Ramin Bahrani

Ebert has declared that this Iranian-American from North Carolina is the "new great American director", and has already elevated Bahrani's second film, Chop Shop (2007), to the hallowed Great Movies list. Huh?? But then we recall that Roger has lately been of a rather grandiose mood, entreating the world take dictation as he utters his final visionary pronouncements. I can already hear ol' Rog' rattling his chains...And it shall come to pass that all Denny's give way to Steak 'n Shaaaaake! Takhoooooooooooomasaaaaaakk...!

The Sagacious Thumb is not to be discounted entirely, even in his woollier fits of wisdom. It is true that Bahrani is a talented young fellow with the good eye and delicate touch you expect of top shelf observant/humane indie drama. His three movies each give us new images and untold stories of America's post-millennium urban margins — the nocturnal labors of Pakistani street cart vendors in lower Manhattan, the Dickensian jungle of auto wreckers in the lee of Shea Stadium, the transits and encounters of an African cabbie in the Piedmont Triad region of transitional Dixie.

This is good stuff. But I'm afraid it's not quite the revelation Roger makes it out to be. Bahrani's particular subjects are new but the method is old and not forgotten; the Italians were pioneering naturalistic documentation of everyday lives with non-actors in the 1940s, and the practice remains common enough today (e.g. the arthouse projects of Steven Soderbergh and Gus Van Sant). And it's senseless to extol Bahrani's digital cinematography over that of other aesthetic prodigies out there, like David Gordon Green, who still take the trouble to shoot in 35mm.

So what we've got is Equal Opportunity Roger wettings his panties over a non-white American making worthy movies about non-white Americans, which is every reason to get moist, but is not reason to single out Bahrani over the extraordinary contributions of David Gordon Green, Ryan Fleck, Rian Johnson, Jody Hill, Noah Baumbach, Miranda July and John Cameron Mitchell.*

That aside, I want to point out that Bahrani and Green are both members of an impressive cohort that has recently emerged from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, which also includes Green's brilliant cinematographer Tim Orr, directors Jody Hill and Craig Zobel (co-creator of Homestar Runner) and actors Paul Schneider and Danny McBride. Writer Angus MacLachlan (Junebug), a 1980 alum, joined the collaboration with a crack-addled cameo in Goodbye Solo. Apparently NCSA is no joke.


* I stand by this list of young American mainstream directors of consequence. I could really go for Chili 5-Way.