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.