John-444

Fully prepared for a documentary, I found SexStar to be my brand of ludicrous. The pick-up artist is hardly a creature of sheer technique, so to present all this as mere performance to be aped is funny indeed. The jargon is utterly pointless except to highlight the little regard Hill has for womankind. The presentation sequences have a bone-headed literalness that mocks the trope. The reenactments are gamely performed, but could never be mistaken for anything but. Toward the end Hill reclines in his lips-shaped chair with a roaring caveman laugh as crayon loveletters flit across the screen. I would have you believe that I was laughing even harder.

A nice little 3-part tale shows us the king of Swaziland, the last absolute monarch in the world: his wives, palatial accommodations, fleet of luxury cars, etc. The filmmaker obviously enjoyed extraordinary access to the king and the royal family, and the king has a great deal to say about his role and his responsibilities. Unfortunately, all that talk seems wildly at odds with reality. Swaziland has the world's lowest life expectancy. The prevalence rate of AIDS in the population is almost 43%. The people earn roughly $.63 per day and subsist on donated food and offal. There is talk of revolution from many people who must now be at risk for espousing treason on camera. There is also the princess, sold to us as a rather spoiled brat who equates her father with the nation's culture, and cannot imagine the willful denial of either. She begins to see things through another point of view, but how far will that go?

One woman plays the birthdays of her dead children. Another woman plays numbers passed down from her mother and her mother before her: we see a wooden box stuffed with curling wedding photos and mementos mori, including ancient hand-written lottery tickets. A wealthy intellectual says "Through the poor I learned about the lottery. The lottery is not an innocent game. The lottery has a system and ambition: to interpret the world." He makes several claims about Pythagoras and Kabbala and the antiquity of Naples' civilization. The black & white cinematography does* create a timeless quality, such that I am all but blind to shiny new cars in the background as this ancient numerology articulates itself. But many film-goers may find it easier to view Italian poverty and Italian eccentrics in these shades, creating a sort of nostalgia for more artfully shot fictions. I can see people getting frustrated with the interludes, full of establishing shots providing a deep sense of the Neapolitan funk. Our intellectual tells us that Naples is steeped in pain and deprivation, and these superstitions provide a comfort more visceral than bourgeois savings accounts can provide.

There are overtones of the confessional as people step up to the glass and translate events or hopes into numbers they wish to play that week. The images of dreams are translated into numbers. Dreamers are frustrated when an image is too surreal to translate smoothly, and the ticket vendors try to elicit the dream-emotions an image evoked: anything to find a meaningful reference to a number they can sell you. A mammoth transsexual runs a bawdy bingo/keno parlor calling out numbers and creative translations of the associated imagery: "78: Good news, my husband has died! 38: I do a striptease. 21: I am incredibly feminine!" There is the theological question of playing numbers derived from tragedies and disasters. There is an abiding faith that if you can recognize the serendipity of a lucky number when it appears on a license plate (be it in a newspaper photo or a delivery van that all but runs you down), or select the relevant items from your dreams or biography, you can change your fate. With no future and nothing desirable in your past, you live in the present. A sacred ceremony rescues one believer every week.

This is an interesting idea which sadly drifts from its central notion: unpacking the beliefs of fundamentalist Christians intolerant of their children's homosexuality. Three families are examined, with varying degrees of success due to a lack of cooperation by two of them. Former Congressman Bob Dornan's feelings are a matter of public record, luckily, which rescues the segments with his former aide, who was like a son to him. The Mormon family either abandons the project at its outset, or cravenly manipulated their son and the filmmaker in order to make their point. This is a real tragedy as they seem to be the most venomous critics of homosexuality. The pacing and technical aspects are pretty shaky, and too much is given to exploring the hurt feelings of the children. Isn't their hurt rather obvious? The treatment they receive would elicit sympathy from anyone (aside from those likely to inflict these wounds in the first place). More time should have been given to fleshing out the objections of fundamentalists (some of which is done nicely in the extra features on the DVD). More time should have been given to refuting the misstatements of fact that they make in their condemnations. In short, compelling characters provide some heartbreaking drama as they find themselves in families where neither love nor hate are reciprocated. Could have been really illuminating, but strays into the comfort of coming-out war stories.

Strange tale of Doug, whose autobiographical/episodic memory is wiped one night due to still-unknown causes. He remembers nothing personal, just facts about the world and how to perform skills he has mastered. This is a wild dual-camcordering of his reintegration into a family, a profession, and finally a network of friends (including the director/principal cameraman) he was meeting for the first time. Doug shoots footage full of the wonder of things we take for granted, and the tenuousness of that which we consider integral: our sense of self, which seems to be constructed from the totality of our experiments. Doug is not what Doug was.

Letts tops himself, and I didn't think that was possible after his excellent documentary on The Clash. This is the finest broad survey of punk ever. It suggests that punk is an attitude at the heart of rock, which existed before there was a "punk rock" per se. As soon as "punk rock" appears, you have little scenesters making necessities of virtues, imposing orthodoxies that undermine the freedom that the music longed for or expressed. Tons of interviews with the pantheon of punk royalty, but it is often the forgotten geniuses who never made significant commercial indentation that have the most to offer. Punk also has the virtue of many short & tight tunes, so there is less excerpting of musical performances than one sees in 99% of music documentaries. Is there a soundtrack available?

Derailroaded might be about music, but Wild Man Fischer isn't particularly musical in any conventional sense. More of an outsider artist, or maybe just an exploited freakshow, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and creating during his manic peaks. This is more a study of mental illness than anything else, and we see Fischer beginning to treat the film crew as he has finally treated everyone who has tried to help him in the past. Notable scenes include a re-enactment of an interview between Dr. Demento & Frank Zappa, done with puppets, in which each reveals to the other just how beyond-the-pale crazy Fischer is.

I think some of the best documentaries are those that make you ask yourself if the whole thing is a put-on. Here we have a fearless explorer who hates the jungles and is too inept to consult archaeological lore or maps or weather patterns. We have a film crew which bogs down the Long March with vast amounts of filming gear. We have a succession of guides (the gonzo Col. Kilgore wannabee who has surveyed the terrain on hallucinogenic over-flights, the aged man drunk on metaphysics, and the Indian who craves urban life) whose information is always false (sometimes outrageously). It is a recipe for disaster, a quixotic trip into the heart of darkness which unglues every mind and every alliance. The serial foolishness of the explorer is also our narration. His tapes bounce manically from loving to hating members of the team, from delusional optimism to crushing defeatism, and from unwarranted certainty to paranoid skepticism--sometimes within the space of a few sentences. The Film Crew sometimes creates tangents intended to make a better film. Everyone suffers from a sort of monomanic blindness that prevents them from absorbing the sheer folly of the overarching enterprise. Along the way, the minutiae and the obstacles are just too weird to be believed.

The Hold is a great short documentary which bludgeons us with the metaphor of the slave ship to describe the class conflict coming to a boil in Brazil. A vast multitude "down below" deprived of basic resources and casually tossed aside should they die, a privileged few "on deck" separated from their seething victims by the thinnest of boundaries. Drug dealers, police officers, intellectuals, social workers: they suggest the crisis looms, but both sides are powerless to alter their course. Animation is employed to great effect, and the narrator shifts invisibly from describing slave ships to food riots and other urban unrest.

Two couples & two singles cheat with & on one another in a marathon of infantile self-absorption. There is tons of oblique dialogue designed to demonstrate everyone's complete inability to communicate. The levels of narcissism may well be toxic to some viewers. In fact, it's very difficult to even figure out the characters' names, because no one has the interpersonal skills to have a discussion about anyone but themselves. Sentences that could contain proper names dwindle off into elliptical silences & eventually you conclude that the names are pointless because they are all vacuous reproductions of a type being savaged by Labute. They might as well be numbered "egomaniac 1", "egomaniac 2", etc. Are these solipsistic nightmares so rare that a whole film explores the narrow pointlessness of their lives? Maybe where you live, but the ubiquity of this type makes this film an endurance test, as if Andy Warhol directed a very unspecial funny-only-in-spite-of-itself 100 minute Seinfeld episode with all deliberate estrangement. Better to go with the reductio ad absurdum titled In the Company of Men.

This is a fine movie with a few rough spots. If this had been my first Godard film, I might have fallen in love with it. As it is, I think the innovative technique & social commentary of Godard are better revealed in other films, like Breathless & Les Carabiniers. Bruno's long soliloquy at the end seemed so disjointed, but not in a passionate, naturalistic stream-of-consciousness way, but rather as if every brief (and often parenthetical) comment on the film thus far were compiled.



-JMc

Filmed with an obvious love for the "enchanting" locale, I thoroughly enjoyed it until the end, which I find rather abrupt, tidy, and not a little bourgeois. Something about these portrayals of women desperate to escape their English lives strikes me as very sad, and very irritating if done too neatly. Nonetheless, the acting is fine and the book is certainly more clever in wrapping everything up.

I was reluctant about this one, but it is actually quite good. It has more obscure references per minute than a Dennis Miller special. There's a real Kevin Smith-y quality to it all, including the abrupt and overly-neat ending (my only complaint). With the exception of the kids who represent our protagonists as youths, the acting is fine. Just picking out the sources for dialogue would entertain any sci-fi scholar, but the whole thing is really funny, as well.

I saw this after Godard's "Breathless" & Truffaut's "400 Blows" and I found this the nicest of the three. I was immediately caught up in the surreal "Anger" and never felt let down by any of the "sins" that followed. The narratives are fine, the acting humane, and the directing lovely.