pretty girlfriend who has stuck by his side through thick-and-thin.

"You smell weird," says Colleen's dad (who comes off like a stepdad). Scentless now in all likelihood, given that Colleen is residing in a nunnery, though has yet to take her vows. Little Sister [2016] suggests the rationale for Colleen's 180 life-change, but offers no definite conclusion as to so radical a turn. Perhaps high school misfit'ism, or the passive-aggressive resentment of her mother (Ally Sheedy) toward her daughter, which as things do in movies rise to a boil (especially in tiny, tidy narratives). A reconciliation, an awakening, a marriage ceremony.

In the course of Little Sister Obama/Biden campaign placards have sprung forth. This next time around it won't be Rumsfeld, but following O/B's disastrous terms, could be Egseth, a Fox News propagandist, guiding the playbook of champions. This time the target, one of which, and others by proxy, could well figure as Iran. No matter for heroes, when the decision to join the service provides a route out of the lower-middle-class to elevated income and stable living, with the only obstacle coming between a soldier and his pension is getting his face blown off. •

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Other writing on the films of Zach Clark on Cinemasparagus:

Little Sister [2016]

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Tuscarora

Untouchable

Tuscarora, Nevada, zero-mile marker, end of the road. Seems like the end of the world based on its isolation alone.Vast horizon murals of lowering clouds; sometimes something near a cyan. At ground level piles of collapsed structure lie strewn like toppled lecture hall skeletons.
 

Schickele's documentary subject, Dennis Parks, was a middle-aged teacher, in fact, a sculptor and master pottery maker. His students live and work off the studio acreage, which not only includes a kiln, but ample studio space accessible to the clay that Parks uses on his artwork — the practice akin, one might say, on a much more modest scale, to the earth upended in industrial mining and fracking. It's the Tuscarorans versus the microgold barons.

Tuscarora [1992] was shot on an — inherently — ugly format, Hi8 video. At the time a signifier of "the real." This, however lets loose a slew of aesthetic questions too numerous for this post  As Dennis pronounces: "I am interested in permanence."

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Other writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of David Schickele:

Give Me a Riddle [1966]

Bushman [1971]

Tuscarora [1992]

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