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Amreeka

Cherien Dabis’ debut feature film, Amreeka, is a palatable, sweet film about a Palestinian mother and son coming to America. It feels like a pilot episode of a serial TV show, which is really unusual for this kind of subject matter. It’s a strength and a weakness for the story- perhaps if there really were a prime time episodic show that humanized the Palestinian experience and rendered it so familiar there would be a sorely needed and perceptible pressure against the prevailing myth of extremist Arabs and terrorism. On the other hand, the film suffers from a lack of intensity and from an understandable but problematic anti-political stance. The most politicized character in the film is the doctor brother-in-law with a diminishing medical practice in the suburbs of Chicago due to post 9/11 reactionism, and he is shut down by the main character, Muna, the mom (played by the charismatic Nisreen Faour), who insists that the political troubles of Palestine and Israel have little bearing on the reality here in the US. This is a common stance for immigrants of many backgrounds, who hone in on the material struggle for survival in their new country and cannot afford to give much energy or resources to their homeland’s strife. Yet it is also one of the main reasons why immigrant communities become, over generations, minority populations with little political power and or representation. I have often lamented this fact often about the Chinese American communities, and although it is less true amongst the youth, I have found it to be quite true in first generation Palestinian immigrants.

ghost town

I was trying to download Chinese filmmaker Zhao Dayong's Ghost Town, and accidentally ended up with American director's Steven Kroepp's 2008 Ghost Town, starring Ricky Gervais, Téa Leoni and Greg Kinnear. I was skipping through the file (I admit, I mostly bit torrent stuff now, the cultural equivalent to pirating... we can talk about the pros and cons of this somewhere else..) and got SUCKED in. Ricky Gervais, who most know from the British sitcom comedy series The Office, was unrecognizable to me, both because I don't really watch The Office, and also because, according to the avid The Office watcher, James, he looks pretty different in this. It's a smart, laugh-out-loud-funny mainstream Hollywood film. I can't remember the last time I watched one of those... maybe As Good As It Gets? But Ricky Gervais is funnier than Jack Nicholson. Ghost Town features a similar hopelessly misanthropic, obsessive compulsive middle-aged man who is transformed into a begrudging samaritan by an unconventionally charming love interest. There is a spiritual twist here- apparently if any of your survivors have unfinished business with you, your ghost will be condemned to an indefinite permeable existence in the clothes you died in until that business is finished. This system is based on an expiring notion in Hollywood, as sufficiently displayed in Ghost, or Field of Dreams, and sort of in City of Angels. The kind of completely banal see-through existence of the dead is a familiar archetype- I just also thought of Will Self's London neighborhood of the dead in his collection of short stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity. It is somehow comforting and the opposite of the horror genre that when we die, we go on with our everyday purgatory of daily mundane life, only invisible to the living.

The anti-hero, Bertram Pincus, played by Ricky Gervais, is a thoroughly anti-social dentist who dies for seven minutes during a routine colonoscopy, and comes to with the ability to see all the ghosts who inhabit Manhattan. This would be overly hokey if acted by most, but Gervais manages to act out this gimmicky premise with a mixture of deadpan skepticism and dead-on irony. Complementing him is a former couple, Greg Kinnear and Téa Leoni, one dead, one alive, who needs Dr Pincus' intervention to move on, he to the sweet thereafter and the other with her life. I do wish that Gwen (Téa Leoni's character), a smart, sexy archaeologist weren't so totally defined by the men in her life, as usual, but this is written by the guy who wrote Mission: Impossible and Spider Man, after all. Taking that into account, this is a nice detour from his usual fare of testosterone driven action film.

in the realms of the unreal

Jessica Yu's outstanding documentary, In the Realms of the Unreal, of outsider artist Henry Darger's lifelong work reminded me of my aspirations for documentary making. The film is permeated with a deep reverence and love for Henry Darger's art- which is difficult to access and perhaps easy to dismiss given its uneasy location outside of any recognizable artist status. Jessica Yu takes creative license and, with the aid of an animation team, animates Darger's beautiful and wholly original paintings, giving them a kind of final resolution that I believe Darger would have hoped for. As a recluse, Darger held menial labor jobs his whole life, while secretly working on his 15,000 page "novel" in his every spare minute. His work was only found posthumously, and has since been met with critical acclaim, establishing Darger as one of the most famous figures of outsider art. This film reminded me of another outsider artist- Thornton Dial of Mr. Dial Has Something To Say. Both Darger and Dial led hard lives of manual labor, and neither would have called what they did in their spare time Art. Their impulse to make art and this notion of "self-taught" artist calls into question the institution of art, access to it as well as a fundamental deconstruction of what art is. Jessica Yu uses a young girl's voice (10yr old Dakota Fanning) for the narrator, which evokes the voices of the Vivian girls, the heroines of Darger's epic. This tactic, combined with a seamlessly interwoven mix of third person biographical narrative and self described sentiments from Darger's own memoir flow in and out of excerpts from his manuscript, The Story of the Vivian Girls, merging together into a deeply considered and crafted representation of Darger's mysterious and rich inner world. I kept marvelling at Darger's exceptional mastery of language and visual imagery with so little exposure to precedents and formal education. In the end, the film made me wonder how, in total solitude, Darger could fantasize in such detail, breadth and vivacity a world of loving colorful people.

rabbit

Illustrator and animator Run Wrake's 2005 short film Rabbit (available to watch online) is included in the Cinema 16 World Short Films dvd collection. I found it captivating and a little disturbing. Based on illustations by Enid Blyton illustrator Geoffrey Higham, Wrake creates an original paper cut-out feel to tell a fable-esque story of two greedy children who pay a big price for their avarice. They are violent hunters, and discover a magical idol inside a rabbit that they cut open. The idol turns flies into jewels, so they trick him with the jam that he loves, and kill a lot of other animals to attract flies and maggots to annoy him. They are single-minded in their destruction in order to be wealthy, and in the end, learn that all the transformations are mere illusions, thus leading to their demise by the thousands of flies captured in their room. Without any dialogue, Wrake conveys a natural justice sensibility that is both edgy and classic. I'm debating if I should show it to Micah- it might be too scary, and yet perhaps it'd be medicine for his 5 yr old selfishness?

Grizzly Man

It took me a long time to get around to seeing Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. I watched it in two sittings- the first half during which I was disappointed, and the second half I enjoyed. I had expected the documentary to be more sophisticated, less didactic, perhaps more experimental. Once my expectations were put aside I was able to appreciate the curiosity and nuances of Timothy Treadwell, the infamous bear protector and protagonist. It makes sense that Herzog would be interested in this story about a self-documenting manic animal activist who rages against man-made society for our failure to adequately love the bears. However, I didn't appreciate Herzog's moralizing two-liners throughout the film, the omniscient faceless voice-over that frames the entire tale. Nonetheless, Timothy Treadwell is a fascinating persona, and his intense religousness about a benevolent Nature and her creatures is one that I can both relate to, and am afraid of. There is the sparkle of madness in his eyes whenever he talks to his imagined audience, and his devotion to his chosen semi-illegal cause of camping directly in the middle of wild grizzly territory for 13 summers smacks of zealotry and abandon. The characters surrounding him, including his girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend/secretary, the coroner, all connote a similar kind of idiosyncrasy; in other words, they all seem a bit cooky. This makes them potent exploits for a documentarian, and Herzog certainly does use them as such, albeit with a kind of gentleness and sincerity that comes through. I was moved to tears in the moment that Herzog listens through headphones to the audio of Treadwell's mortal encounter with the grizzly that killed him and his girlfriend, and I relished the disappointment I felt that the actual audio track was not included in the film. The kind of unbridled total and complete graphic disclosure that we are accustomed to now in media was highlighted when I realized that it would not have added anything to the film had we actually sat through the actual recording of their deaths. It reminds me of why books are almost always better than their film adaptations, and why the mind's eye is often more powerful than any image a filmmaker can provide.

Sunset Boulevard

Since I'm in LA for a bit, I've been inspired to check out some films set in LA that I should have seen long ago, like Billy Wilder's 1950 Sunset Boulevard. Wonderful wonderful!


It's funny that we tend to think that any respectable roles for women must be some modern invention, when in fact current roles might actually be a lot less meaty and decent than roles have been historically. This definitely came to mind watching Nancy Olson's smart aspiring writer, Betty Schaefer in Sunset Boulevard. And, frankly, Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond was a pretty great female character too, not that maintaining a kept-man is a top aspiration. But it was a great role and she was certainly in her power, despite her insanity.

I have to say, it was a hoot watching Schaefer, in her 70's at the time extras interviews were shot, talking about the making of the film. (Wisco represent!) It's stuff like this that reminds me how young film is, and how far it's come.

The Owls

It's always exciting to see fresh work from an iconic filmmaker who hasn't come out with something new in a while. I got a chance to see Cheryl Dunye's new experimental thriller The Owls last week and it was a distinct treat. The fast-paced and highly entertaining feature manages to cram a whole lot of edgy, smart and fun stuff into less than 70 minutes. "OWL" stands for "Older Wiser Lesbian" and the four main characters of the film are just that, some of them aging more gracefully than others. I won't give away any of the plot, but there are some really interesting things that this film does in terms of mixing genres that make it great. It walks a line between fiction and documentary in a way that is both reminiscent of Dunye's earlier work and an improvement on that, evolution indicative of progress and the wisdom that the title refers to.

Hugh Hefner's Bogart

I had never seen The Maltese Falcon before last week, can you believe it? But I had some time to kill before heading to the East side on Thursday night, and my friend Tim who's the house manager for the UCLA Film Archive at the Hammer invited me to a screening of the film which Hugh Hefner would be presenting. The Hef donated some money to the archive for the preservation of some of his favorite Bogart films and they were showing his top five over the course of March and April.

I arrived as Hefner and his entourage were being herded to a sign in front of the theater for a photo session with the museum director and his young companion, Cricket. It was an odd scene to be part of, and I wasn't sure where to stand or where to look. Ay, celebrity, not my favorite environment. But interesting for sure. As we entered the theater and it filled up, I was looking around attempting to assess who was there and why, a common LA past-time. I quite enjoyed the show, was amused by the wavering honesty of Mary Astor's Brigid O'Shaughnessy, obsessed about Bogart's teeth throughout, and was aware every once in a while of Hefner sitting four rows in front of me enjoying the same film. As I looked over in the dark, he was just an old man watching a movie, stumbling to the bathroom (with the help of bodyguards) in the dark, proud of his accomplishments and accumulated wealth, living his life. America is so weird.

Worse Than War

This PBS documentary, which I caught in a preview screening presented by the LA Film Forum at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, is about genocide. Specifically it follows genocide scholar Daniel Goldhagen as he investigates various contemporary genocides and why genocide keeps occurring in research for his book, Worse Than War. The main flaw of this film is that the "dispassion"- as it was repeatedly referred to- of Goldhagen carries over to the audience, and I found myself leaving the doc back in the theater, barely thinking about it after I left. No film about genocide should be shaken that easily. But the fact is that I wasn't even haunted by some of the terrible images that the film showed, because they were presented through such scholarly posturing that I was not compelled to identify at all with the questions about humanity inherent in a piece about genocide. Goldhagen was so unlikable and cocky that his dispassion became mine and the doc fell flat. Too bad, because I'm a real easy target for such work, and I presume it will have a similar effect on other viewers.

Worse Than War will air on PBS on April 14.

Society for Cinema & Media Studies Conference

Who knew an academic conference could be so exciting? I have come to acknowledge that I am not an academic, but a film curator who is an interloper in academia. I derive genuine pleasure from reading dissertations, but I know that's not the world for me. When SCMS came to LA I didn't intend to crash the whole thing, but I ended up doing just that, and it was an excellent trip of a weekend. The Westin Bonaventure was teeming with film dorks for SCMS's "Archiving the Future/Mobilizing the Past," and I arrived just in time for Amy Beste's "Instructional Film" panel on Thursday afternoon. Afterwards, drinks ensued at the bar. I saw a bunch of people I didn't expect to see, met a bunch of people I didn't expect to meet, and I started to realize that this was going to be a lot more fun than I'd expected.

Friday I had non-conference obligations all day, so I only made it to a queer caucus party at Akbar that night, always fun to see academics swimming outside of their natural habitat. But Saturday was a conference whirlwind and it was good. It started out with an extremely enlightening panel moderated by Michelle Puetz called, "The Avant-Garde and the Archive." I love it when experimental film geeks spout off stuff like anecdotes about Peter Kubelka describing what would happen if all avant-garde film was transferred to digital media and for some reason it all crashed at once and how the universe would experience a "collective stroke." Same goes for talk about the "disarticulation of materials" in referring to looking at avant-garde film on digital formats (I love that term). One of the most relevant parts of this panel for me was a discussion of the importance of putting pressure on museum curators to exhibit film on FILM, to add film to museum collections and to contribute to the preservation of films by supporting archives (especially informal ones like Canyon and Filmmakers Cooperative). God knows I have struggled within such institutions to legitimize film as art. And part of this discussion was the importance of encouraging filmmakers to raise the bar and value their work, as a painter would a painting or a sculptor a sculpture, the importance of raising standards around film as art. Now, I have always found it ridiculous when a video artist sells a copy of her video to a gallery for thousands of dollars. But in reality it's no more ridiculous than a painter doing the same with a canvass, or, more accurately, a printmaker with a print, and god knows it often makes about as much sense. But the primary issue here to my mind was recognizing the reality that some of our film distributors are functioning as archives without being recognized and receiving protections, financial and otherwise, as such.

The next event I attended, "New Approaches in African Documentary," was super exciting, primarily because it centered around Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Tèno, whom I greatly admire, and he was there for the panel. What was appalling and terribly disappointing is that I was one of only a handful of participants, the audience sometimes outnumbering the presenters. Both of the papers were presented by white women. Both of them were interesting and pretty kick-ass academically. But it's a curious phenomenon and I wondered about the connection between white women academics from the US who study the Global South in particular. (Indeed, one of the papers, Kristin Pichaske's, was entitled "Black Stories, White Voices.") The moderator encouraged us to think of documentary as archive, an interesting perspective, particularly considering the panel I'd just come from, but also to think of it within an African context. Tèno pointed out that today in South Africa as well in much of sub-Saharan Africa, production is largely the same, it is still white producers who are creating stories, often, "reiterating the Heart of Darkness trope." Tèno's Le Malentendu Colonial was the subject of much of our discussion and its subtle critique of a "civilizing mission" transformed into a "saving mission," one of humanitarian charitable causes. Relatedly, he shared how the doc came out in Europe at the same time as Darwin's Nightmare and how that film by white Belgians got all the play, while his was ignored.

The next panel of my afternoon was equally if not even more exciting that the first two. Zeinabu irene Davis and Karen Bowdre moderated an incredible table of stellar filmmakers of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, or the LA Rebellion Filmmakers, on a panel called, "Understanding the Past and Future of African-American Media." Barbara McCollough, Cauleen Smith, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash and Billy Woodberry (the only filmmaker I'd not heard of, as well as the utmost entertaining of the bunch) all showed clips from their work and talked about the historical moment they were part of and where things are at now.

This was followed by parties and drinks and meetings and reunions and dinners etc. The next day the LA Marathon prevented me from getting to more panels, but I did get in on more visiting with out-of-town friends and frankly I'd consumed enough information to feed me for a while anyway. Being at this conference confirmed both that I have made the right decision in not joining academia and that academia ain't half bad.

The Blind Side

March 12
It was even worse than I expected. It was as offensive as I expected Invictus to be and much more so. It was just me and a whole bunch of other white people in that audience. (My brown friend who I went with couldn't stand it and had to leave and slip into Alice in Wonderland.) I cried several times, but that's no indication of quality. The more I think about this film, the angrier I feel. This was funded by a bunch of right-wing Christians for sure. I bet it will play well in Indianapolis and the rest of deep-middle America. I can't believe this was made in 2009. Disappointment. Ugh. Good boy.

Un Prophète

I want to go to prison in France! There the lady guards say "please" as they order you around, everyone gets his own baguette with every meal, and dudes on the playground wear fitted brown suede jackets, while others sun themselves with reflective tanning devices.

Everyone's talking about Un Prophète. Jacques Audiard's follow-up to 2005's The Beat My Heart Skipped is indeed good, but I fail to see how it merits the extent of the critical acclaim that it's received. It's such a masturbatory boy-director Tarantino/Doyle/Godfather-esque etc derivative bit of aimlessness in many ways, that I would write it off were it not touching and illuminating in other ways. I like the matter-of-fact and poetic way Malik (Tahar Rahim) is haunted by the fellow prisoner he is forced to kill, for example. And this might not be an indication of it's greatness, but every mention of literacy in the first half of it made me tear up uncontrollably. I'm loving the films coming out of France (and Europe in general) over the past decade dealing with immigrant populations and the richness and realness that gives lives and stories. Watching the prison interiors of Prophète evoked for me Steve McQueen's Hunger (2009), and Manijeh Hekmat's Women's Prison (2002), and I think that has as much to do with the common cinematic depictions as with the foreign depictions of prison-life. But each of those films was dealing with prisoners quite different from the straight-up criminals depicted here, and it's this glorified corruptness- even with the unjust truths it also portrays- that keeps me from really buying the film.

Andréa described this film as "powerfully depressing" as we left the theater.  I think that's saying something, right?

I hate Scarlett Johansson

For lack of absolutely anything better to watch at Andrea and Mark's one night, I found The Other Boleyn Girl (Justin Chadwick,  2008) on their DVR. Watchable? Yes. Worth it? Questionable. It's always somehow titillating to see sexuality depicted in far off history. But this is so Hollywoodized, I could not tell you whether it's at all accurate.

I guess one of the main draws might be the costumes, one of which Lucas and I saw on display at the Landmark on Pico a while back (this green number depicted above). But I guess that brings me back to...fluff.

Plus, I hate Scarlett Johansson. So it was kind of fun to see her Mary Boleyn get destroyed by Natalie Portman, I mean Anne Boleyn. But then, of course, she got to get all self-righteous in the end. Damn.

alice in wonderland, 3D

The latest adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Tim Burton, is in 3D and aesthetically at full throttle. I took Micah to see it, mostly for the air conditioning and cocoon of a movie theater, and thus arrived with few expectations. I left feeling surprisingly inspired, empowered and thoroughly entertained.

Mia Wasikowska plays a superb 19 yr old Alice. She embodies an unlikely mix of tomboyish insistence, adolescent insolence, and a coming-of-age intelligence that is, in sum, refreshing to encounter in a big budget film. Of course her best lines are lifted straight out of the texts, but they are perfectly believable coming out of Wasikowska's mouth. The other strong acting highlights are Helena Bonham Carter, as a most fitting evil but vulnerable Queen of Hearts, and Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, who does, literally, steal the show in almost every scene he is physically in. The nearly tactile nature of Wonderland that Burton and all his massive team managed to effect allowed for a magical experience of that other world of lore.

Special effects aside, the "moral" of the story that especially moved me was the transformation of Alice from an uncertain, yielding teenager to an empowered and discerning young woman. The question, "are you THE Alice?" echoes throughout the film, as Alice gets thrown into an adventure that feels like someone's else with the same name. She can't believe that she could possibly be the protagonist of a prophetic slaying of the Jabberwocky story, and yet, by the end of the film, she realizes that she is much more than she thought, and that she has not, in fact, lost any of her "muchness". As is so often in life, girls do lose their sense of innate confidence and agency through the vagaries of adolescence and adulthood, from the immense societal and familial pressures to be selfless, to caretake others at all costs and, above all, to accommodate men. When Alice returns to the original world, she knows exactly how to politely but firmly decline the offer of marriage by a man she does not love, and sets off to pursue an unmarried career in the unknown. It may have been the especially susceptible day I was having, but I found this to be a much needed reminder of the work I have yet to do to remember how much power I have to make fearless choices.

Daddy Longlegs

Having been a second parent but not a dad for the last five years makes me an unusual watcher of films about fathering. Daddy Longlegs, directed by brothers Josh and Ben Safdie, is an autobiographical film about their incompetent and delinquent father, Lenny, who is played by Ronald Bronstein. I found myself constantly chagrined and irritated throughout the film, as I watched the hopelessly narcissistic and negligent dad attempt to parent his kids for 2 weeks out of the year. As is often the case, the single father is represented as the absolutely magical vessel for FUN, while he simultaneously fails to create all the most basic structures and boundaries that are foundational to a happy childhood. The Safdie brothers and Ronald Bronstein were extremely defensive of any gender based readings of their film in the Q&A that followed the screening, but Emily and I could not find any other useful lens through which to interpret the film. It was terribly problematic in its "vilification" of the mother as an older, less attractive bitchier version of Lenny's girlfriend, despite the Safdie brothers' vehement denial of any such negative characterization of their mother. Overall, the three of them were shockingly bad at discussing the film and the questions that came up in the sense that they seemed really offended and unable to really engage with any of the questions that any of us had, probably as a result of it being such a personal project. In a certain light, the film is about custody, which has become an increasingly loaded and hot button issue (eg., the Fathers' rights movement). From another angle, it's about lionizing and romanticizing a selfish and inept father figure. Either way, it's a self-referential, insular aggrandizement of a tired brand of masculinity and paternity.

Sunset Community Film Festival

I've been a fan of Wayland He's Life of Wayland since Rebecca Devlin first shared it with me a few years ago. At the 6th Annual Sunset Community Film Festival, held at Ulloa Elementary School in San Francisco on March 5, He made dozens more fans. His latest short, a funny animation called Worm War I, won the audience award for best film, and I heard many a serious discussion between 6th graders and uproarious laughter from the 3rd graders sitting behind me about the video.

The entire program, chosen and compiled by youth media group SCREAM members, was very good and it was professionally well presented. The best part was sitting in a theater full of an audience of young people, watching a program entirely made and presented by young people, and experiencing the extreme pleasure of everyone involved. Half of the time I had no idea why they were laughing, but they sure were having a good time.

Barbara Hammer and Silas Howard at the Hammer

What a great night. I wish this conversation could have lasted a lot longer- they were just getting started. But what an excellent combination, whoever thought this one up!

WTF

I can't believe I finally finished it. After three viewings over the course of two weeks I have finally finished watching David Lynch's enigmatic Inland Empire (2006). Clearly (well, I use that word loosely...), this film is about Laura Dern's character Nikki Grace's psyche. It's about psychology, movies and reality vs. make-believe in a hodge-podge of visual styles and genres, but mostly horror. I bet if I watched it again I'd get it, but I can't imagine I will ever, ever be driven to do that. If you know me, you know that I'm all about film and media that make you go, "WTF?!" But WTF?! And Whatever.

secretary

I watched Secretary, directed by Steven Shainberg, for the second time with James recently. I love Maggie Gyllenhaal because of this film, and I enjoyed her as the main character, Lee Holloway, just as much years later. This film positions sadomasochism as a marginally mainstream attitude towards intimacy, and I have referred to it as a kind of introductory tale for the uninitiated. This is a love story between Lee, a secretary, and her boss, Mr. Edward Grey. It all seems like a recipe for classic objectifying fucked up gender relating when Mr. Grey starts commanding Lee to do menial tasks around the office in an obsessively meticulous way. But the power dynamic shifts when the viewer realizes that Lee enjoys and eroticizes the controlling encounters, especially when they involve spanking. As these scenes are replayed and subsumed into her own fantasy and masturbatory life, the power differential actually swings in the other direction- Mr. Grey loses control of his own desire for control. Because Lee is not ashamed of her own desire, she makes open and honest gestures of love that Mr. Grey repeatedly rejects out of fear. In the end, it is Mr. Grey who we pity in his repression and naked need for love, yet both characters are ultimately humanized in their idiosyncratic yet totally plausible bid for everlasting love.

Nordwand Schmordwand

This looks miserable, right? Well it was. There was also a lot of ACTING! bleh. This was a big night out to the Royal with Andrea and Mark. And I guess I never got bored enough to think of leaving. But this movie was a one-trick-pony. What did we need this for? We didn't.

Les chansons d'amour

I finally watched Love Songs (Christophe Honoré, 2007)- and I loved it! Never has a musical worked so well, in my book. I actually didn't mind at all when the cast broke out in song, it seemed as natural as I ever do when I sing while walking down the street. And it was such a relief of a story. French, yes, and refreshingly real! The guy who looks like Albert from Little House on the Praiarie aka Ismaël (Louis Garrel) would drive me up a tree with his silly joker antics. But other than that, this movie did not annoy me at all, remarkable for a musical movie. The songs are actually good. And I'm sure if my French were better I would have appreciated it even more. I love the sexual fluidity, the matter-of-factness of the affairs and the way they affect everyone's lives in the film. And I love that it ends up GAY gay. And I love that it just ends abruptly in the middle of just another love story. And that it's to a Barbara song- no proprietary musical last song-ness. Yum.

The Yacoubian Building

Hmmm...this was a tough one. Admittedly, I am ignorant of classic Egyptian film and Egyptian cinema in general. But The Yacoubian Building (Omaret yakobean) (Marwan Hamed, 2006), touted far and wide as the biggest-budget Egyptian film to date and a great cinematic accomplishment, was hard to take. I'd been expecting something pretty great, since this was the talk of the International Film Festival Rotterdam during my first year there, and I was really disappointed to have missed it then. It was so soap opera-like that I wasn't sure I could finish it. Upon finally viewing it, the main thing I took away from it was that the story entailed a lot of gross sexual coercion in the name of social advancement. That and the realization that I don't know enough about Egyptian history...or ANYTHING about Egyptian history for that matter.

When Taha (Mohamed Imam) became involved with a more radical sect of Islam, it was such a relief to focus on something substantial, something beyond the shame of characters stuck in poverty and feeling yuck-o about sexual favors demanded according to class and status. I guess there was also a fair share of political corruption. And it was thick with the message that violence breeds violence. But the homosexuality stuff was a bit much, not to be celebrated as I'd been lead to believe. The film has caused great controversy in Egypt for  its depiction of homosexuality. But when the Bey Hatim Rasheed (Khaled El Sawy) indulges in a flashback montage in which he is talking to [hideously rendered] portraits of his parents, and his homosexuality is explained by an assertion that his black African caretaker molested him as a child, I had to groan. The grossest part was probably the clown-like face and particularly the smile of the aged Pasha (Adel Imam) who somehow easily won the heart of the hot young thing of the film, a woman who'd been vehemently discerning till that point.

 I haven't read the book, but it MUST be better than the movie...

When the Patriarchy Let's You Down

Nerakhoon (The Betrayal) (Ellen Kuras & Thavisouk Phrasavath, 2008) is not a typical documentary. More than most docs, it attempts to- and succeeds in- telling its story through images more than words, and that works for the most part. It's an interweaving of recent interviews with amazing footage captured in the 1980's when Kuras first started following her Lao tutor, Thavi (co-director Phrasavath) with a camera. Nerakhoon dramatically reveals long-buried and/or never-revealed ugly secrets of US imperialism and dirty work that left allies abandoned and families in ruin, in particular that of Thavi. To that end, it's also the story of botched patriarchy and how political betrayal ruined his father and eventually his family. The doc also reveals truths about new refugees in the US, the living conditions of new immigrants and the price of assimilation. Are things really better for refugees once they reach the US? Does their chance for survival truly increase? It's a story of multiple betrayals, what we're willing to forgive, who we trust.

Once the family gets to the US, the doc moves seamlessly back and forth between Laos and US, between 1984 and the present, requiring its audience to find clues to figure out where we are, why we're there. From Ellen Kuras we expect beautiful images, and she delivers. There are a lot of orange robes of novices, Buddhism all over the place. And then there is unexpected and horrible community destruction due to gang coersion and involvement of young new immigrants. What emerges is a highly compelling collaboration between documentarian and subjects, revealing the interconnectedness of humanity.

Viva Women Directors!

I am ecstatic! Driving home from watching the Oscars, I felt high like I felt when Obama was elected (which in itself felt like when Mandela left prison and when the borders were opened between East and West Germany).

OH MY GOD!!!!!! Kathryn Bigelow!!!!!!!!! Viva women directors! Viva women filmmakers!!! Viva our voices being heard!!! Viva women calling the shots!!! This is a dream realized- Finally a woman has won the Oscar for Directing. My next dream is to see a woman win for Cinematography- starting with a lot more women DP's being hired. What a beautiful day!!!


(As I just wrote to a kick-ass 19 year-old friend whom I've known since she was 4... Only 3 times before in the 82 year history of the Oscars have women even been NOMINATED for Best Director:
Lina Wertmüller in 1976 for "Seven Beauties" 
Jane Campion in 1993 for "The Piano"
Sophia Coppola for "Lost In Translation" in 2003
Today is an historic day! In 2010, Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman to win for Directing. Sad but true... and WONDERFUL! She also won Best Picture for "Hurt Locker!" Now what I really want to see is a woman win Best Cinematography. THAT is a male-dominated field...)

Maverick Mother

Australian humor is a particular brand of humor, something I'm not necessarily accustomed to. It's somewhat innocent and cheesy, like Canadian humor, yet it can be raunchy, but not as bad as British humor. That might threaten to ruin Janet Merewether's autobiographical 2007 doc, Maverick Mother. But somehow it works, her fantastical dramatic interludes serving only to illustrate her seemingly cliche desires to procreate, and they keep the tone of the work lighthearted and flowing.

My viewing partners and I questioned not the acquisition of sperm demonstrated here, but Merewether's stubborn, then annoying, then obnoxious, then incredible persistence in contacting the "father" long after he'd ceased to respond, seemingly making it clear that he wanted nothing to do with the wishes she'd manifested. But other than that, I found it entertaining and relatable as an illustration of modern motherhood. Well done.

skim milk and soft wax

Dani Leventhal's most recent video, Skim Milk and Soft Wax, evoked a mixture of apprehension and appreciation. Dani's earlier work, Draft 9, being one of my favorite videos, meant that my expectations were high and that I was probably going to give a generous reading of her treatment of a high-stakes issue, i.e., the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the Q&A that followed the screening at Syracuse University, Dani expressly stated, in the face of pointed questions, that her work is definitely apolitical although she knows that she is handling a controversial topic. This resolved some of the uneasiness I had felt at moments throughout the video- primarily because it is quite hard to read her political stance on the issue. Being Jewish American, Dani has been facing an extremely difficult and nebulous path away from the Zionism that she was raised in. I think as with all "political" controversies, there lies at the heart of the issue deeply ingrained and primarily emotional stances that are staked out and defended, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a perfect example. Most Jews I have known (and often loved) believe in the myth of endless persecution and the redemption of the land of milk and honey for completely understandable reasons, few of which are actually political in any legislative or juridical sense. And yet these very personal feelings, rooted in misinformed notions about security and righteousness, quickly turn into convictions that lead to political and militaristic decisions that have grave human rights consequences for Palestinians. This being said, I think it very brave of Dani to even attempt to represent her journey into the deconstruction of the meta narrative of her heritage, and I think her video is invaluable for her honesty. It's particularly interesting to see how her father figures largely in it as a major voice of her internalized Zionism. Basically, the video is a document of their journey back to Israel together, a beloved land of her father's and a nostalgic site of confused feelings for Dani, as she awakens to the reality on the ground, beyond the story she's been indoctrinated in.

i'm through with white girls

I'm hoping that writing about I'm Through With White Girls, directed by Jennifer Sharp, will be a good way to start posting on this blog. I've been anxious about writing about movies in a casual blogging format- my tendency is to overly deconstruct films and this medium calls for a broader stroke.


Anthony Montgomery plays Jay, a black hipster geek who womanizes white women in a mildly offensive way. He's a serial monogamist who cowardly breaks up with each girlfriend with the same hastily written note. The film opens with a lighthearted series of angry exes reading his break up note, which piqued my interest because it was fairly articulate self-aware bullshit. He decides that his problem is that he needs to find a "sista", or "operation brown sugar" as his graphic novel friends dub the recent epiphany. The movie attempts to address racial stereotypes by eventually uncovering that what was masked by a superficial focus on color was actually a deeper pattern of fear and lack of integrity. As every romantic comedy requires, the perfect woman appears in the form of Lia Johnson. She plays Catherine, who is hot, a best selling feminist author, and also quirky enough to complement Jay.




They're both chain smokers, weird, and have believable chemistry. She mistrusts men, and he has to deal with the fact that his relationship woes have been because of him and not the women that he dated. I enjoyed this movie for a couple of reasons: for a formulaic romantic comedy, the main characters are refreshingly smart and deviations from the norm, and I laughed out loud several times. The one major criticism I have of the film is that it's frustrating that Catherine, who is a successful, beautiful writer, would be vulnerable enough to be attracted to someone who she has to take care of. But sadly, this is so typical in the world in general.

Roller Derby Queen

The family story goes that when I was born my dad said I would be a roller derby queen. He also wanted to name me Zwingliana if I was a girl and Heinrich if I was a boy. (He was working on his PhD in Swiss Reformation History, though how that relates to roller derby, I'm not sure...) It always seemed like an eccentric early-70's reference until the recent surge of roller derby popularity that has swept the nation. Considering I was an active member of the drag king community at the turn of the century and the burlesque movement in early Decade One, it would have been a logical successive turn, had I only been a bit younger.

Drew Barrymore, however, is about my age and is undaunted by fears of being too old or seeming too trendy to make a movie about the Austin roller derby scene and she plunges right into this subculture in her debut feature Whip It. I'm truly glad to see her taking the creative helm in her own project, and it's decent entertainment. I never once thought, "when is this going to be over" or "wow, this is really crap." It isn't a work of genius either, but as Barrymore herself has attested, this is just a first attempt at directing, only the beginning.

I appreciated Whip It's depiction of perpetual teenager Ellen Page's Bliss Cavendar and her desire to break away from the beauty pageants her mom has subjected her to for years. She's freakier than that and she's smart and she's stuck in a small town. She needs an outlet and finds her answer when she joins the Hurl Scouts and adopts the moniker Babe Ruthless. It's a relief to see a teenage girl like this, someone I can relate to, someone who was more like me as a high-schooler. I imagine that's true for a lot of us.

another bad title and the danger of poor memory

A friend of mine lamented recently that his memory is going to crap, particularly bad news for this friend who is a history professor. In the same vein, I've been freaking out about my increasingly bad film programmer memory. What good is the wealth of film information my mind has gathered if I can't recall a director's name, film title, or recollect a plot detail. More and more this happens to me and it's scary. My wonderful Grandma Nelson suffered from Alzheimer's, which was especially awful in her last decade, and it made the rest of the family wonder if this would be our fate too.

The memory-loss fear came up again when I watched Youth Knows No Pain (Mitch McCabe,  2009) with my friend Jessica in New Orleans in our HBO binge. I know that I had seen this doc before. But was it in consideration for my program at NMWA? Was it at a festival, on a screener, in a theater? If she released it in 2009, I must have seen a rough cut or another version of the piece, a shorter one maybe. Where the hell did I see this? And it wasn't called Youth Knows No Pain, was it? Not a memorable title anyway, rather an awful one, and not suited to this doc, which is about our internalized agism and the fear of getting old, or rather the fear of LOOKING old. I must admit, especially in the last couple years, I'm feeling the "I look so old" thing as I never expected I would. And as much as theoretically I am much more concerned about the memory-loss associated with getting older, my vanity also gets stronger each day and the looking-older thing gains importance. Ugh.


Youth Knows No Pain is a feature length doc that follows filmmaker McCabe (whose name is really familiar- I know I've screened work of hers in the past. What was it? When was it? How come I can't remember anything?) whose father was a plastic surgeon and died in a car accident that she and the rest of her family survived when she was a teenager. The doc serves for her as a tool to pay homage to her dad, but more to indulge her own fears of aging. She interviews various people who have had plastic surgery and delves a bit into their psychology, what it's meant for their self-image, for their social lives, their intimate relationships, how they view youth and how they view plastic surgery in general. It's a disturbing and mildly fascinating of investigation.

I saw another documentary that was submitted to a film festival I organized a few years ago, I think it was from a Dutch director, examining plastic-surgery-happy Americans and their obsession with youth and beauty. It was actually very wry, entertaining, compelling, the most memorable bit being of a 16 year old girl who was getting labiaplasty because she thought she had flabby vagina lips, her mother sitting next to her in agreement the whole interview. What the hell was that doc called?

Towelhead or Sex and the Arab American Teenage Girl at the Turn of the Century in Texas

Another night, another HBO movie, though this one had a festival and arthouse run before being relegated to cable and DVD. I imagine that a big part of the reason it wasn't more successful is its title, Towelhead. I had a vague idea what this movie was about, thought it had something to do with Arab Americans in the US, definitely about men, maybe men in the Middle East, something to do with the war? That did not compel me to see it sooner or to seek it out in a theatrical run. In actuality the film was nothing like I expected. It's a really compelling story of a girl coming of age in Texas and the sexual awakenings, adventures and misadventures that she has. Based on the autobiographical book "Towelhead" by Alicia Erian, it was eerily reminiscent in tone, setting and some content of my friend filmmaker Susan Youssef's feature script Marjoun and the Flying Head Scarf, which she's been working for a few years on adapting from her short film of the same title.

Towelhead- which originally had the much more appropriate title, Nothing Is Private- was directed by Alan Ball, of American Beauty fame, and it contains a lot of social and sexual taboos like those that made him (in)famous with that film. A lot of it is hard to deal with, partly because we so infrequently see healthy images and stories of childhood sexuality. Of course, in this case, that is complicated with inappropriate and criminal behavior on the part of adults. Young-looking 20 year old Summer Bishil plays Jasira Maroun who discovers the orgasm when perusing her neighbor's porno mags while babysitting his son, and she wants more. She's oddly open and frank about it, as though she does not understand that sexuality is private, and she's without shame. It's actually a bit overdone- to me it seemed like she was mentally challenged at times, like when she approaches neighbor Travis Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart) and requests access to his Penthouse magazines, because she likes "how they make her feel." I don't believe that a 13 year old girl would present that so transparently. (At all. I did something like that when I was 7, but I certainly didn't say it was because of how they made me feel.) Mr. Vuoso is creepy, if only because of his idiotic lack of self-critique in falling in lust with the barely-teenager and believing that something is legitimately going on between them. It's an old tired story, but in this context of early 1990's Gulf War Texas it's spruced up in a truly interesting way. Jacira (pronounced Jazeera) has come to a white sub-division in Houston to live with her father (Peter Macdissi) after her mother back in Syracuse (played by Maria Bello) kicks her out for shaving her legs (at the suggestion of her mother's boyfriend...). I kept waiting for the scene where we learn that papa Maroun has a secret loverman, because this guy is GAY. But that never happens, which I guess is ok, but it was confusing. In any case this snooty French-speaking Lebanese Christian is an asshole, a pretentious jerk and an unloving father who is abusive in the name of discipline. I think Macdissi is simply a terrible actor, and that is the only significant flaw of the film (besides the title) in my eyes. Toni Colette plays the vigilant, right-on and refuge-providing neighbor, Melina. Her bleeding heart Peace Corps veteran husband happens to speak excellent Yemeni arabic that the Beiruti Mr. Maroun understands perfectly when reprimanded in a face-saving way.

I guess, once I got past the deceptive title of this film and beyond the bad-actor gay-but-not-gay father, I really liked this movie for it's complex characters and community questions delving into race and ethnicity in the US. But most importantly, it's important in its portrayal of the sexual agency of a young woman just starting to figure out what gives her pleasure in the world and navigating this tricky territory.

The Joy of Cows

Okay, it didn't make me weep repeatedly as it did my friend Jessica (she also exclaimed, "Oooh I love autism!" as the movie began...). But this biopic about autistic cattle expert Temple Grandin was a very nice film. Claire Danes does an excellent job embodying the title character, and Catherine O'Hara as her sympathetic Aunt Ann is also a standout (and finally given a substantial dramatic role). Produced by and screened on HBO, Temple Grandin (Mick Jackson, 2010) tries through visual techniques of enhanced flashes of bits and pieces of what Grandin is seeing to convey what it is like to be autistic. I have no idea if this is accurate or if it's possible to convey what it's like to live as an autistic person, but I liked it. In typical biopic fashion, the audience follows Grandin from her summer before college on her aunt's cattle ranch when she discovers the comfort of the cowpoke, through adulthood, all the while summoning flashbacks to childhood and school to explain where she is now. It entertainingly relays her triumphs and struggles leading to her innovations in understanding how cattle work. It's definitely an inspiring, uplifting story, but it's also funny and not too sappy. Unless you're my friend Jessica.

The Black List

 


During downtime throughout carnival in New Orleans, we caught a lot of HBO entertainment. One pleasant finding was Elvis Mitchell's The Black List (dir. Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, 2007). When it came on, I immediately thought, ah yes, Black History Month. But whatever. It's a great portrait of amazing people coming from very disparate parts of culture, their only commonality being that they are black. Yet there are unifying elements. Every person is shot against a grey background, well lit, well dressed, everything's real classy. The interviews were insightful and frank, inspiring and not too sentimental. My favorites were Thelma Golden, Colin Powell, Lorna Simpson, Toni Morrison, Serena Williams, Chris Rock. It's an appropriately celebratory piece and I'm definitely glad we caught it.

Old Joy

I finally watched Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy, a film I kept missing at Rotterdam a few years ago and have not made a chance to see since then. It was perfect for my flight from Denver to New Orleans- and a glimpse of male nudity always perks up an airplane row!

"Sorrow is just worn out joy" is the line, spoken by freewhellin' Kurt (Will Oldham), that the title comes from, and I've been trying to think about how this is the theme of the film. The weepy Pacific Northwest is certainly the perfect setting for such a theme, and the buddy movie aspect of old friends coming to terms with adulthood in their own particular ways was a good context for this emotional nostalgia. It's largely a film about just that: male bonding, manhood, masculinity, life responsibilities, growing up, becoming an adult, procreation... It made me think about the man-friend-couples I know and how they are and aren't allowed to express their affection for one another, what is an acceptable amount of attachment, and how friend-pairs sometimes grow apart as much as romantic pairs.

The context of Mark's (Daniel London) wife's pregnancy is also interesting to me with regard to the fact that his pending fatherhood is mentioned only briefly at the beginning of the men's brief camping trip. Yet it is the coming infant intruder that seems to so threaten Kurt, or at least it is a manifestation of Mark's increasing distance from their friendship, a threat that seems in some way to be the cause of Kurt's current sorrow. I kept thinking about how different it would be if Kurt and Mark were women, going on a camping trip right before a birth like that, how omnipresent that coming presence would be in its advent. But this was a bromance, and that was the point.

Up

Some people I know and trust have raved about Up, how deep and complex it is, how much it's a story for adults, how it made them cry. I wasn't terribly excited about it myself, but it wasn't a complete waste of time. I think I appreciated the Pixar technology in this film more than I have in other Pixar films. And I like the intergenerational story, the idea of an old man and a young boy becoming friends. I like the fact that the romantic couple of this story does not have kids, yet they live out a happy life together. And even more I like that Mr. Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner) by the end of the film takes on responsibility for Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai) in a non-conventional family role. (It would be nice if some of the boys receiving medals at the end of the movie could have been accompanied by someone other than a normative father figure, but this is a Disney film...) I probably like Dug (the dog voiced by Bob Peterson) the best, but after a while his humor got tired too. No matter- it was all entertaining enough. Oscar nomination-worthy, no. But neither is Up in the Air, which I really liked. C'est ça...

The Devil Came on Horseback

Wow. I've been meaning to see The Devil Came on Horseback (Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg, 2007) for a while. Tonight a year+ old article in Harpers, Nick McDonell's  "The activist: Alex de Waal among the war criminals," left me wanting to make more sense of the situation in Darfur, and this film certainly helped with that. I was at first skeptical that Brian Steidle, an ex-Marine and African Union hired monitor of a ceasefire in Sudan in 2004, was our entrée to this situation. But, as I came to learn, he was in fact the one to expose this situation to the world, starting with Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. In an op ed piece, Kristof published some of the thousands of photographs that Steidle took, along with his account of the genocide occurring in Darfur. The story burst out from there, but somehow not enough, and that is part of the puzzle that this documentary leaves its viewers pondering and the inaction it leaves viewers wanting to react against.

 The story is absolutely horrifying, a call to action against a genocide full of the worst atrocities you can imagine. I suppose that is exactly why Steidle's photos are so important to the story (in a way that reminded me of Rory Kennedy's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib or Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure). They are proof, they are undeniable, they are terrible, they are haunting. Equally disturbing is the frustration Steidle expresses in his inability to get the world to react in a meaningful way to the genocide. ...

Crazy Good

This evening I went to Crazy Heart and came home to Sam's crazy chicken in time to meet crazy Nihar at the corner bar. Crazy Heart was crazy good. I'm trying to live by the theme of it, "give love another try" like I'm trying to live by "carpe diem," simple mottos that ain't always so easy. I see why this film is such a hit, so touted for the great acting. I was very skeptical, didn't expect to like it at all. It's probably Maggie Gyllenhall (a present crush because of interviews) that made me go see it. But it's really Jeff Bridges' Bad Blake (and Colin Firth's Tommy Sweet, for that matter) that makes this film great. And the script and the music- it's just a great story that is completely believable and relatable.

 MG acts first like a therapist and she's also super sexy from the start. Bad Blake thinks she's too good for him. He is enchanted with her classiness (and her youth?). She gets all shy and bashful, which was for me off-putting. I mean, really? This old scruffy dude complaining about his hemorrhoids is that intimidating to you? I didn't expect to, but I totally bought their love story, it made perfect sense. It's chemistry that draws them to each other, like it always is, and they have it.

 Just as important as the love story, the struggling musician story, the buddy story, and indeed central to the story as a whole, is Bad's struggle with alcoholism. It's good to see alcoholism portrayed humanly, as the fatal disease, the killer that it is. I've seen a few friends struggle with this disease and it's heartbreaking how it destroys lives, just as it does here. When Bad calls his friend Wayne and says, "I wanna be sober," it's a moment of great triumph, but with a deep breath in anticipation of the long road ahead. In that sense the ending was very real too. But I won't spoil it for you... Here's Sam's Crazy Chicken! Yum.

Steve McQueen's Hunger

Like most of artist Steve McQueen's work, Hunger is absolutely beautiful. It's also deeply disturbing, in a visceral sense that I haven't experienced since Precious. That's probably at least partly because Hunger is based on the true story of a "blanket" and "no wash" strike that lead to a hunger strike of IRA prisoners held in Maze Prison in Northern Ireland in 1981. The stillness of this film echos the monotony, the disturbing silence that must have existed there. It's, well, imprisonment. The film is full of shit, spread all over the walls of each cell as part of the prisoner's protest to being denied political prisoner status by the British government. This image is so strong you can absolutely smell it and it's overwhelming. We watch an orderly pour bleach onto pools of piss that prisoners have poured out their doors into the hall, and we watch him sweep the liquid all the way down the hall toward the camera, methodically, as if to hypnotize the viewer, the pools reflective and somehow beautiful. I love it when experimental filmmakers and video artists make narrative features, because then we get this beauty, this stillness, this pause. And the film is indeed slow, but this is called for. It takes time to fully contemplate what is happening and to digest the horrific violence the prisoners endure (historical echos of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo). The sound design is amazing- sparse and quiet, so that there is an overlying tension and we can hear every little thing. The confined, entrapped, seclusion of the prisoners is contrasted with extreme low angle shots of a prison guard in the outside world with the sky behind him, no limits. In the same sense we see birds crossing through prisoners' dreams and at the end of the film flashbacks to outside times, forests and trees, causing my friend who'd gone to the bathroom to exclaim, "is this the same movie?"