FILM Jafar Panahi is no longer allowed to make films in Iran. So, with the help of documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, he made This Is Not a Film.
After arrests in 2009 and 2010, Panahi was sentenced to a 20-year ban from filmmaking and a six-year prison term for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” as reported by the Green Voice of Freedom, a human rights website. He is also barred from leaving the country or giving interviews.
This Is Not a Film, an “effort” credited to him and Mirtahmasb, was smuggled from Iran for its premiere at Cannes in 2011. Its title is an obvious provocation, and in translation a nod to Magritte’s ubiquitous painting of (not) a pipe, The Treachery of Images. Its content seems simple: Panahi eats breakfast and gets dressed in long, self-shot takes. Then, after Mirtahmasb arrives to take over the camera, he talks to his lawyer, begins to narrate and reconstruct the last film he was working on, explores memories of filmmaking, and interacts with his neighbors. The editing becomes more complex, more cinematic, and more problematic as the day progresses.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czXsGPqYjhE
Panahi (2006’s Offside, 2000’s The Circle) is an established filmmaker, a contemporary and collaborator of the renowned Abbas Kiarostami, if slightly less internationally well-known. But as he revisits his past work on a TV in his living room, it is clear that this not-a-film is hardly his first flirtation with metanarrative experimentation. He discusses a sequence in his second film, The Mirror (1997), where the lead actress, a young child, refuses to continue participating in what — up to that point — had been a contained fictional narrative. Her character’s arm is in a cast, but she takes off the cast and walks off the set — and Panahi says he, too, must throw away his cast. This cryptic prescription for his predicament is just the first of an increasingly tortuous set of philosophical considerations he tackles.
As he proceeds to read and describe his last screenplay, which he was banned from filming, he maps out the film’s set on his carpet with tape. These shots have more than a little resonance with Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), in which a space for creative performance is inscribed within a real, lived-in space.
In some slower and more willfully meta moments, Panahi and Mirtahmasb banter about the filmic potential of the footage they are producing. This could never be part of a film, they say, but documentation is an end in itself. And yet this isn’t pure document — it is edited, and often at strikingly emotional moments, to create cinematic effects. One beat, where Panahi halts his narration and looks suddenly overcome with frustration, is suspiciously preceded by a change of camera angle. But then, Panahi and Mirtahmasb even discuss the possibility of editing their footage, so even that aspect is a performative extension of the “documentary” content. Furthermore, the notion that Panahi is not directing is repeatedly challenged by the fact that he can’t stop telling Mirtahmasb when to cut.
But the work is not nearly as dry as all this analytical babble might imply. It is also deeply funny, in the parts where the camera follows Igi, Panahi’s daughter’s pet iguana. And then, in a startling final sequence, it becomes weirdly claustrophobic and suspenseful as Panahi joins his building’s custodian on a longish elevator ride.
There’s a cliché in criticism that certain technically accomplished movies are “pure cinema,” and in a sense, if this is not a film, it’s pure filmmaking. It presents itself as a document, but its authenticity is questionable, and for a man who is banned from filmmaking, so is its legitimacy. But it is a process in action and in dialogue with itself. It is an act of defiance, and the product of an artist’s self-effacing need to express himself. Whether or not this is a film, it is a profound artistic howl.
THIS IS NOT A FILM opens Fri/6 at SF Film Society Cinema.
FILM Nothing dates faster than yesterday’s futurism. Yet particularly at a moment when half the country seems bent on ordering us back to the past — a past that might variably be identified as the Victorian era, the Inquisition, and the Dark Ages — there is something comforting in revisiting old visions of the future. For the next seven Thursdays the Vortex Room boldly goes a few places you’ve probably been before, several that earn brownie points for foreknowledge, and others that separate the sci-fi nerd from the sci-fi mega scholar.
The familiar titles are still on the cultish side, like the intentional-camp nirvana created by a double bill of 1980’s Flash Gordon and 1968’s Barbarella. Likewise on the spoofy side is John Carpenter’s 1974 feature debut, Dark Star. Also fairly famous is horror specialist Mario Bava’s 1965 Planet of the Vampires, a gorgeous color nightmare.
But the rest of the “Starship Vortex” series dwells in forgotten netherworlds of cosmic fantasy from the advanced minds of Italian and Danish exploitationists, as well as Communist bloc filmmakers with higher budgets and less strictly-commercial aims. The sole all-Yank effort here is also the earliest, 1961’s endearing The Phantom Planet, whose brave new universe of 1980 finds an ever-belligerent Ugly American astronaut stranded among Lilliputians (who shrink him down to their size — the nerve!), whose females fight over this rugged lunk. The assertively bad acting, quaint FX, heavy (and heavy-handed) religious-philosophical overtones, dorky monster, and credit for “Electronic Space Equipment by Space Age Rentals” make this a classic of black and white sci-fi silliness.
On the other side of the Iron Curtain, however, people were taking space exploration very seriously — and no wonder, since the films were state funded, and the U.S.S.R.’s space program was one indisputable success in which (for a while) it even outpaced the West. Typically earnest was 1963’s Czech Voyage to the End of the Universe. Satellite “town” Ikaria XB-1 and its 40 inhabitants are liberated from Earth orbit and sent to the closest star outside our solar system. There’s much attention to interpersonal relationships (as well as scantily clad gymnastics in the exercise lounge — hey, fitness is important), and despite desultory suspense around radiation exposure, our interplanetary future ultimately looks bright.
Interestingly, an assumption shared by nearly all the features here is that any future enemies we faced would be from “out there.” The inevitable sprinkling of jerks aside, humanity would have long since been joined in peace and prosperity by a one-government body à la the United Nations. Try floating that concept now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQjCyMfFi8
In the Me Decade and after even Socialist sci-fi lightened up, discounting the thesis statements made by Tarkovsky and his ilk. The East German-Romanian In the Dust of the Stars (1976) is a fair riot of silliness as Earth voyagers sample the high life on Tem 4 — interpretive dancing, flavored inhalers, snakes slithering around party smorgasbords — until our heroes discover the planet’s secret slave underbelly, prompting revolutionary class struggle. Just a bit more sober is 1981’s Soviet To the Stars by Hard Ways, in which an ethereal sole survivor is found on an alien spaceship and brought to Earth, then taken back to save her home planet from death by industrial pollution. It’s a rare post-1977 sci-fi film not influenced by Star Wars, which was imitated more shamelessly the further you went down the exploitation-cinema tunnel — at least by anyone not using 1979’s Alien as their model. Italy, second only to the U.S. as the drive-in era’s international trash exporter, ground out countless grade-C space operas like 1979’s Star Odyssey (featuring such spectacular budget-sparing action as two people using their minds to open a door); even Star Pilot, originally shot in 1966, was retitled, re-edited with footage “borrowed” from other movies, and re-released in the U.S. 11 years later to cash in on George Lucas’ bonanza.
Nothing, however, will ever equal the plagiaristic zeal of 1982’s The Man Who Saved the World, a.k.a. Turkish Star Wars, which took full advantage of Turkey’s disinterest in copyright law to slap together an unforgettable contraption combining acres of actual Star Wars footage, other stolen elements, and new scenes putting a distinctive bargain-basement regional spin on the whole affair. Gauze too expensive for your zombie-mummies? Use toilet paper!
If you haven’t overdosed on “futuristic” pastel track suits or annoying comedy robots yet, elsewhere in the Vortex series there’s the relatively big budget 1969 British Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, a “parallel planet” tale at its best when flaunting the obvious influence of the prior year’s psychedelic “trip” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Way down the production-values scale, 1967 European co-production Mission Stardust features then-hot Swedish sexpot Essy Persson, who utters the line “Those robot creatures are great tailors, but they haven’t a clue how to put buttons on.” Denmark’s 1961 English-language Journey to the Seventh Planet adheres to the lava-lamp school of color design in portraying astronauts under mind control that materializes their thoughts — all of which seem to run toward pin-up girls (including a former Miss Denmark!) in lingerie.
TRASH In 1968, Pretty Poison, which plays the Castro Theatre this Thursday in a new 35mm print, arrived a bit early. The next year Easy Rider would suddenly make young American directors seem like “the future” of an industry then hobbling on the same now-arthritic legs that had supported its Golden Age decades earlier. By 1970 and for several years afterward small, idiosyncratic, independent (both within and outside studio funding) films would flourish, in number and frequent quality if not commercially.
But 1968 was the year of Belle de Jour, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary’s Baby, Petulia, two Ingmar Bergmans, and three Jean-Luc Godards — all “foreign films” in fact or stance. Stage or TV-trained not-quite-newbies like Arthur Penn or Mike Nichols aside, the perception was that U.S. cinema needed new voices yet unfound.
Certainly 20th Century Fox had no great expectations from Poison, which seemed eminently disposable: A small-town thriller with medium-watt stars, a first-time director (Noel Black had only done Skaterdater, a prize-winning ’65 short about suburban boarders), and a TV scenarist (Lorenzo Semple Jr., just off the Batman series). Expecting to dump it into drive-ins and second run houses, they opened in one New York City theater without a press screening, then were taken aback when Pauline Kael and Newsweek sought it out and praised it to the skies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJovJY-1f8c
We first meet Dennis Pitt (Anthony Perkins) being released from a lockup institution of some sort, his probation officer advising him to stay in touch and keep his “fantasies” in check. Relocating to a sleepy mill town for drone work at a chemical plant, Dennis quickly abandons both those principles. He’s convinced he’s under surveillance, because he’s onto a conspiracy to poison the water supply. Or is that absurd intrigue just a ruse to beguile the high school honor student he’s ogled on the football field in her miniskirt?
Sue Ann Stepenek (Tuesday Weld) is the golden all-American ingénue in Blondie’s “Sunday Girl:” “cold as ice cream but still as sweet.” She responds to Dennis’ crazy overtures with Girl Scout enthusiasm; looking for adventure, she’s willing to play along with his secret-agent delusions. It takes us a while to realize what’s really happening — that Dennis is not the bigger freak here. When we meet Sue Ann’s hectoring single mother (Beverly Garland), we begin to glean she might be using the older man to get out of her own domestic lockup. Later it occurs that she is Mother Version 2.0, with twice the chrome and venom. Weld doesn’t channel deception as most actors might — her Sue Ann doesn’t let us see the act’s seams any more than Dennis does. The depth of her performance is only revealed in a full-circle tag scene at that unlikely hub for criminal genius, the hot dog stand.
Weld was supposed to be our great actress of the 1970s, but that didn’t happen. Was the teen-pinup image impossible for audiences to overcome? Was she too “difficult”? Was she just not that interested? A few roles like this one make her career seem tragically under-realized. Director Black’s, not so much — the two movies he made (1970’s Cover Me Babe, 1971’s Jennifer On My Mind) on Poison‘s promise were nadirs of New Hollywood flailing that sentenced him to TV work and B genre flicks. But for a moment, Pretty Poison made it seem like anything was possible for them both.
FILM It’s not easy being a repertory cinema these days, even when you’re the coolest (or only, or both) one in town. Hoping that this town is big enough for more than just one, at least for a few days, the Roxie this weekend is hosting a kind of cult cinema smackdown between itself and two more of the nation’s finest such emporiums. Under the blanket title “Cinemadness!,” the three-day marathon of rarities, oddities, and unbilled surprises challenges you to look away, or stay away — either way, your sanity will surely be shakier come Monday.
Cinefamily kicks things off, road-tripping up from L.A.’s Silent Movie House. More than just film programmers, the collective also contrives relevant ring tones (intrigue your fellow Muni riders with the “Death Wish II-O-Rama”!), multimedia shows, curated archival wonders online, and live events like the “Jean Harlow Pajama Party.”
The party may be in your pants as well as onscreen Friday, March 23, as Cinefamily brings “100 Most Outrageous Fucks,” a clip compilation of the most tasteless, ridiculous, over-acted, and anatomically unlikely sex scenes yet found by people with an inordinate interest in such things. Expect mainstream Hollywood, exploitation cinema, and le porn to be fully representing.
This will be followed by a real obscurity. Dirkie a.k.a. Lost in the Desert was a 1970 endeavor by the late South African writer-director-producer-actor Jamie Uys, who would later have a fluke international smash with 1980’s The Gods Must Be Crazy. (And end his career 16 years later with barely-noticed The Gods Must Be Crazy V.) The Apartheid-era racial attitudes that drew criticism to some of his other works are absent from Dirkie, a film nonetheless distinguished as one of the most traumatizing and sadistic “family movies” ever made.
The titular eight-year-old (Uys’ own offspring Wynand) is sent for his “weak chest” to the country. Unfortunately a plane crash strands Dirkie and terrier Lolly (played by “Lady Frolic of Belvedale,” whose performance is indeed splendid) alone in the Kalahari Desert. As Dad (Uys) frantically oversees search efforts from Johannesburg, our wee asthmatic hero is attacked by a viciously persistent hyena; scorpion-stung; blinded by snake venom; fed Lolly’s cooked remains (or so he thinks); etc. Preceding by one year Nicolas Roeg’s better-known Walkabout, Dirkie is an equally spectacular survival adventure saga that’s less arty but even less suitable for young viewers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTCJWVLfAYo
The Alamo Drafthouse — jewel of Austin, that oasis of civilization in Texas — takes up Roxie residence Saturday, March 24, with two of 1987’s finest sci-fi-horror-action black comedies. A sleeper hit then that’s underappreciated now, The Hidden has pre-Twin Peaks Kyle MacLachlan as a mysterious “FBI agent” (OK, he’s from outer space) tracking an interplanetary homicidal maniac who quite enjoys Earth — especially its loud crap pop music, Ferraris, and automatic weapons. This mayhem-spreading tourist fears no physical peril because it can always abandon one human (or canine) host body for another. Typical of the script’s over-the-top glee is a stretch when said thingie “possesses” a stripper, taking rather more pleasure in her bodacious form than any slimy, tentacled whatsit ought to.
It’s followed by Street Trash, to date the only feature film directed by J. Michael Munro (still a busy cameraman), who incredibly was just 20 when he made it. This last word in low-budget Escape From New York-Road Warrior knockoffs finds a depressed city’s ginormous Skid Row population winnowed by (among other things) cheap Mad Dog-type wine with a flesh-melting-acid bouquet. Incredibly crass (typical banter: “You fuckworm!”), gross (see: severed-penis-as-Frisbee set piece) and energetic, it’s the guiltiest, most pleasurable of guilty pleasures.
The Roxie wrestles its own back Sunday, March 25 with three big attractions. First up is George Kuchar: Comedy of the Underground, an ultra-rare 1982 documentary about San Francisco’s beloved, recently deceased DIY auteur that was unavailable for preview. Then there’s Robert Altman’s 1984 Secret Honor, with Philip Baker Hall as the craziest faux Richard Nixon on record.
That is nothing, however, compared to the brain-warping experience that is Elvis Found Alive. An alleged two-hour-plus interview with the King himself (shot in silhouette), whom filmmaker Joel Gilbert located with stunning ease thanks to poorly-redacted paperwork obtained via Freedom of Information Act, this … documentary? re-enactment? mock-doc fantasia? … bares many a shocking revelation.
To wit: secret FBI agent Presley faked his own death because the Weathermen, Black Panthers, and Mafia had joined forces to assassinate him. Believe me, that is just the tip of the ice cube in this video cocktail. It all makes more sense if you know Gilbert is himself a professional impersonator of Bob Dylan (whom Elvis confides “dumped that awful Joan Baez when she tried to push him into leftist politics”) and has also made such direct-to-your fallout-shelter opuses as Paul Is Really Dead and Atomic Jihad. Does “Elvis” have an opinion about President Obama? Ohhh yeah, and that “socialist thug” best not mess with Memphis. America forever! *
FILM Say the name “Pam Grier” and certain things come to mind: the iconic poster for her 1973 breakout, Coffy, about a nurse turned vigilante (“the baddest one-chick hit squad that ever hit town!”); or her cool-as-ice, career-reviving turn in 1997’s Jackie Brown.
What you don’t think of, probably, is blaxploitation’s most gorgeous badass puttering around on a Colorado farm. Make no mistake, Grier is a badass (onscreen and off), but this was the first thing she said, over the phone, after a breathless greeting: “I was just stacking some hay!” With that image lodged in my brain, I chatted with Grier about her upcoming event in San Francisco with Peaches Christ.
SFBG The Castro is screening films that span your career: Coffy and Jackie Brown. Did you realize, at the time, that Coffy would have such an impact?
Pam Grier I knew that Coffy was representing the women’s liberation movement. But it was also representing my mother — as we were all trying to survive the Jim Crow era, she was the nurse in our community — and my grandfather, who was the first feminist in my life. He required the girls to learn as much as the boys, and to be self-sufficient. He said, “Men will respect you when you can do something.” And I brought that to film. It was about literally giving women across the world a voice. I didn’t invent it — I just happened to be the one who could show it onscreen. I think women [realized] “Yes! We’ve always had that freedom. Why haven’t we utilized it?” It was a real revolutionary movement.
SFBG What was it like working with director Jack Hill?
PG He was great. He and Roger [Corman] were very much into authenticity, and they wanted their actors to be as raw as possible. It was great that they didn’t want to overly polish me and cover me in blue eyeshadow.
SFBG You first encountered Jackie Brown director Quentin Tarantino when he was casting 1994’s Pulp Fiction. What was that initial meeting like?
PG I walked into his office and all of my posters were on his wall. Very impressive. I said, “Did you put them up because I was coming?” He said, “No, I was gonna take them down, so I didn’t seem like a stalker!” He is so enamored with film — how could you not respect someone with such a great appreciation of cinema and art?
I remember I was watching Reservoir Dogs in New York City, and the characters talked about “Pam Grier, that badass chick.” My friends around me started screaming and pointing at me! I said, “He gave me an homage! Amazing!” You never know when you’ll impress other people by just being yourself.
SFBG Aside from being a film star — with roles in multiple upcoming films, including the RZA’s directorial debut, The Man With the Iron Fists — you are also a huge film fan as well.
PG I love the cinema, and I have respect for all films whether I like them or not. I love good storytelling. [My career is] always an adventure. It’s always interesting. I’m never bored! *
FILM You gotta love a guy who is willing to poke fun at his man handles. But the consistency with which Will Ferrell is willing to drop trou has had even Terry Gross wondering, what’s with the vast expanses of exposed carne asada, dude?
Ferrell’s new Casa de mi Padre — a Spanish-language jab at telenovelas, spaghetti-burrito westerns, and just plain low-budget moviemaking, circa the early 1970s — is no exception. It, er, climaxes with a sweet, sweet love scene, complete with close-ups on rumps.
“Well, that was always in the script — that was literally written in the stage direction: lots of butts. Way too many butts. And that made me laugh, if that was going to be our big crescendo lovemaking scene,” Ferrell says gamely. “Of course, lit beautifully with soft lenses and elegant tracking shots and dissolves.”
Tanned, gold-tressed, and outfitted in a gingham shirt and khakis, the actor resembles the tall, well-groomed human incarnation of a Steiff teddy bear. He also comes off as one of the nicest every-guy movie stars around — the kind that justifies the response you get when you tell someone you’re interviewing Will Ferrell (inevitably: “Omigod, I love him!”)
Maybe that appeal has to do with a willingness to embrace the painfully awkward. Anything to heighten the comedy of the moment, he explains, but also, “I think we’re so body- and image-conscious in this culture, and there’s so much emphasis on staying in shape, looking good, plastic surgery, this, that, and the other, that it’s just kind of my protest against all of that. It’s just, that’s what real bodies look like, and if mine happens to look funny, then that’s good, too.”
The latest challenge in a long line of actorly exercises and comic gestures — from his legendary stint on Saturday Night Live and his Funny or Die videos, to his long list of comedies probing the last gasps of American masculinity, and such serious forays as Stranger Than Fiction (2006) — is Casa de mi Padre. Here Ferrell tackles an almost entirely Spanish script (with only meager high school and college language courses under his belt) alongside Mexican superstars Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna and telenovela veteran Genesis Rodriguez.
The entire project, directed by Matt Piedmont and written by Andrew Steele, sprang from Farrell’s noggin. “I had this idea for the longest time, just from watching telenovelas,” he recounts. “It’s one of those things where you’re cruising around the dial, and you stop, and you watch it for four or five minutes, and it’s like, my god. It’s way over the top, but it was so funny to put myself in that world. I’ve never seen that before and I thought, wow, it would be a unique opportunity to take someone from American comedy and have them commit to speaking Spanish. That could be a cool movie.”
So Ferrell worked with Patrick Pérez, who translated the script from English to Spanish, before the shoot and then during the production, driving to and from the set every day, going over lines and working on pronunciation. “It was a little bit crazy — a lot crazy,” Ferrell confesses. “But it was so much fun. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a more fun yet stressful experience.”
All of which led to almost zero improvisation on the actor’s part; plenty of meta, Machete-like spoofs; and a new twist in the world of Ferrell’s films, which seem to all share a glee at poking holes in American masculinity. Yes, Casa punctures padre-informed transmissions of Latin machismo, but it equally ridicules the idea of a gringo actor riding in and superimposing himself, badly or otherwise, over another country’s culture.
“That theme of the macho Americans, ‘USA! We’re number one!’ has been so fascinating and such a great thing to make fun of. That we think we’re the best,” Ferrell observes. “I’ve always been fascinated with that level of ego.”
CASA DE MI PADREopens Fri/16 in Bay Area theaters.
SFIAAFF As the mainstream movie industry undergoes a senior moment and tips toward grandfatherly nostalgia, this year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival seems to be in the throes of a youth movement. You can trace the growth spurt from Eduardo W. Roy Jr.’s reproduction production line Baby Factory and the childhood Xmas fantasy of Kim Sung-Hoon’s Ryang-Kang-Do: Merry Christmas, North! to Wang Xiaoshuai’s coming-of-age snapshot 11 Flowers and the teen gang wars of Byron Q’s Bang Bang. A closer look at three — Christopher Woon’s Hmong hip-hopper doc Among B-Boys, Akira Boch’s girl-band indie The Crumbles, and Takashi Miike’s tot action farce Ninja Kids — finds the disparate troika taking aim at shared themes of bonding and identity.
Among B-Boys gives outsiders an hour-long, respectful immersion in the lives of Hmong breakdancers, here “getting lost” in their impressively athletic moves and speaking for themselves, away from the flinty-eyed filter of Gran Torino (2008). In his quest to follow the Velocity/Soul Rivals and Underground Flow crews, Woon takes his camera from Oklahoma to Left Coast exurbia where the kids are attempting to dream with acrobatic handstands, freezes, and crazy-fancy footwork — and finding their efforts rewarded with trophies.
Their triumphs in gritty gyms and community centers are made that much more poignant in the context of their parents’ memories of war, displacement, and poverty. The elders’ stealth contributions to the CIA’s shadowy adventures in Laos casts a pool of lingering darkness on these hip-hoppers, who are striving to carve out a life for themselves while coping with the unique challenges that the Hmong have encountered in the states. As Joua Xiong, the rare B-girl in the Soul Rivals Crew, explains, “Hmong mean ‘the Free,’ and that’s basically what we are: we don’t have a certain country, but we don’t really know our original customs because we’re so mixed up. We have a lot of Thai, Lao, Chinese in us, and we’ve been running away so much from people trying to destroy our customs and make us conform with them.”
Cast away in a semi-rural Merced, Fresno, and Sacto, these kids appear to be finding another kind of freedom. “It’s not just breaking,” says Soul Rivals’ Kyle Vong. “It’s the culture of hip-hop — it’s about teaching yourself to understand life in general and expressing yourself.”
The awkward slackers and damaged hipsters of The Crumbles seem to be worlds away from the humble, proud B-boys of the Central Valley: theirs is a sun-strafed, paved-over Los Angeles habitat of coffee shops, taco trucks, bookstores, budding filmmakers, and living room-bound band practice. Darla (Katie Hipol) is slouching nowhere fast when her zany, charismatic cool-girl chum Elisa (Teresa Michelle Lee) enters the picture, looking for a place to crash.
Elisa’s wacky, erratic, and unreliable, but she’s also capable of generating real excitement — and a mean little keytar hook — and the girls’ band, the Crumbles, gets off the couch and threatens to get all involved to bust out of their shells. Though director Boch never quite dips into the deep background of his characters’ various dysfunctions — the threatened readings of Darla and Elisa’s psychic friend never quite sheds light — the first-time feature filmmaker has a real feel for the drifting, up-for-anything quality of Cali 20-somethings and an appreciation for their highs and lows that makes this familiar, loving, lets-put-on-show-kids update compelling.
With kindred ultraviolence vet Martin Scorsese throwing himself into his own kiddie roller-coaster of a cinematic ride with last year’s Hugo, it makes some sense that Takashi Miike — whose 2010 13 Assassins might have bested both Ichi the Killer (2001) and 1999’s Audition for sheer bloodletting — would enter the children’s field with such gusto. Manga fans will appreciate Miike’s broadly farcical, spoofy élan with comic book touches — down to the freeze-frame mucus drips, the CGI hatched-background stills denoting way-ramped-up action, and fourth-wall-bust-outs/pop-up trivia interludes by your “friendly ninja trivia commentator.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVjoh-jG36o
Rantaro — your archetypal geek toddler, complete with thick glasses and bad haircut — has left the family farm and been sent off to ninja nursery school to learn all about deadly boomeranging stars, big-headed villains with testicular chins, and ninja master-slash-hair stylists. Does Rantaro, er, find himself amid the rigors of class, attacks from dastardly ninja outfits, and a final challenge that has him literally biting the dust? And does it matter when Miike digs in with such glee to lampoon the samurai genre, and kick up dust with the ankle-nibblers in this insanely comical alternate universe of ninja mini-mes?
SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL
March 8-18, various Bay Area venues, most shows $12
DOCS AND SHOCKS: MORE FROM THE SF INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL
SFIAAFF Documentary fans, prioritize Give Up Tomorrow, Michael Collins’ probing examination of a high-profile murder case in the Philippines. If the Paradise Lost films got your blood boiling, expect to rage even harder at the unbelievably shifty way the events detailed here unfolded.
As with the West Memphis Three, the crime at Tomorrow‘s heart is horrific: in 1997, two sisters in their early 20s were kidnapped, raped, and murdered. Or were they? Only one body was found, and it was never quite confirmed that the dead woman was actually one of the missing sisters. Of course, that didn’t stop authorities (almost all of whom had ties to a local drug lord, who was also connected to the victims’ family) from fingering a group of local teens, including Paco Larrañaga — who became the case’s main target, despite the fact that dozens of his culinary-school classmates swore he was with them, hundreds of miles from the crime scene, at the time of the alleged murders.
Give Up Tomorrow offers a searing study of a corrupt court system, and the heartbreak that happens when a cause célèbre falls victim to the short attention span of the international activist community. Without spoiling all of its twists and turns, know that this story is better than any fictionalized crime drama, and more powerfully wrenching for being true.
Other docs worth checking out include Mr. Cao Goes to Washington, an insightful look at the American political system via Joseph Cao, who was the first Vietnamese American elected to Congress. But that wasn’t the most unique thing about him: he was a Republican, elected amid post-Katrina disarray in one of New Orleans’ traditionally African American and staunchly Democratic districts. S. Leo Chiang’s film follows Cao as he makes hard choices in the year leading up to his battle for re-election, including voting first for, then against, President Obama’s health care reform bill. (Reason for the switch: he’s passionately anti-abortion.) Even if you don’t agree with his views, Cao puts a human (and surprisingly honest) face on the great divide between the political parties in this country.
More hopeful is No Look Pass, Melissa Johnson’s quite enjoyable documentary about first-generation Burmese American Emily Tay, a basketball superstar who turns pro after graduating Harvard (eat your heart out, Jeremy Lin), and, oh yeah — happens to be a lesbian. No Look Pass also screened at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, and it’s not hard to see why it appeals to a wide range of audiences: Tay is an inspiring figure on the court, and endearingly awkward off it, especially when trying to relate to her deeply traditional parents.
Even more uplifting, and perfectly compressed at 39 minutes, is Lucy Walker’s Oscar-nominated The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, which examines the “beauty and terror” of nature, as perceived by Japanese survivors of the recent earthquake and tsunami — and the spiritual significance of the cherry blossom, which is shown to be a key element in the country’s healing process.
Genre fans! I Am a Ghost, the world-premiere latest from prolific local H.P. Mendoza (2006’s Colma: The Musical), starts slowly but — holy ghost! — stick with it, and you’ll be shriekingly rewarded. And another recent IndieFest selection, Marlon N. Rivera’s satirical The Woman in the Septic Tank, returns to delight another wave of crowds with its tale of three ambitious filmmakers (and a hell of a leading lady) determined to make the most popular Filipino movie of all time. Best line: “Fuck Cannes, bro! We’re talking Oscars!” (Cheryl Eddy)
FILM It’s almost impossible to describe Adult Swim hit Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, but “cable access on acid” comes pretty close. It’s awkward, gross, repetitive, and quotable; it features unsettling characters portrayed by famous comedians and unknowns who may not actually be actors. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, who are much more low-key than the amplified versions of themselves they play on the show and in the new Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, discussed the spoils of cult fame the morning after a recent screening in San Francisco.
“Seeing the last ten minutes with our hardcore fans — that was the best, because they’re laughing at everything,” Wareheim says. “Versus, we just came from the Sundance Film Festival, and there were good crowds, but there were a lot of people who didn’t know us. It takes awhile to adjust to what we do, like a learning curve.”
Though it opens theatrically this week, Billion Dollar Movie has been available On Demand since the end of January.
“The idea is to get it out to as many people as possible, especially people who won’t be able to see it in theaters, since it’s a limited theatrical release,” Wareheim explains. “But I also think that by getting it out there [early], our fans are talking about it, and they’ll go again in the theater.”
So, how do you transform something comprised of bite-sized insanity into a feature-length film? “Early on, we made a choice not to do a sketch movie, or just make a long episode of the show,” Heidecker says. “We felt that the pacing would never sustain itself. We tried to pace it in a way that the craziness would be there, but it just wouldn’t be coming at you so rapidly. But still, some people are saying that it’s completely exhausting. For us, we feel like we scaled down, but that might not be the reaction of the man on the street.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88pv0cbw8yQ
“For someone who’s unfamiliar with us, it’s at least an interesting take on comedy,” Wareheim says. “Some people are really going to enjoy it, some people are not going to get it, and some people are going to hate it.”
And though Billion Dollar Movie contains its share of boundary-pushing gags (literally, you will gag), Heidecker and Wareheim’s humor also springs from their deliberately crappy production values, inspired by commercials, TV outtakes, and promo videos — and necessitated by their own low budget (title notwithstanding). Still, Heidecker sees the movie as a turning point for the pair.
“We’ve been playing with that aesthetic for awhile now, and it is getting a little redundant,” he says. “As in any kind of aesthetic trend, you’re gonna run out of ammunition. I think in a lot of ways, the movie moves past the aesthetic [of the TV show]. We use it in certain places where it’s appropriate, but it wasn’t like, this is all we do. You gotta have other tools in the toolbox.”
TIM AND ERIC’S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE opens Fri/2 in Bay Area theaters.
FILM What with the internet, the paparazzi, Rupert Murdoch’s CIA-level spy techniques, and the general displacement of actual news by “celebrity news,” it’s pretty hard these days for a star of any sort to keep their debauchery private. Not like the good old days, when Hollywood carefully stage-managed publicity and only those who’d become a real liability risked having their peccadilloes exposed.
Such rare windfalls aside, the public were mostly restricted to watching beautiful people behave badly onscreen — a pastime that took a big blow once the censorious Production Code was instituted in 1934. Elliot Lavine’s latest Roxie retrospective of movies from that golden-shower period of post-silents, pre-Nannywood licentiousness — this time entitled “Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films for a Nasty-Ass World!” — provides plentiful early talkie titillation. Now that the bodies involved are long buried, we also know a few tales of their stars’ off-screen misadventures, too.
The week-long series of double bills sports its share of familiar titles, notably Howard Hawks’ terrific original Scarface (1934); Edgar G. Ulmer’s Karloff vs. Lugosi smackdown The Black Cat (1934); and the first, probably best version of H.G. Welles’ prescient biotech fable Island of Lost Souls (1932). There are women in prison (1931’s Ladies of the Big House), women in Faulkner (1933’s The Story of Temple Drake, a watered-down adaptation of W.F.’s then-notorious Sanctuary), women in everything else (1932’s Three On a Match, whose Depression-era Valley of the Dolls-esque trio includes a very young Bette Davis), and just plain Joan Blondell (1933’s Blondie Johnson).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzxnEDEY2Hs
It’s a few choice dames in lesser-remembered pictures that provide the biggest “nasty-ass” discoveries this go-round, however. March 4 offers a shocking double dose of pure white femininity finding themselves in, ahem, “Yellow Peril” — miscegenation being something Hollywood could only begin to embrace a few decades later. Frank Capra’s atypically erotic The Bitter Tea of General Yen, with Barbara Stanwyck alllllmost surrendering the white flag to a “charismatic Chinese warlord” (Swede Nils Asther, eyes narrowed), has become a minor classic since flopping in 1933.
No such luck for The Cheat (1931), a remake of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 shocker that was part of Paramount’s brief, failed attempt to make stage sensation Tallulah Bankhead a movie star. Her gambling-addicted socialite gets branded (literally) in lieu of repayment not by the original’s Far East businessman (dashing Sessue Hayakawa) but by a mere rich Caucasian perv with Sinophile pretensions (Irving Pichel). The big courtroom climax is a notable howler.
Bankhead remained a Broadway star and a popular “personality,” her throaty voice hinting at a semi-private life that included a great deal of bourbon, a fondness for unexpected nudity, and sexual appetites all along the Kinsey scale. After two decades off screen she arguably found her camp métier as a berserk Bible-clutching hag terrorizing Stefanie Powers in 1965’s Die! Die! My Darling.
Much less of a survivor was poor Clara Bow, who was beloved when she played the wild thing yet unduly punished when it turned out that role had relevance in real life. The quintessential flapper and “It Girl” (“it” meaning sex appeal) was never much of an actress, but an incandescent, live-wire screen presence.
Call Her Savage (1932) is a pre-Code jaw-dropper that was supposedly her personal favorite. Running an A-to-Z gamut of emotions (and hairstyles), her Texas heiress heroine Nasa “Dynamite” Springer is “never two minutes the same” — a nice way of saying she’s nuts. In 88 minutes she rides a horse like it’s something else, plays with her mastiff likewise, is near-raped by an estranged husband, turns streetwalker, causes a brawl in Greenwich Village café catering to “wild poets and anarchists,” gets in two catfights, hits the bottle, and finds peace upon discovering she’s a part Indian “half-breed,” which apparently explains all.
Emotionally unstable, due in part to a pretty horrific upbringing, Bow must have related. At the time she was enduring myriad problems, notably some embarrassing public revelations spilled by a blackmailing secretary. Savage would be her next-to-last film, after which she retired into a deep and troubled seclusion.
Heading thataway as well was Juanita Hansen, a silent star who’d gone down in flames a decade earlier thanks to a “Queen of Thrills” image that unfortunately she enacted a little too enthusiastically in real life. She quit cocaine, got hooked on morphine, quit that, and became an anti-drug crusader — but nothing re-ignited her career. Certainly not lone comeback vehicle Sensation Hunters, a 1933 Poverty Row exploiter in which she was fifth-billed as “Trixie Snell,” manager-slash-madam to a troupe of “Hot-Cha Girls” who kinda dance, kinda sing, but mostly roll customers at Panama City’s “Bull Ring Club.” It was a sad exit. Puffy and peroxided, Hansen is all too convincing as a woman with too many hard miles on her to go anywhere but further downhill.
Waaaay uptown — glittering Broadway via glossy Paramount — 1934’s Murder at the Vanities offered the last hurrah for pre-Code naughtiness. And what a hurrah: chorus girls in pasties and less (at one point they simply clutch boobs as if on a latter-day Vanity Fair cover); production numbers like “The Rape of the Rhapsody” (the “rape” being Duke Ellington’s “colored” jazz musicians and dancers invading a classical orchestra with something called “Ebony Rhapsody” — until a white gangster jokingly machine-guns them all down); plus sexual humor so blunt that Jack Oakie ends the film telling a giggly blonde “Come on, let’s do it,” meaning exactly what you think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCoj855Vdo8
On the side of the angels — definitely for losers here — there are numerous horrible songs (excepting standard “Cocktails for Two”), gag-inducingly sweet romantic leads, and kitschy-great ideas like having stage impresario Earl Carroll’s patented “Most Beautiful Girls in the World” pose en masse as tropical waves and cosmetics products. Representing Satan and evening gown-wearing pot smokers everywhere is villainous Gertrude Michael, who infamously sings torch song “Sweet Marijuana.” Michael was an elegant stage and radio star whose own recreational taste leaned more toward cocktails for one. Indeed, she was fictionalized as the hard-drinking love object in one-time lover Paul Cain’s 1932 novel Fast One, an early classic of hard boiled American pulp.
Saving the sleaziest for last, the series will truly flabber your gast with its closer. Normally prim MGM found itself reviled in early 1932 with the fleeting release of Tod Browning’s Freaks (playing the Roxie March 3), a much-misunderstood, now celebrated fable starring actual circus sideshow performers. It was considered so grotesque and unsettling that Freaks was banned in many areas — Britain didn’t see it until 1963.
Yet there’s no evidence of any similar backlash to the infinitely scuzzier Kongo, unleashed by Metro a few months later. A remake of Browning’s 1928 Lon Chaney vehicle West of Zanzibar, it stars Walter Huston as wheelchair-bound “Deadlegs” Flint. He’s used cheap magic tricks to appoint himself fearsome white-man “god” amongst spear-carrying tribesmen in a “dunghill” African outpost, all part of an elaborate, insidious plan to wreak vengeance on the rival who stole his wife and health long ago.
What this revenge eventually encompasses reads like a list of nearly everything the Production Code would soon bar from the screen: depicted or suggested drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, rape, sadism, and a convent-bred ingénue (Virginia Bruce) recalling “hot hairy hands pawing and mauling” her unwilling virginal body. Not to mention human sacrifice and a unique substance abuse “cure” using leeches.
One can almost hear the censuring voice of Will Hays, the Code’s original enforcer, when one character tells Deadlegs “The swamp’s wholesome compared to you!” It would arguably be 40 years before MGM distributed another movie so flagrantly perverse — and even then the studio was so ashamed they put it (Paul Bartel’s 1972 Private Parts) out under a fake subsidiary’s auspices.
HOLLYWOOD BEFORE THE CODE: NASTY-ASS FILMS FOR A NASTY-ASS WORLD!
FILM “It’s highly probable that no one but Kevin Epps could have made a film like Straight Outta Hunters Point,” begins Erik K. Arnold’s 2001 Guardian article. Epps, then a 33-year-old first-time filmmaker, had just released his bold documentary; it investigated a neighborhood that most San Francisco residents never actually visited, but knew about thanks to news coverage of its prodigious gang violence.
“That world wouldn’t open up to an outsider,” Epps, who grew up there before studying film at San Francisco State University and the now-defunct Film Arts Foundation, told Arnold.
Cut to 2012, and Epps is no longer an emerging talent — he’s a full-time independent filmmaker with multiple credits (including The Black Rock, a documentary about Alcatraz’s African American inmates, and hip-hop film Rap Dreams), collaborations (with Current TV and others), and an artist fellowship at the de Young Museum under his belt. For his newest project, he returns to the scene of his first work. He no longer resides in Bayview-Hunters Point, but he still lives close by, and he’s never lost touch with the community that inspired the first film and encouraged him to make its follow-up.
“Straight Outta Hunters Point opened up a lot of opportunities up for me, in terms of traveling abroad and being exposed to experiences that I would never have had [otherwise],” Epps explains. “But I was always mindful of, you know, this is my passport: telling the [community’s] stories, that’s my passport to the world. So though my life has changed a little bit, I’ve never been too far away from what’s going on in the community. I decided to keep shooting certain things that I thought had significance, and more importantly interviewing people in the community who could give insight into its current state.”
Despite its title, and its similar use of handheld camera, SOHP 2 is not a straightforward sequel to part one.
“I wanted to talk to people who really live in the community [to find out] what’s going on every day — Straight Outta Hunters Point eight, nine, ten years later. Have things changed for the better or gotten worse?” Epps says of his new film. “It’s not really a sequel — it’s a continuation of that conversation, and looking at where things are now, compared to how they were then. Obviously there’s some redevelopment that’s been happening. That’s apparent in the film, when the Hunters View housing development slowly gets torn down.”
Epps built his film around themes that arose from his interviews with Hunters Point residents, including the disconnect between generations — older folks with activist backgrounds, and youths who face “a lot of distractions” as they approach adulthood — and pressures, both internal and external, that have shaped the neighborhood.
“These are the predominant topics that come up, if you go to the barber shop or if you’re hanging out at the gym, and you get into an informal conversation. Redevelopment. Violence, which has a history that’s still being dealt with. [Discussing] these reoccurring themes is a way to see if there’s been any progress. Being a filmmaker, I was trying to put them into a creative context, more like an edu-tainment sort of piece,” he says. “My first documentary was really for the community, when I was living there, to have a conversation with ourselves. [SOHP 2] is less of a personal story. It’s [investigating], did we break some of the cycles? And how do things look in the present day?”
Going back to that earlier point about Epps’ unique access to the neighborhood: while he admits that not every person he approached was eager to be filmed (“When you go into these communities that have other activities going on, where people have other ways of survival because there are no jobs, you’re gonna always get opposition to cameras”), he does understand that in many ways, he has the exclusive on this particular story.
“Do people know me, and does that carry weight, because of the first film? Yes. It does help me get access to some things that a lot of people have had their cameras taken from them trying to do,” he says. “There were some German filmmakers out here for three years trying to shoot a film. They had funding and everything. They could talk and kick it on the block, but once they took out the cameras — they shut ’em down.”
STRAIGHT OUTTA HUNTERS POINT 2
Kevin Epps in person at Fri/24-Sat/25 evening shows
Feb. 24-March 1, 7 and 8:45 p.m. (also Sat/25-Sun/25, 3:15 and 5 p.m.), $6.50–$10
FILMBay Area filmmakers Steve and Ann Dunsky (2005’s The Greatest Good) have a pair of documentaries making waves right now: Green Fire, about conservationist Aldo Leopold, which plays at the upcoming San Francisco Green Film Festival; and Butterfliesand Bulldozers, an exploration of the decades-long fight to save San Bruno Mountain. Bulldozers screened at the 2011 Green Film Festival, and has a coveted slot amid the 20th anniversary programming at Washington, D.C.’s Environmental Film Festival later this spring. (It also features Guardian editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann among its interviewees.) I chatted with the busy couple about their latest projects.
SFBG I have to admit, I hadn’t even heard of Aldo Leopold until I saw Butterflies and Bulldozers, which opens with a Leopold quote.
Ann Dunsky I think maybe 99.9 percent of all the people we’ve ever spoken to have never heard of Aldo Leopold. But for those people who do know of him, he’s like their god. He’s had an amazing influence on the field of conservation.
SFBG How did you get involved with the San Bruno Mountain story?
Steve Dunsky We had just made The Greatest Good, and it was a really intensive period of time. So [we] decided to take some time off from our regular jobs, with the U.S. Forest Service making films, and maybe do an independent film. At that time we’d been living in Brisbane for about 20 years, and we’d heard about this amazing story that had national implications, both historically and in a contemporary sense. And since that’s what we do — we make films about conservation and conservation history — we thought we’d look into it.
SFBG What was the biggest challenge you faced?
AD What intrigued us was the heart of the story, which is what you’re always looking for: the wonderful relationship and dynamic between [film subjects] Fred [Smith] and David [Schooley], these two really good friends who bonded over their joint efforts to save the mountain, and ultimately had a major falling-out about the best way to do that. So we thought, “There’s the thread that we would like to weave throughout he film.”
SD The reason we chose that Leopold quote at the beginning is that we ultimately realized that it’s a story about compromise. It’s an uncomfortable subject for a lot of people, especially in the environmental community, because it does create a lot of tension over where you draw the line. At what point do you say it’s OK to have some development in exchange for other protections?
AD It was a challenge to find that proper balance where we were very respectful to all sides. Telling the story completely without any narration is a very hard way to make a film, but ultimately I think it’s much more satisfying, because our voices aren’t in there trying to tell the viewer what to think.
SFBG The film discusses how San Bruno Mountain was, in some ways, ground zero for the environmental movement.
SD The early 60s were a formative time for the environmental movement, and San Bruno Mountain and Save the Bay played a critical role in that. And then, you have this whole second layer of the story, which deals with the Endangered Species Act and the Habitat Conservation Plan amendment, which is also very historically significant.
SFBGWhat’s next for San Bruno Mountain?
SD It’s really a success story, despite the compromises that were made. As we say in the film, it is one of the largest open spaces in any urban area in the United States. Most of the mountain, 2,000 acres, is state and county park. And that was the result of these protests, as well as the political and legal processes that went on in the 1970s behind the scenes. [Currently] a developer wants to build on some sand dunes that are on the west side of the mountain, so that’s a fight going on right now.
SFBG Do you hope the movie will inspire people to take up the fight?
SD For people in the Bay Area, what I would like them to do is — when they drive by San Bruno Mountain, they don’t look at it as a big, ugly, brown lump, but actually realize that it’s a haven for biodiversity, and also that there was this 50-year ongoing struggle to save it. I think it’s important for people to know the history of their surroundings.
From a national perspective, we really hope that it gets people to think about these deeper issues of conservation, questions about compromise, and questions about development versus preservation.
AD One of my favorite Leopold quotes is “Conservation without a keen realization of its vital conflicts fails to rate as authentic human drama; it falls to the level of a mere utopian dream.” I love that because I think it’s so easy to say “No development anywhere!” A lot of us would like things to be that easy, but they’re not. And I think this film, hopefully, will help people recognize that it’s not that simplistic.
Green Fire screens March 5 at the Green Film Festival (www.sfgreenfilmfest.org) and March 8 at the Randall Museum (www.sfns.org). For more information on Butterflies and Bulldozers, visit www.butterfliesandbulldozers.com; DVDs available for institutional and home use at www.bullfrogfilms.com.
FILM The demise of Ken Russell late last year at age 84 blew a few cobwebs off appreciation of his career, which had ever been beloved by cult-minded buffs but forgotten by most everyone else for some years. He hadn’t had a theatrical feature for two decades, and in his last years had been reduced to glorified home movies with titles like Revenge of the Elephant Man (2004) and The Fall of the Louse of Usher (2002). But for a while he was an inescapable, flamboyant, exasperating, and utterly unique presence in film, with even his detractors (who were legion) admitting his work could never be confused with anyone else’s.
In 1971 he was at his zenith as the scandal and big noise (frequently self blown) of British cinema, having had a great international success with 1969’s D.H. Lawrence adaptation Women in Love, which won a previously little-known Glenda Jackson her first Oscar, and a qualified one the next year with The Music Lovers, one of the increasingly outrageous classical-composer biopics he’d commenced making on the BBC and continued through 1975’s Lisztomania. (Which, featuring as it did Roger Daltry as pop star Franz Liszt having lovers dance like Rockettes on his giant phallus in one fantasy scene, and Wagner reincarnated as a Nazi Frankenstein in another, presumably exhausted that genre’s desecration possibilities even for Russell.) At the time, it seemed that 1971 was the year that killed off Old Hollywood and shat on its corpse. Movies like Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Roman Polanski’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, John Boorman’s Deliverance, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge, Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, Alan J. Pakula’s Klute, and Dusan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism all pushed the envelope in terms of sex, violence, and nihilism.
Even in such company, Russell’s The Devils — which closes “The Second Coming of the Vortex Room,” the venue’s February series of religion-themed films — was an outstandingly bad trip, an assaultive experience as tainting and unwelcome to most as that phone-receiver tongue licking Heather Langenkamp’s ear in the original Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). The words “hallucinogenic,” “appalling,” and “tasteless” would be applied to nearly all Russell’s films, but never with such genuine revulsion as this one. Today, The Devils can be seen as perhaps his greatest, most cohesive work — being about hysteria, religious and sexual, it justified his trademark surreal excesses as no subject ever would again.
Based on an Aldous Huxley novel about actual historical events, it takes place in a 17th century France beset by plague, persecution, church corruption, and court decadence. Scheming to end walled city Loudon’s independence, Cardinal Richelieu seizes on an accusation made by an unstable abbess that the leading local priest had seduced her entire convent via black magic. After considerable torture, said priest, Urbain Grandier, was burned at the stake, despite recanted testimonies and widespread belief that only “crime” was being in ambitious Richelieu’s way.
Russell depicts Grandier (played by his go-to bulldog Oliver Reed, practicing more restraint than usual) as a lusty breaker of celibacy vows, but also as a man of true conviction compared to the hypocritical displays of faith, morality, and community-mindedness around him. Mother Superior Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave as you’ve definitely never seen her before) is a hunchback lost in fantasy and spite, having like many of her wards not chosen this vocation, but instead been abandoned to it — back then, well-born females whose family didn’t have enough dowry money to marry them off were forcibly “married” to Jesus instead.
The Devils is a fevered nightmare, unrelentingly grotesque and claustrophobic. (Russell had the inspiration of hiring Derek Jarman as his production designer — not yet a director himself, the latter devised studio bound, abstract monochrome sets more vividly oppressive than any actual historic sites could have been.) It had to be heavily cut even before getting slapped with an X rating in the U.S., excised sequences like a mad convent orgy dubbed “The Rape of Christ” assumed lost until their re-discovery a decade ago. In England the film was banned from several districts. Nearly everywhere, critical response was bilious — reviewers felt violated, polluted, disgusted. The L.A. Times called it “a degenerate and despicable work of art,” others “pornographic” and “Satanic” outright.
Those gag reflexes were understandable. The Devils is flawed, mostly in its crudely satirical aspects. And its scalding majority impact is achieved in a hyperbolic manner that makes it very hard to separate the depiction of blasphemy from the embodiment of it. Yowling “I want to shock people into awareness. I don’t believe there’s any virtue in understatement!” to Time magazine that year, Russell cared little about clarifying that distinction.
A visual statement as singularly alarming as any canvas by Bosch or Bacon, its disturbance further heightened by avant-garde composer Peter Maxwell Davies’ striking score, The Devils would doubtless be more highly regarded today had it been one isolated case of delirium in an otherwise relatively sane director’s oeuvre. But the baroque excesses Russell flaunted under any circumstance, no matter how apt, made it seem just more of his reliable too muchness. The neglect his work has fallen into benefits this most serious of his features, as it allows The Devils to be seen clearly as a caterwaul of horror — not at supernatural possession but at the infinite human cruelty power and sanctimony can allow.
FILM “The male stereotype makes masculinity not just a fact of biology but something that must be proved and re-proved, a continual quest for an ever-receding Holy Grail,” wrote Marc Feigen Fasteau in The Male Machine, a 1975 Gloria Steinem-approved polemic (she wrote the introduction) that attempted to catalyze American men into joining their sisters in the women’s movement in reexamining and casting off traditional gender roles.
Masculinity of the variety rhapsodized by Ernest Hemingway and scrutinized by Fasteau is now something talked about in scare quotes (see Old Spice’s man on a horse) or presented as a relic of an earlier time à la Don Draper, even if magazines such as GQ routinely make it into a fetish object. Even a cursory scan of contemporary pop culture, from Drake’s broody makeover of hip-hop swagger to Will Arnett’s stay-at-home dad in Up All Night, shows that men today seemingly have more options, and consequently different sets of expectations, when it comes to being a man.
And yet, the ties that bind to that “ever-receding Holy Grail” still grip some men, causing fresh wounds and opening up old scars. It’s a struggle that runs through many of the remaining programs in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ ongoing series “Bros Before Hos: Masculinity and its Discontents,” a collection of leftfield representations of masculinity, often under duress.
The hitchhiking bisexual hustler at the center of Meat Rack (1968), a gritty piece of Gay Lib-era San Francisco film history, protests the loudest. Director Michael Thomas, who appears in person at the screening, has his boy-toy clanking his can against the prison bars of pop Freudian psychology as he works out his Mommy issues, turning tricks in Market Street cinemas (appropriate, given that Thomas owned the infamous Strand Theater and later founded its namesake, indie film distributor Strand Releasing). Although the film’s sexual politics are at times as confused as its protagonist’s, Meat Rack depicts with lysergic abandon the panic that can happen when the injunction to be a man is simply too much to bear.
That pressure is also touched on again and again by the various Finnish men Joonas Berghäll and Mika Hotakainen interviewed for their tender documentary Steam of Life (2011). Within the steam-filled confession booth of a sauna, men talk candidly and emotively about their lives, loves, and losses, their famous Scandinavian reserve seemingly melting away into streams of tears with each new puff of steam. “What are the options for boys?” a solider asks a bench-mate, reflecting on his inability to mourn. “Silence and drinking”
Steam of Life wears its nationalism, as well as its heart, on its sleeve, intercutting gorgeous long shots of the Finnish countryside between its in-the-buff interviews, and ending with a dedication, not merely to its subjects, but to, “all Finnish men.”
But the ballad of aging strongman Stanley Pleskun, a.k.a. Stanless Steel, as documented in Zachary Levy’s Strongman (2009), can be called uniquely American. Pleskun’ abilities are the stuff of classic tall tales — he can lift 10,000-pound trucks with his legs and hold aloft three adults with just one finger — even if his chaotic home life and uphill battle to keep his career going, sympathetically captured by Levy, is straight Arthur Miller. For all his might, Pleskun is at times painfully oblivious to his emotional shortcomings, making his quest for the ever-receding Holy Grail of fame and glory one of the rougher paths that “Bros Before Hos” traces.
“BROS BEFORE HOS: MASCULINITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS”
Abel Ferrara’s latest imagines what the end of the world might be like for a volatile Lower East Side couple — he’s an ex-junkie (Ferrara favorite Willem Dafoe), she’s a young painter (Shanyn Leigh, Ferrara’s real-life companion). The film’s title refers to the predicted instant that an environmental catastrophe will completely dissolve the ozone layer, but 4:44 is mostly set indoors, specifically within the headspace of Dafoe’s character. It’s a gritty film that veers between self-indulgence and stuff that honestly seems pretty practical (sure, there’s a lot of Skyping, but if the world were ending, wouldn’t you?); as far as inward-looking disaster movies go, anyone planning an apocalypse film festival could double-bill 4:44 nicely with 2011’s Melancholia.
IndieFest is not an apocalypse film festival, per se. You could choose to have a jolly old time; there’s a power ballad sing-along, and even a flick called I Like You. But the selections for sick puppies are truly, truly outstanding this year. Personally, I recommend going as dark as you can possibly stand.
Start your journey with Michael R. Roskam’s Bullhead, a Belgian import that just scored a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination. The five-second description of this film, which is about a cattle farmer who injects both his livestock and his own body with illegal hormones, doesn’t do it justice. Who knew there was such a thing, for instance, as a “hormone mafia underworld”? While some of Bullhead‘s nuances, which occasionally pivot on culture-clash moments specific to its Belgium setting, will inevitably be lost on American viewers, the most important parts of the movie come through loud and clear, and you won’t soon forget them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvLVNlMvus
Also memorable is Snowtown, another standout Australian crime film on the heels of Animal Kingdom (2010). While Snowtown — whose vérité shooting style recalls Andrea Arnold’s films about desperate living amid Britain’s council estates — isn’t quite as exportable as Animal Kingdom, it is just as uncomfortably tense, and features a teenage protagonist struggling to survive amid close-to-home evil. It’s based on the real-life case of Australia’s worst serial killer, and follows the gruesome facts quite closely. The film has a lot of characters that come and go without much explanation or introduction, which starts to seem deliberate after awhile. Fortunately, the core cast is magnetic. Remember 2005’s Wolf Creek? Snowtown is just as intense.
Still have a lust for blood? Of course you do. British director Ben Wheatley made a splash with 2009 gangster drama Down Terrace; he’s back with much buzz surrounding Kill List, with a review in the IndieFest catalog citing it as “the number one horror film of the year.” I’d hate to hand out that accolade so early in 2012, but this hired-killer-down-the-rabbit-hole tale is indeed worth considering.
Of course, there’s more to horror than guts and torture; if you need a reminder as to why, check out the festival’s pair of home-is-where-the-creepy-is films from Austria, Beside My Brother and Still Life.Beside My Brother‘s set-up — an emotionally disturbed father pretends his twin sons are the same person, and forces them to live as such, a practice they maintain into adulthood — is more promising than its payoff. Remember how in Dead Ringers (1988), the doppelganger bros were gynecologists? Here, they’re painters, and pretty bland ones at that. Far more harrowing is Still Life, about the irrevocable damage wrought by a father’s single, horrible revelation. First-time feature director Sebastian Meise manages to distill the complete crumbling of a seemingly normal-ish family into a slender, wrenching 77 minutes.
Speaking of harrowing, there’s nothing scarier in all of IndieFest than the early scenes of documentary Last Days Here, made by Don Argott and Demian Fenton (directors of 2009’s excellent The Art of the Steal). The film alights upon Bobby Liebling, dubbed the “godfather of doom” for his forty-plus year stint fronting legendary band Pentagram, as a fiftysomething crack addict living in his parents’ basement. Last Days Here is both heartfelt and gloves-off; it’s also blessed with having one of the most unbelievable comeback stories at its core (not a spoiler if you keep abreast of Bay Area concerts; Pentagram’s played here several times in recent years). It, like many of the films discussed here, has a distributor and will be coming around after IndieFest, but I implore you not to sleep on this one — even if you don’t love heavy metal, but especially if you do.
Less successful but no less intriguing is Atlanta oddity Snow On Tha Bluff, which is somewhere between an old-school ethnographic film — like, Robert Flaherty old — and self-aware product of the YouTube generation. The opening and closing scenes are obviously staged, as a drug dealer named Curtis Snow steals a video camera and decides he’ll make an autobiographical movie from the footage he collects. What’s between those bookends is what appears to be an authentic record of life in Snow’s crime-infested neighborhood, complete with drive-by shootings, home invasions, run-ins with the police, copious drug use, etc. Why any of the involved would allow their faces to be shown on camera while, say, firing a non-street legal weapon into a rival’s home is the film’s biggest mystery; its biggest accomplishment is obscuring the obvious lines of demarcation between what’s real and what’s not.
To end your IndieFest experience on a slightly uplifted note, you will have to die — or at least be cool with hanging out with the ghosts in Finisterrae, the first feature from Catalan artist Sergio Caballaro.
Expressing themselves via droll, post-production “dialogue” (in Russian, subtitled in English), the newly-deceased, sheet-wearing duo decides they would like to live again. A-journeying they go, following the wind and encountering an array of strange characters, including enough taxidermied animals to make Chuck Testa‘s head spin. Finisterrae starts slow but builds to glorious, gorgeously filmed and supremely weird heights. Hippies beware.
FILM Gregory Markopoulos was born in Toledo, Ohio, but his Greek heritage lights the way in critical appraisals of his refined and elusive body of work. Many of the films featured in the Pacific Film Archive’s “Seconds of Eternity” series are imagined on the stage of Greek myth. After leaving New York in 1967 with his partner Robert Beavers, an outstanding filmmaker in his own right, Markopoulos drew still closer to his ancestral home. He died in 1992, but Beavers, who will be on hand at the PFA to shepherd the films, has preserved the work for the Temenos, a unique archive and biennial outdoor screening cycle located near Lyssaraia, Markopoulos’s father’s home. This June brings another such event.
Markopoulos’s films have themselves long achieved mythic stature. He was a colossal figure during the heroic phase of the American avant-garde and then left it behind. Dissatisfied with exhibition standards, he withdrew his prints from circulation (the Temenos screenings represents the idealistic rejoinder). Remarkably, he requested that critic P. Adams Sitney excise a full chapter on his works from Visionary Film, generally considered the central critical survey of the American avant-garde. So Markopoulos went to almost unthinkable lengths to maintain the primacy of his early films (he continued making new ones, as well). Any opportunity to watch these ravishing films close to home is unusual.
Markopoulos once remarked that “locations and beautiful faces have been the backbone of my work,” and one sees that to an archetypal degree in Psyche (1947), the first film of his Du Sang, de la volupté et de la mort trilogy, made when he was still a teenage student at USC living across the hall from Curtis Harrington. Inspired by a Pierre Louÿs novella, the film replaces spoken language with dynamic color and framing. We begin with a man and woman crossing each other on a leafy Angeleno street: a few steps further and they turn back to consider what they’ve just passed. All that follows might be transpire within this instant: a languid fantasia hatched within a fugitive moment of lost time. Markopoulos frames the couple in deep focus two-shots, grazing shoulders and lips and tumbling toward dreams.
An evident poverty of means only concentrates the film’s withdrawal into a private world of frustrated beauty (across town Kenneth Anger was fashioning his more explicitly Dionysian Fireworks). The dive into inexpressible desire reaches a peak when Ralph Vaughn Williams’ “Serenade” suddenly drops out and the image snaps to a silent interlude of natural splendor bordering on abstraction — sea grass gorgeously superimposed upon the sea. This image gives magnificent form to the phrase “out of the blue” and overflows the frame in such a way as to shake loose the film’s more studied visual effects.
Markopoulos would later articulate in written form (“Towards a New Narrative Form in Motion Pictures”) what he set out to accomplish beginning with Psyche: “The film maker gradually convinces the spectator not only to see and to hear, but to participate in what is being created on the screen, on both the narrative and introspective levels. The magnificent landscapes of emotions, with colors brighter than the film viewer has ever been concerned with, begin to exist. The transient impact of meetings, handshakes, kisses, and the hours apart from these contacts becomes revealed in all its astounding simplicity.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w59mrfKQRdQ
That “astounding simplicity” is readily apparent in A Christmas Carol (1940), a compressed bildungsroman evoking a richly embroidered fabric of memory with only a few spare images (mother setting the table, father looking up over his newspaper, figures dancing on a nearby rooftop). Twice a Man (1963) reveals the full extent of Markopoulos’ dream of a new narrative language. A psychologically fraught interpolation of the myth of Hippolytus and Phaedra (son seduced by mother and liberated from suicidal thoughts by a healer-artist), the film surfaces an internal state of emergency in a persistently emergent form.
Most remarkable is the densely interleaved editing by which Markopoulos folds multiple registers of time, color, and theme. Though often likened to other seminal works of the American avant-garde (especially Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man, 1961-64), Twice a Man‘s fractal form also recalls contemporaneous French films like Alain Resnais’s Muriel (1963) — though if anything Markopoulos’s cutting seems more evolved for its thoroughgoing commitment to simultaneity. Beginning with a ferry ride into blue New York, suggestive of any number of mythic crossings, there is an ever-sharpening concordance of different blocks of imagery. The protagonist’s central struggle to get out from under his mother and be reborn as his own person takes root in these syntactical somersaults. Indeed, this is where the modernist character of Markopoulos’s work shines through: a classical story embodied in the radical address of the senses. (You don’t need a neurologist to know that your brain gets a tune-up watching this film). Less successful is the cut-up spoken address that Phaedra delivers to her son, with which Markopoulos seems a little too assured of his genius. The haranguing pure speech dampens an otherwise brilliant film with a faintly misogynistic mist.
Though Markopoulos delved still deeper into myth with his Illiac Passion (1964-1967), he also gravitated towards more focused portraits of people and places in these years. San Francisco Cinematheque will screen Galaxie (1966), his anthology of New York people, in May. Meanwhile, the PFA sneaks in Ming Green (1966) before the epic Illiac Passion. The silent film gathers up images of the New York home Markopoulos was soon to leave as if for a bouquet. Edited in camera with great fluency, Ming Green revises the still life for cinema: the apartment’s objects sit in repose, vibrating with the articulation of color and residue of memory. Flourishing superimpositions put on a terrific show without abandoning the refined air of quietude. It’s unlikely that you’ll see a more exquisite short roll of film this year.
SECONDS OF ETERNITY: THE FILMS OF GREGORY J. MARKOPOULOS
MUSICFrom the start, Ice-T was a versatile chameleon, the product of an integrated culture, and a student of the marginalized.
Born in New Jersey, raised in the Crenshaw District of LA, he joined the Crips then pursued the army to pay his bills. His career was blazed in rap, though he once flipped the game to heavy metal. Multifaceted talent that he is, Ice would later grow even more famous on television.
It’s no surprise, then, that he now adds the title of director to his resume, with the debut of his first documentary, Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap, at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The feature length endeavor is the pioneering artist’s tribute to the culture that bred him, beat him, and made him who he is; it’s a culture he feels is slowly slipping from his grasp. It’s a story as much about the traditions of hip-hop as it is a fervent call to action, told through the eyes of its maker and his impressive posse of friends.
The premise, nevertheless, is simple: this is the story of hip-hop. “It’s a lot of life lessons because you’re not only hearing about rap, but experiences and struggles,” explained Ice during a one-on-one breakfast interview at The Lift in Park City, Utah. He was present for the screenings, along with Grandmaster Caz and Chuck D, both of whom appear in the film.
Other notable feature players include Eminem, Dr. Dre, Kool Moe Dee, Kanye West, Royce da 5’9,” Common, Rakim, KRS-One, Bun B, and Snoop Dogg. “You’re hearing people who you thought woke up successful talk about how they thought about quitting, how they had to find their voice,” Ice said. “I wanted to catch these guys when they were vulnerable, to show they’re real people, and that success doesn’t come without some blows.”
Ice got into rap initially to avoid falling back into gang life, first experimenting with turntables while enlisted in the military. Musically, he made his name as an underground artist before signing with Warner Music/Sire Records, and eventually winning a Grammy for his song, “Back On the Block.” He would follow such success with a branch into acting, currently starring in the primetime series, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. And while his schedule is more than demanding, he found time between shoots to direct this documentary, a film he believes had to be made to challenge the fallacious imagery of hip-hop in American culture.
“This movie is not about the money or the cars, it’s about the craft,” he says. “The only questions we get asked by the press were, you know, ‘Who are you having sex with?’ ‘How high do you get?’ ‘Who don’t you like?’ They don’t care about your work…I wanted people to see the hip-hop I know, not the hip-hop that’s been given out until now. You’re getting this image that’s not real.”
Something From Nothing begins on the streets of New York, and follows the beat to the sunny coast of Los Angeles. Interviewing the gamut of rap’s finest, Ice catches his friends at the record store, in the studio, on their patio and at the diner. They eat; they smoke; they talk hip-hop. Some, like Kanye, freestyle for the camera; others spit the rhymes they can’t get out of their heads.
In one of the more poignant scenes, Ice speaks with Eminem about his toil to commit to the trade amidst extreme discouragement, and the moment he realized it was his raison d’etre. Equally surreal, the filmmaker travels to Dr. Dre’s lavish estate in the Hollywood Hills, where the two converse about the late, Tupac Shakur.
Because the name ‘Ice-T’ signifies authority, the strength of this film is his access to the inside, exposing tales most people would never have a chance to hear. He hits on every shade of the genre, from gangster rap to native tongue, the poetics of Q-Tip to the in-your-face anarchy of Immortal Technique.
Introducing the film at Sundance, he described his impetus as a dissatisfaction with the current state of hip-hop, and an earnest aim to improve the situation.
Later, he elaborated. “To me, the most pinnacle moment in the movie was when Mos Def quoted Q-Tip saying ‘rap is not pop; rap never had pop ambitions.’ It’s a counterculture. Now it’s become pop, and how you gonna get mad at the kids? They want to eat; they want to make money; they want to live. If you ask me what my dream is, I would love to see a 19 year-old Public Enemy come out of nowhere; I would love to see the new 18 year-old Ice Cube just come kick in the door, and start telling motherfuckers, ‘Fuck the bling, this is what’s good. Let’s talk about Obama, let’s talk about Occupy Wall Street. Let’s go in.'”
He added, “It will never get radio play, but I believe if a young group of kids really nailed it, they could get a movement going. And it’s needed. I took Rage Against the Machine out as my opening act, so of course I want to see that. The terrain is wide open.”
It’s rare to catch Ice-T without his signature shades, and somehow it’s obvious he truly is the OG he claims. Yet his inner sincerity and passion show through in this project, an ode to the first platform to ever give him a voice. He sold the rights to film after the Sundance showings to The Indomina Group for worldwide distribution; a theatrical release is planned for summer.
“Music has that power to give people emotion, and that’s what’s lacking right now,” he reiterated. “They’re not using art form at full power. They’re just rubbing the surface of it.”
FILM Opposition to apartheid didn’t really pick up steam as a popular cause in the U.S. until the early 1980s. Which makes it all the more remarkable that New York City-based documentarian Lionel Rogosin made Come Back, Africa about a quarter-century earlier — though less surprisingly, the film itself was barely seen here at the time. Now finally playing American theaters outside his home town in a restored print, it’s a time capsule whose background is as intriguing as the history it captures onscreen.
The horrors of World War II and some subsequent global travel had stirred a profound awareness of social injustices in Rogosin, who began planning a feature about South Africa while still working at his father’s textile business. He had very little filmmaking experience, however, so he took $30,000 of his earnings and as “practice” made On the Bowery (1956), a semi staged portrait of Manhattan’s skid row area that won considerable praise, if also some shocked and appalled responses from Eisenhower-era keepers of America’s wholesome, prosperous self-image. (It was, as 1959’s Come Back, Africa would also be, much more widely appreciated in Europe.)
Armed with the confidence bestowed by that successful effort and several international awards, Bogosin traveled to South Africa — not for the first time, but now with the earnest intent of making his expose. In the mid- to late ’50s, however, that was hardly a simple task. He and wife Elinor Hart had to do everything clandestinely, from making contacts in the activist underground to recruiting actors and crew. (The latter eventually had to be brought in mostly from Europe and Israel.) To get permits he fed the government authorities a series of lines: first he pretended to be making an airline travelogue to encourage tourism; then a music documentary to show local blacks “were basically a happy people;” then another doc, about the Boer War. Amazingly, despite the myriad likelihoods of being informed on, he shot the entire film without being shut down or deported. It remained, however, a stressful and dangerous endeavor for all concerned.
Like On the Bowery, Come Back, Africa qualified as a documentary by the looser standards of the time (Rogosin preferred the term “poetic realism”), but mixed a loose, acted narrative with completely nonfiction elements. Like the prior film, it also followed the luckless wanderings of an agreeable protagonist played by a first-time actor actually found on the street — here Zacharia Mgabi, a 30-ish bearded worker “discovered” on a bus queue.
His character, Zachariah, is caught in one catch-22 of apartheid life: he can’t get a job without the appropriate permits, and can’t get the permits without a job. First he tries finding employment in the misery of a mining encampment, then travels to Johannesburg — where it’s illegal for him to be without further permits — where he’s bounced from one position to another. Working as “house boy” to a middle-class white couple, he’s fired when the racist, shrewish wife (a memorable performance by Myrtle Berman) catches him sneaking a drink from her own secret booze stash. An auto-shop stint is lost due to a friend’s incessant goofing off, while service as porter in a hotel is terminated when a hysterical white lady guest cries “Rape!” simply because he surprises her in a hallway.
Meanwhile Zachariah’s wife arrives from their native KwaZulu, and they tentatively set up house in a Sophiatown shack. (Come Back, Africa is of particular interest for its scenes there — within a few years the government had forcibly emptied this poor black township, having made its population mix of races illegal, and the area was razed to become an unrecognizable whites only suburb.) But even this small foothold on stability is doomed. Just as alcoholism dragged On the Bowery‘s hero back into a downward spiral at the end (both on- and offscreen), so Zachariah and his family are helpless to save themselves from the violence, police harassment, and self-destruction apartheid breeds and maintains itself with.
All show and almost no “tell,” Come Back, Africa pauses around the two-thirds point to let several men pass around a bottle, discussing the nature of and solutions to their oppression. They’re happily interrupted by the incongruity of a young woman in an elegant cocktail dress — no less than a then-unknown Miriam Makeba, who sings a couple of songs in her inimitable voice. When the film was finished, Rogosin bribed officials to get her out of the country, bankrolling his contracted “discovery’s” launch at the Venice Festival, and in the U.S. and England. But to his great disappointment, she was quickly taken under Harry Belafonte’s wing, dismissing her first benefactor as “not very nice” and “an amateur.” Thus a legend was born, with Rogosin pretty much cut out of the resume.
Come Back, Africa, too, would disappoint its maker in some respects. With a furious South African government swiftly condemning this portrait as “distorted,” his original plans for a trilogy became impossible. The film won a number of prizes — although unlike On the Bowery, it was pointedly not nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar — and would eventually be widely seen on European television. But it has still never been broadcast in the U.S., and despite Rogosin’s efforts — he went so far as to open NYC’s still-extant Bleeker Street Cinemas in 1960 to show it and other important new works — it collided with a thud against the overwhelming indifference of middle-class white audiences. They were barely starting to confront such thorny racial issues in their own backyard, much less in far-flung nations. Not shown in South Africa until the late 1980s, Come Back nonetheless proved a great influence on development of the whole continent’s indigenous cinematic voices.
A liberal shit-kicker to the end, Rogosin made other documentaries, was integral to the New American Cinema movement (alongside Jonas Mekas, Robert Downey Sr., Shirley Clark, and other experimental luminaries), founded distribution company Impact Films, and moved to England for a spell before dying in Los Angeles at the century’s turn. It’s a pity he didn’t live to see his two first features restored and rediscovered — though interviews late in life suggest he never let limited exposure dampen his activist zeal one whit.
Showcasing the boldly imaginative and innovative talents of the artisans at the Jim Henson Company, the 1982 fantasy film The Dark Crystal broke new ground when it came to visual special effects and believable creature creations.
The movie’s tale — evil Skeksis versus good Gelflings and Mystics, just tryin’ to restore balance and freedom to their world — captivated viewers’ imaginations upon its release, and has gone on to become a beloved part of many people’s childhood memories. And it’s still earning new fans: in honor of the film’s 30th anniversary, SF Sketchfest presents a special Crystal screening with guest Dave Goelz, who performed the puppetry for fan favorite Fizzgig, as well as the Skeksi Garthim Master SkekUng.
Goelz, who’ll introduce the film and share some rare, behind-the-scenes footage, is looking forward to marking the movie’s milestone with fans. “What I love about doing these events is that it reminds me of the quality of the things we were doing, and that they are enduring, and how much we enjoyed making them,” he says.
Having worked with Henson since 1973, Goelz was no stranger to busting through creative and logistical boundaries on film and television projects, but even he was uncertain for a time about Crystal‘s chances of success. “We all knew Jim as an incredible, indefatigable optimist. He was just so positive about everything, and he just believed that we could do anything — and he usually figured out a way to do it,” Goelz remembers.
“On the first day of shooting, though, we had to have the Skeksis file by the bedside of their dying emperor, and that was the very first shot that I was in. We were up on a two-foot riser, walking, and each Skeksis has two people inside, and then about four people down below, sort of duck walking on the floor, with each one holding a cable control.
Partway through the first shot I fell off the riser — it was dark, I couldn’t see where I was going. I remember thinking at that moment, ‘Jim’s optimism has really caught up with him this time. We’ll never get this thing shot!’ But of course, within two weeks we were ad-libbing in the characters.”
Goelz attributes the film’s success to the hard work of everyone involved, but points especially to Henson’s emotional and financial commitment to the quality of their projects.
“These things were developed and rehearsed for months, only Jim Henson would make that kind of investment,” Goelz says. “He was always like that. People who worked in the shop all those years tell me that he never came in and said, ‘You can’t buy that fabric for Miss Piggy. It’s $200 a yard!’ — he never held back on anything for the shop and the characters.”
In addition to the time, money, and effort spent on bringing the world of Crystal to life through advances in special effects technology, the crew also found simple ways to add depth to the film’s characters, as was the case with the lovable Fizzgig.
“The reason he’s convincing is because he’s used sparingly,” Goelz notes. “He’s a character who can’t really do much; he can move his paws and blink and open his mouth, so if you overexpose him you will realize that he’s limited. But the way he was conceived was to be used sparingly and that was useful.
Secondly, the way he traveled was by rolling [himself into a ball], which made it very easy for us to shoot him. We just rolled him across the shot, so that was extremely simple. One of the simplest things in the movie!”
Having worked with the Muppets for nearly 40 years (bringing life to much-loved characters like Gonzo and Bunsen Honeydew) and lending his talents to affiliated projects such as Labyrinth (1986), Fraggle Rock, and a host of other films and television shows, Goelz says he loves to see the impact of his efforts on fans.
“A lot of people who originally saw these projects [as children] are in their 30s now and have little kids, and they want to pass this along to their kids,” he reflects. “It’s very heartwarming to see there is a legacy.”
FILM Today, seeing high-profile evangelical Christians reveal themselves to be charlatans or hypocrites is old news. Even the spectacle of homophobic mega church prig Ted Haggard, outed as a fan of male hustlers and crystal meth, resurfacing on Celebrity Wife Swap induced a few shudders but no real surprise. The plunge from public sanctimoniousness to scandal and newly angled self-promotion is by now too familiar to shock.
A few decades ago, however, the face of American evangelism was inclusive, straight-arrow centrist Billy Graham. Elmer Gantry-like tent revival shows seemed a thing of the past, or at least one whose few remaining practitioners traveled well off the mainstream radar. So there was considerable exoticism to Marjoe, a 1972 documentary that plays the Vortex Room next Thursday as part of a religion-themed February schedule.
Its subject was a 28-year-old Pentecostal preacher — titular name a combination of "Mary" and "Joseph" — who’d been "The World’s Youngest Evangelist," pushed onto the stage of a lucrative salvation circuit from the age of four. By his own estimation, his parents-managers-slave drivers made $3 million or so off his precocious act as God’s littlest huckster, none of which he ever saw. Some years after running away as a teen, he’d gotten his secular head together, but reluctantly re-entered the revival biz — working it half the year in order to fund the other six months as a California flower child.
As ample archival footage shows in Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan’s portrait, Marjoe Gortner was indeed the real thing, at least in terms of having a natural gift for mimicry, rhythmic "testifying," crowd control, and snake-charming dollars from wallets. But he’d never been a believer, and in adulthood was uncomfortable providing religious experiences to people who innocently assumed he shared in them. His restless showman’s energy needed to be channeled in another direction — rock or movie stardom, perhaps — so Marjoe the Movie was intended to chronicle, expose, and bury one career while hopefully launching a new one.
It worked, to an extent. Marjoe got a lot of attention, winning the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. The New York Times called its subject "Evangelism’s answer to Mick Jagger" (whom Gortner admitted stealing moves from). With the youth-oriented Jesus Movement then at its peak, some church leaders were not happy at an instance of Christian hoaxdom getting such wide exposure. Though what’s striking about the film now is not just how charismatic (in the non-divine sense) its protagonist remains, but how sincere he is: Marjoe doesn’t judge, condescend to, or snark at his nightly congregations, whose members he can make faint dead in holy rapture with a laying-on of hands. He knows they’re having an authentic experience, but also that "I don’t have any ‘power.’ Hundreds of people were healed at my crusades, but I know damn well it was nothing I was doing. Sometimes I feel like I should do repentance to the audience." So Marjoe was the record of his quitting.
It was just the start, however, of a wider public’s acquaintance with Marjoe Gortner. He made one album on a major label called Bad, But Not Evil. (Are the Black Lips aware of this?) Hunky in a slightly goofy way, he soon started guesting — usually as some kind of seductive wacko — in TV series like Kojak, The A-Team, and Fantasy Island.
He became a familiar face on the big screen, too, peaking early in commercial terms with a memorable role as a psychotic supermarket employee and National Guardsman who spends all of 1974 disaster epic Earthquake trying to force himself on a ‘fro-haired Victoria Principal. He definitely had ability and magnetism, but also the ill luck to appear in some of next decade-plus’ worst movies: joining William Shatner and Robert Reed as suburban nice guys on vacation with unexpectedly warped neighbor Andy Griffith (!) in Pray for the Wildcats (1974); imperiled by giant rats in The Food of the Gods (1976); in Viva Knievel! (1977), ’nuff said; Star Wars rip-off Starcrash (1978); horror idiocy Mausoleum (1983); women-in-prison jewel Hellhole (1985); and Rambo-meets-T&A travesty Jungle Warriors (1984) — replacing Dennis Hopper in that one after the latter was found wandering naked and senseless on location. Arguably only Linda Blair made more enjoyably awful movies in a particularly rich period for them.
Gortner had produced a 1979 version of the stage play When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? as a serious vehicle for himself — in which he was duly impressive, albeit as yet another psychotic — but that flopped. Around the same time he also started filming an autobiographical drama, only to reportedly abscond with the film cans when that never-finished project’s money ran out. By 1990 (and American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt), a respectable acting career was clearly not going to happen, and the one he had held little remaining appeal. Gortner spent the next couple decades producing charity sports events. He’s since retired, and shows no sign of any further desire for the public eye. He presumably prefers not being remembered at all to being remembered as a novelty.
Marjoe‘s co-feature is an obscurity I’d love to see an exposé documentary about: San Francisco-set The Second Coming of Suzanne (1974), a muddled parable about a megalomaniacal hippie film director (Jared Martin) obsessed with the titular chick (future Clint Eastwood consort Sondra Locke) he casts and, naturally, crucifies as star of his unfathomable film-within-the-film.
Suzanne itself is one of the most flabbergastingly pretentious movies ever made, the first and last screen opus of writer-director Michael Barry, son to second-tier Hollywood and Broadway leading man Gene Barry. Featuring a pre-fame Richard Dreyfuss and a pre-Decline of Western Civilization Penelope Spheeris in support roles, it’s such a timepiece — for better and far worse than you can begin to imagine. It should be required viewing for people who worship 70s cinema, as illustration of how easily all that era’s best intentions could go to hell in a hand basket. To wit, "Second Coming" kicks off this week with an inimitable pair: Soul Hustler, a.k.a. The Day the Lord Got Busted (1973), and 1972’s J.C., in which Jesus joins an LSD-crazed biker gang.
TRASH It takes a certain kind of sicko to fall in love with Italian horror, what with all the oozing maggots, spurting jugulars, WTF plot twists, weird zooms, jarring musical cues, and supporting characters who do completely bizarre things that are never explained.
Sickos take note: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is screening an uncut 35mm print of Lucio Fulci’s 1981 The House By the Cemetery. HUGE. Within the gore-splattered Fulci canon, House is maybe not as well-known as 1981’s The Beyond, 1980’s City of the Living Dead, or 1979’s Zombie (which made a recent local appearance thanks to Blue Underground, the cult champions also responsible for this showing of House). But it’s no less essential or enjoyable than the others, despite suffering from one nearly insurmountable flaw. (More on that that in a minute.)
House‘s story is actually pretty straightforward, as Fulci flicks go. After a mysterious murder-suicide claims his colleague, professor Norman Boyle (Paolo Malco) uproots his family, including wife Lucy (Fulci scream queen Catriona MacColl) and young son Bob (Giovanni Frezza), from New York City to small-town Massachusetts, where he plans to finish the dead man’s research. Fate or something worse means the Boyles will be bunking in “the Freudstein place,” a notorious mansion once occupied by “a certain Dr. Freudstein — a turn-of-the-century surgeon with a penchant for illegal experiments.” Uh-oh. That the family is merely renting this sinister abode is ignored by the film’s ad campaign: “Read the fine print. You just may have mortgaged your life!”
That may be so, but the truth is Bob’s dubbed-over voice is the scariest thing in this movie. Among the House DVD extras is an interview with a grown-up Frezza; the first thing out of his mouth is an apology. (His later filmography includes Lamberto Bava’s ludicriously amazing 1985 Demons, so he’s off the hook as far as I’m concerned.) It’s a distraction that elevates Bob from a mere rip-off of the kid in 1980’s The Shining, an obvious House influence, to eardrum-torturing moppet from hell.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbIiJeCpCgY
Fortunately, the rest of House is weird enough to cushion this sonic godawfulness, or at least blunt it a bit; it helps that the other kid in the movie — Silvia Collatina as Mae, the Scatman Crothers to Bob’s Danny Torrance — sounds perfectly normal. There are plenty of juicy bits for Italian horror geeks, including Ania Pieroni as a creepy, glaring babysitter (doing a slight variation on her creepy, glaring Mother of Tears in Dario Argento’s 1980 Inferno) and Carlo De Mejo (star of City of the Living Dead) as a helpful librarian. The traditional Fulci cameo casts the director as Dr. Boyle’s bow tie-wearing academic peer, uttering the immortal line “I adore New England!”
Speaking of, the titular house actually exists, though it’s not actually located by a cemetery as advertised. Also the setting for Umberto Lenzi’s 1988 Ghosthouse (sickos know Lenzi’s name well, thanks to grindhouse nuggets like 1981’s Cannibal Ferox and 1980’s Nightmare City), it’s the historically significant Ellis House in Scituate, Mass. No word, however, if the arts association that now maintains the property accommodates curious horror fans — or if the basement décor is still keepin’ it funky.
FILM Rooney Mara’s chalk-complected cyberpunk Lisbeth Salander is one of the more fearsome and curious creatures to stalk across movie screens in recent memory, her freak genius and impassive veneer concealing deep reservoirs of pain and rage — and also desire. Cold and distant to the extreme, Salander makes for an odd duck of a femme fatale to disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist’s accidental gumshoe.
And yet, as many a reviewer has commented of David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), the camera spends plenty of time surveying Mara’s naked body as she takes down Sweden’s patriarchal-industrial complex one misogynist at a time. Salander might be more leather than lace, but like many femme fatales before her she flickers (albeit far more unsteadily than her forbearers) between being an object to be desired and a force to be reckoned with.
If it is perhaps something of a stretch to claim that the dame-heavy titles at this year’s Noir City offer a tour of the more distant branches of Salander’s genealogy, at the very least, the gallery of black widows and Jezebels-in-disguise Eddie Muller has assembled for the festival’s tenth go-round offer a pointed lesson in how hard it has been for Hollywood, tattoos and mad hacking skills aside, to shake its old regimes of visual pleasure.
Something of Salander’s icy remove is detectable in mid-1960s Angie Dickinson, who will be feted and interviewed in person at a double bill of two of her best: The Killers (1964) and Point Blank (1967). Whereas Ava Gardner simmered her way through Robert Siodmak’s 1948 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, the temperature of Dickinson’s Killers mob girl is harder to take in Don Siegel’s remarkably brutal remake: a Monroe in harsher lines with nothing of the little girl lost about her. So too in Point Blank —which re-teams Dickinson with her Killers costar Lee Marvin — does she put up a good fight, even as she brandishes her sexuality like a semi-automatic.
You can add Bedelia — writer Vera Caspary’s lesser-known 1945 follow-up to her convoluted 1943 novel Laura — to the canonical list of first-name-basis sirens (also in Noir City X: 1946’s Gilda and the 1944 film version of Laura). Bedelia‘s titular heroine was touted on an early cover of the 1945 book that inspired the 1946 film (for which Caspary also wrote the screenplay) as “the wickedest woman who ever loved,” a title more than lived up to by Margaret Lockwood’s performance as the small-town temptress.
That description also fits one of noir’s finest leading ladies, Gloria Grahame, who — as always when cast as the bad girl — makes damaged goods look damn fine. In Naked Alibi (1954), she plays a border town torch singer caught in an abusive relationship with a fugitive on the run. Beverly Michaels, on the other hand, is simply damaged (but no less a joy to watch) as the bullet bra-brandishing beauty trying to off her husband for money in Hugo Haas’ sleazoid rarity Pickup (1951).
In keeping with the Pacific Film Archive’s unofficial late-January tradition of running complimentary programming during Noir City, a retrospective of the films of French suspense auteur Henri-Georges Clouzot offers a more nuanced gloss on noir’s troubled women. Simone Signoret and Clouzot’s own wife, Véra, deliver a master class in how to simultaneously do and be undone by a dirty deed in Diabolique (1955). Perhaps more apropos to the dragon-tattooed girl is Clouzot’s final feature Woman in Chains (1968), which, much like Michael Powell’s tour de force Peeping Tom (1960), lays bare the operations of cinema’s gendered voyeurism by having the kinky Josée (Elisabeth Wiener) turning the gaze back on both her artist boyfriend and the amateur pornographer who covets her — a reversal that Clouzot formally mirrors in the film’s electric finale. Though she might not show it, I think Lisbeth Salander would be pleased.
FILM The most famous and honored Hollywood directors have always been easily identifiable by style, genre, emotional tenor, or all the above. There’s Hitchcock with his wryly misanthropic suspense, and John Ford’s outdoor archetypes of masculinity. Even Steven Spielberg, who’s made just about every kind of narrative, has a telltale penchant for sweep and sentimentality running through everything from Jaws (1975) to The Adventures of Tintin (2011).
But the director probably responsible for more popularly embraced classics than any other during the industry’s golden age remains less familiar by name than many inferior talents, and his was the classic case of a lifetime achievement Oscar offered as thinly veiled apology for being ignored by the Academy over a long, conspicuous career haul. Howard Hawks could be said to bring all this upon himself: while far from modest, he was never much interested in self-promotion, or publicity in general. Nor did his films provide the obvious auteur identification points of a recognizable visual style, or consistent interest in particular genres or story elements.
They’re immaculately crafted, with some thematic similarities one can poke an analytic stick at after extended scrutiny. Yet as much as Hawks fought for creative freedom, often exasperating studio executives with his stubborn independence, he had few pretensions (or tolerance) toward art, pretty much measuring his movies’ value by their box-office performance. As has been noted elsewhere, that wasn’t because he was a bottom-line-focused hack, but because for decades his personal taste really did seem precisely in synch with the majority public’s.
The Pacific Film Archive’s “Howard Hawks: The Measure of Man” offers plenty of opportunity to weigh that discriminating yet popular appeal via a retrospective that’s thorough if not quite exhaustive. It reaches from his earliest extant feature (1926 comedy Fig Leaves) to his penultimate (’67 John Wayne horse opera El Dorado).
Between, there’s an almost staggering array of gems, more than any one life’s work should encompass: the seminal gangster flick (1932’s Scarface); deathless screwball classics Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), and Ball of Fire (1941); war epics (1930’s The Dawn Patrol, 1941’s Sergeant York); Western totems Red River (1948) and Rio Bravo (1959); setting the standard for cinematic sexual cool via the invention of Bogart and Bacall (1944’s To Have and Have Not, 1945’s The Big Sleep). Hawks wasn’t particularly attracted to musicals or sci-fi. Yet he made one of the all-time most enduring titles in each category, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and The Thingfrom Another World (1951, with “official” directing credit going to Christian Nyby).
Hawks came from Gentile gentry, which lent him an air of entitlement he didn’t mind using to intimidate the largely Jewish, working-class backgrounded studio chiefs he infuriated by running way over budget and schedule. The motion picture business was an odd, borderline-disreputable choice for his like just post-World War I. Yet its wooliness (not to mention the never-ending wellspring of pretty girls) struck his fancy, and he worked in numerous capacities before getting to direct a first feature in 1923.
Later he’d dismiss his silent-era films as apprenticeship, though the few that survive have their points — 1928’s A Girl in Every Port introduces an ongoing motif of jokily tough-loving male camaraderie and finds a quintessential Hawksian woman in coltish flapper legend Louise Brooks, while the same year’s hunk of “Arab sheik” exotica Fazil has some unusually vivid (for Hawks) depictions of sexual desire.
With sound, however, Hawks was immediately in his element: snappy patter and hardboiled realism (or something like) were more to his liking than the pictorial emotionalism of the silent screen, even if as a director he remained close-lipped toward cast and crew to a “sphinx-like” degree. (The many superficially contradictory comments about his on-set demeanor gleaned from collaborators in Todd McCarthy’s definitive biography Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood reveal a technique that liberated some and frustrated others.)
Scarface, which prompted his first of many censorship battles, came out as the gangster vogue was considered kaput. Yet it was a sensation, and remains the only such film from that era still shockingly violent, sexual, and modern. It’s arguable that the Hawksian template wasn’t fully formed until 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings. Its loose, episodic script suited his essential disinterest in narrative (which would become a problem in the 1960s), allowing all the greater focus on a tight group of wisecracking, poker-faced men in daily peril (as mail-delivering pilots in the remotest tropics), while Jean Arthur’s dogged pursuit of a seemingly disinterested Cary Grant posited women as an infrequently worthy adversary-companion on rare occasions invited into the boys’ club. (In the screwball comedies, however, berserk woman often simply torments man into submission.)
Allergic to mush stuff, Hawks liked slim, sporty, husky-voiced women — ones an ever-decreasing fraction of his age as time passed, both on and off screen. (Though Gentlemen made her, he professed zero understanding of bodacious Marilyn Monroe’s appeal.) Yet as with his three marriages, he seldom stuck with one for long, almost never casting leading ladies twice while working recurrently with Grant, Wayne, Gary Cooper, and numerous behind-the-camera personnel.
After a long, nearly unbroken string of hits, his touch began slipping in the mid-1950s; like many old-school Hollywood greats, he seemed quite out of synch with the times a decade later. By then Hollywood was probably relieved to be rid of a filmmaker who’d always used his success as leverage in getting maximum paydays (though as a compulsive gambler he was forever in debt), as well as against studio interference. He avoided long-term contracts whenever possible, acting like an independent agent long before seismic industry changes essentially dismantled the contract system for everyone. His politics were conservative, but seldom flexed — he had little use for politicking unless it helped him get more freedom (and money).
Hawks could be arrogant personally, yet was nothing if not unpretentious about his art, at one late point insisting “I never made a ‘statement.’ Our job is to make entertainment.” An unproduced screenplay from his twilight years describes central characters in terms one imagines he’d readily apply to himself: “Tough, resourceful, cheerfully ruthless but always within limits, deeply loyal to a friend but never sentimental, equally needing women, adventure, and a spice of danger to make life worth living.”
FILM When Ingrid Eggers announced that 2012 would mark her last German Gems film festival, the news came as a bittersweet reminder that nothing lasts forever.
Perhaps not coincidentally, this theme is perfectly summed up by the quintet of films that comprise German Gems’ final line-up. From the scandal-inducing, incestuous love affair (and its slow-burning aftermath) between artistic siblings Georg and Margarethe Trackl in Christoph Stark’s Taboo: The Soul is a Stranger on Earth, to the rejection of childhood dreams portrayed in Robert Thalheim’s Westwind, this year’s festival deals overwhelmingly with the impacts and lingering reverberations of loss. Whether Eggers planned it this way — to help us work through our grief at losing her curatorial prowess — isn’t clear, but in any event, the selection does prepare the viewer emotionally to accept her graceful auf Wiedersehen.
An understated portrait of Germany’s relationship with nuclear power, Under Control is a quietly compelling observational documentary. Crafted simply from footage taken inside nuclear power plants across Germany and Austria, along with interviews with various plant operators and nuclear energy experts regarding each particular plant’s focus and future, Under Control offers an intriguing look at a side of nuclear power we’re not normally privy to: the somewhat banal day-to-day operations which go into its generation.
These glimpses include stark imagery of long, sterile white corridors; retro-futuristic control rooms filled with panels and flashing monitors; plant employees being scanned for radiation; steam curling above bucolic countryside from the giant mouths of cooling towers; a subterranean bunker where contaminated washrags go to be buried; and a tense emergency-preparedness training session during which a reactor shutdown is simulated.
By the film’s end an unexpected realization becomes apparent: the almost foregone conclusion that Germany’s nuclear age is drawing to an end. As filmmakers Volker Sattel and Stefan Stefanescu are given a tour of the remains of what was once the Kalkar nuclear facility, completed in 1985 but never taken "online," their guide mourns the loss of jobs, and more importantly, of the billions of Deutschmarks used to fund the construction of a doomed power plant.
"Chernobyl broke our backs," he asserts almost wistfully, while astonishing footage of a modern-day carnival ride built inside the shell of the old cooling tower spirals onscreen.
A film dealing more directly with loss of the utterly human variety, Jan Schomburg’s Above Us Only Sky follows Martha (Sandra Hüller), a soft-spoken schoolteacher married to PhD student Paul (Felix Schmidt-Knopp), with whom she plans to move to Marseilles after he accepts a job offer at a hospital there. Or so she thinks. In a series of brief, clipped scenes, she discovers that the man she has been living with for years has been leading a secret life she’s known nothing about.
Struggling to regain her bearings, she meets Alexander (Georg Friedrich), a charismatic, tattooed professor at Paul’s former university, and in a series of awkwardly-engineered moments, initiates a relationship with him. As their attachment grows, their pairing begins to resemble Martha’s previous relationship — right down to a discussion about moving to Marseilles. The main attraction of this film is Hüller’s nuanced performance, and her disarming veneer of almost girlish delicacy and neurotic sexuality concealing an iron will. Her previous tragedy informing her actions, she keeps her motivations to herself, revealing as little as possible for as long as possible, a stubborn survivalist strategy which finally unravels just enough for Alexander to be able to reveal his own hidden past.
A first feature for Schomburg, the deceptively simple Above Us Only Sky doesn’t waste a frame while tracing the subtle contours of a paradise lost, and one regained.
TRASH The term “Hollywood” has become a many-splendored pejorative, applicable to anything trite, vulgar, politically liberal, morally lax, and so on and so forth. Yet as much as they might like to think they’re so-not That, what red-corpuscled Americans with an electrical socket in their dwelling — or simply senses to absorb stray bits of popular culture when they venture outside — aren’t influenced by if not downright addicted to some facets of the entertainment industry?
It takes enormous effort to approach purity in this regard: a combination of home-schooling, mainstream-society-shunning, self-sustaining, off-grid living that pretty much requires the clock be turned back to pioneer days, before oughty-mobiles and other fancy products of modernity. Certain radical polygamist sects of recent notoriety might be the closest anyone in the Lower 48 gets these days to unhooking more than one stubborn individual or three off the infinitely tentacled monster of pop media.
Of course those people are weirdos whom mainstream Mormons prefer not to be associated with, especially when they’re running for President. To be a regular LDS Church member means having a looser, somewhat disapproving yet tolerant attitude toward Hollywood products. It means, for instance, deeming MTV too racy for basic cable. (Think of the children!) It means wanting your cake, but eating it with less decadent icing. However, many a chef chafes at a consumer scraping the offending spices, toppings, and toplessnesses from his or her labored-over creations just because said consumer is on some special diet. From the consumer’s POV, of course, the issue is different: they paid for the item; why shouldn’t they doctor it as stomach and conscience decrees?
That debate, acted out in the heart of Mormonlandia, is at the crux of Andrew James and Joshua Ligari’s documentary Cleanflix. Its eventually very twisty tale starts out with the simple arrival of a supply to meet a demand — in this case, “cleaned up” versions of Hollywood movies offered for rental or purchase in a handful of Utah stores starting around the turn of the millennium.
Handily removing “sex, nudity, profanity, and gory violence” — pretty much in precisely that descending order of importance — from commercial movies for home viewing, Ray Lines’ original CleanFlicks identified a community need and filled it. This success did not pass unnoticed. In fact even as CleanFlicks sold its stores and moved into online distribution, competitors were multiplying like plygs (children of polygamous families), each one howling as the next invaded their territory.
There are many things you can’t do, or at least are strongly discouraged from doing, in the Mormon-dominated state of Utah. But practicing cutthroat capitalism is not one of them — quite the opposite. Money corrupts just like power, however, and Cleanflix veers in unexpected directions as one of its principal characters, a seemingly affable and earnest man of faith, turns out to be a purported fornicating stoner pornmonger whose only spirituality was spelled with a $. The heat gets such that he has to flee the state, briefly landing in Gomorrah itself, Hollywood.
Even as it stumbles upon such lurid human interest, Cleanflix keeps an eye on the bigger picture, notably the question: who has the right to alter a copyrighted work? Some “clean” video shops clung to the notion that since they purchased and tweaked each and every DVD themselves, they were free to do what they wanted with them. Besides, don’t the big studios often create censored versions of their own films for airplane screenings and such?
The industry begged to differ, eventually winning court victories that shut down most (if not all) of the independent “content filtering” businesses. We hear from directors like Steven Soderbergh and Neil LaBute (the latter an ex Mormon), who bristle at the hubris behind “changing something that doesn’t belong to you,” saying that it’s naive at best to think in taking a few bricks out of an artistic house you won’t cause the whole structure to collapse. Then of course there’s the worry that such tampering “cultivates a tolerance for censorship” and uses legitimizes “a shamefulness toward sexuality,” no matter what the artist’s original intention might have been.
Ye olden American hypocrisy in matters of sex vs. violence — so opposite the attitudes flaunted by our socialistic European brethren — is glimpsed in “cleansed” movies like 1996’s Fargo that many patrons find permissible with all its extreme bloodletting intact (remember that wood chipper?), but one mention of the word “penis” tastefully excised. The mind reels at some successfully censored cinema noted here, like 1999’s The Matrix with all its umpteen non-graphic killings removed, or even sacrosanct Schindler’s List (1993) minus any concentration camp details unsuitable for the entire family.
Some movies, however, resist all taming. Ray Lines admits there was no point trying to scrub up 1990’s seemingly harmless Pretty Woman (whose Cinderella is a streetwalker). As for 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, well … “We didn’t do that one on principle,” a CleanFlicks editor says. Just as the monkey at the typewriter will sooner or later write Hamlet, so in the infinite diversity of human experience, once in a great while homophobia is going to be good news for homosexuals.
CLEANFLIX
Sun/15-Tues/17, 7 and 9 p.m. (also Sun/15, 2 p.m.)
