There is no question that the Coen Brothers A SERIOUS MAN story comes out of the Book of Job and it more universally applies to any person who has "cursed God in their hearts." As much as I laughed and enjoyed the details the Coen's relate about being Jewish in Minnesota, Larry Gopnik could easily have been my Scottish (mostly) father, with a ungovernable family, a house in the suburbs in the 1960s, a teaching position on his way to tenure, and trying to be a serious man while nearingly failing even the most average expectations for success. It's a brilliant movie. A portrait of a time and funny, really funny.
The interesting thing to watch is how A SERIOUS MAN will be accepted either by a wide or narrow audience. Nobody quite predictded how FARGO would go over with a wider audience or in the world-wide market because many felt it was "too Minnesotan" but it was accepted everywhere. So, are the hilarious inside references to Minnesota culture and individuals in A SERIOUS MAN going to carry to a national or international audience? Ron Meshbesher? Will audiences in Southern California or Seattle or London recognize the subtle humor that Meshbesher, the late night TV ad, ambulance chasing, Jewish lawyer that proper staid country club gentiles liked to curse under their breath and then lose to in court.
The same holds true of TRAINSPOTTING or films by Mike Leigh, the best parts of those films are in the details and the specificity of the culture. I love the little story within the story, "Goy's Teeth" starring Michael Tezla playing dentist Dr. Sussman - it could be a hilarious film short all by itself. And Tezla's styled comic acting abilities are brilliant.
One thing that bowled me over about A SERIOUS MAN was the detail and specificity of period and place. SERIOUS MAN is a period piece but, as the Coen's would say, all their films are period pieces and they pay a lot of attention to making artistic direction right to the time of the story. It's a bit like MAD MEN, in that respect, as they carefully frame the story and each scene with elaborate details specific to the 1960s and their particular world of Minnesota at that time. More than just good writing that's great filmmaking.
Thus you see their story in the wall paper, it the countertops, on the desktop of Larry Gopniks desk, along the property line that so-call divides his property from the neighbors - nothing goes unexamined for its potential to contribute to the richness of the story and the internal world of the film.
In preparation for the 2010 SXSW Film and music festival in Austin Texas the staff and board have come up with a unique online method for soliciting ideas and interest in their week long panels.
The Online Panel Picker gives the digital community the ability to browse through programming proposals and vote on which ideas they feel are most interesting for SXSWeek 2010. The voting from the panel picker will only play a percentage participation in the final decisions - 30% - while 40% of the weight of the decision remains with the advisory board and 30% with the festival staff.
I must say this is an interesting public participation experiment in arts programming. Non-profit arts organizations are always wrestling with the problem of knowing weather their programming is serving their constituency. The panel picker creates an easy to use feedback loop both for, sort of whiteboarding ideas, but also for pre-testing them before their target audience.
This is a method that could easily be used in other membership organizations like IFP, Screenwriters' Workshop, Minnesota Film Arts and the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival.
At Sundance you'll see an array of dramatic indie films, foreign and probably more than many of the premiere festivals around the world documentaries. Last year it was "Man on a Wire" which has to be the favorite for an Oscar nomination.
At the '09 Sundance festivals there are a couple of documentary standouts sure to come out of the festival with some buzz. First, there is "Tyson" that gives a fairly unvarnished portrait by James Toback of the troubled life of boxer Mike Tyson, who rose to fame as a pugilist and fell as a convicted rapists and drug addict.
Another standout is former Minnesotan Laura Gabbert's "No Impact Man" that follows a Greenwich Village, Manhattan couple Colin Beavan and Michelle Conlin and their vow to give up luxuries to lessen their carbon footprint but not without remorse and some pretty funny situations. As the Colin explains to their daughter Isabelle "Daddy does nature. Mommy does retail" we witness the travails of giving up lifestyle for ideals.
Thanksgiving films are often a subject for indie filmmakers to explore issues of families, parent/child relationship and sibling interactions. Oh, as if we need that match thrown onto the fire during family gatherings. But, on those lazy fall evenings, it can be fun to gather with family an relatives to have assembled from near and far to pop some corn and indulge in family stories.
Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters" (1986) tags itself to a few Thanksgiving scenes and follows the general themes explored in Thanksgiving films but Turkey day is not at the center of the story.
Here are a few films that feature Thanksgiving as the central premise I would recommend for the Thanksgiving family film festival:
"The House of Yes" (1997) features Minnesota local Rachael Leigh Cook in the first movie she made after her debut in Peter Syvertsen's Minnesota local Screenlabs production of "26 Summer Street." Cook filmed the opening a closing sequences of "House of Yes" after all the other principle photography had been completed, so she knew little of Parker Posey's performance as he adult version of herself, the young Jackie Bouvier and her relationship over Thanksgiving holiday to a sibling that pushes the boundaries of rivalry.
"Pieces of April" (2003) is written and directed by Iowan Peter Hedges who also wrote "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and it tells the story of a wayward daughter living in a lower East Side tenement who decides to reunite with family because her dying mother Patricia Clarkson who was nominated for an Oscar for this role) to have a family Thanksgiving in her run down NYC walk up.
"The Myth of Fingerprints" (1997) is another debut film on the Thansgiving list for indie director Bart Freundlich about a family reunion that uncovers lets just say family issues.
"The Ice Storm" (1997) is an James Schamus, Ang Lee classic period piece located in 1973 and centers on a families, the Hoods and the Carvers, brought together over Thanksgiving break in their Connecticut cul de sac community of upper middle clas conformity only to reveal, adultry, sexual experimentation, drug use and other petty crimes. If you've been in Hudson river valley, Westchester county communities during an infamous fall ice storm, you can appreciate the precarious situation of living the "good life" as in a John Cheever story. Ang Lee is brillant in his understated psychological insights and the performances by Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Tobey Maguire and Christina Ricci are memorable while being career defining.
Many like the crowd pleaser "Trains, Planes, and Automobiles" by Chicagoan John Hughes which as a TG classic about two guys hoping to get home for Thanksgiving has large box office appeal due to comedic Steve Martin and John Candy performances.
In the first significant scene of SECRETS AND LIES, after he's introduced his characters in montage, Mike leigh takes us to an office and the lead character Hortense Cumberbatch is inquiring about an event in her past that Leigh takes most of the ongoing conversation to unveil. Through staggered speech, broken dialogue and interruptions we are left hanging without knowing the subject of their discussion. It is as if a secret or a lie is desperately but slowly coming out.
Just within the scene Leigh masterfully writes into this dialogue all the trappings of the central conflict of his film. And method of conceal and reveal is repetitive throughout the film, allowing us to witness the masked and emotionally veiled social taboos work on our psyche and persona.
Later in the film, when Hortense meets Cynthia's family for the first time, there is a back garden BBQ scene. A set shot done all in one take, it is amazing to watch for all the intricacies and the layers of veiled storytelling and inquiry. Gradually, details like the future son-in-law having his license removed, Hortense not being a co-worker at a factory, her degree from University, all leading to an unraveling of veils of secrets and deceptions -- Leigh is masterful in his peeling away of the story as it unfolds.
Of all the Leigh films you must see, SECRETS AND LIES and VERA DRAKE should be at the top of your list. They are classics of independent filmmaking.
Brett Morgan's CHICAGO 10 played at the Walker Art Center last night in front of an audience who chose to skip the debate between Sarah "aw-sucks" Palin and jumpin' Joe Biden.
Fact or fiction? Documentary or drama?
Morgan's hagiography to Abbie Hoffman is yet another film that attempts to canonize the colorful and exuberantly inspiring leader of the Yuppie movement founded by Anita and Abbie Hoffman as well as Paul Krassner. The first film to take on the Hoffman legend was Robert Greenwald's 2000 film STEAL THIS MOVIE.
Without question, CHICAGO 10 places a lot of the focus on Hoffman very much at the expense of the other more politically important figures: David Dillenger, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, and Black Panther Bobby Seale.
While Hoffman is a colorful extrovert and easily captured for film, the extent and depth of his political philosophy was to shout "Fuck You" and "Fuck the system" as often and loudly as he could. Other participants and witnesses to the movement often found Abbie to be thwarting their gains with his yippie non-sense.
Hayden, Dillinger, and Rubin had wider reaching political philosophies with implications for transforming American government while Hoffman was primarily a proponent of an anarchist drug culture which ultimately brought Hoffman's life to an end but never held any promise for a country worth living in.
Morgan's storytelling challenge is considerable as much has been written and debated on the 60s and 1968 in particular. And before the film, Morgan tried to contextualize this fictionalized documentary by explaining CHICAGO 10 simply is a film and that we all have subjective or individual truths. Certainly, since this film was completed and premiered at Sundance in 2007, it has become under intense scrutiny from all the factions of the left who rightly feel it is thin on content, context and clarity.
If nothing else, the film does blur the distinctions between what is documentary and what is drama or fiction. And that is one of Morgan desired outcomes with viewing his films is to raise this very question.
During the evening with Morgan, he repeatedly made the point that he was merely a fetus when the Democratic National Convention of 1968 happened and thus not a direct observer of the actions. He emphatically stated that he didn't care about objectivity or truth but that he wanted to tell his story as a filmmaker in mastery of the medium.
I've always felt filmmakers who take this auteur position are selfish and often self-indulgent. They are raw and uncooked. Obviously, documentary filmmakers begin from a position of their self-indugent truth but can only be enriched by the facts, by other perspectives and the burden of reaching a higher truth than their subjective reality will allow.
Contrast Morgan's stated purpose with Errol Morris and I think, although Morris fully acknowledges his subjectivity, Morris puts himself in service of the truth and overcomes his subjective lens with meticulous emersion into the waters of the facts, of the evidence, and through a scrupulous interrogation of the witnesses. This is where Morgan's methodology falls short of Morris' exacting standards.
In the end Moragn said he didn't want to put a post-mordem on the film's end cards because he wanted this movie to mythologize the Chicago 10 and their story. I was immediately struck with the question of whether it needs "mythologizing" and instead demystifying.
Yet, I felt CHICAGO 10 was very entertaining. The drive behind the story to its dramatic conclusions was reached when Dillinger and Allen Ginsburg lead the new generation of anti-war youth in a march from the Ampitheater toward the Chicago Coliseum where the 68 Convention was being held. Knowing that they would be beat to a bloody pulp by the Chicago police and the National Guard, the marchers went anyway as a matter of principle and angry defiance.
The Chicago police had been beating the protestors for days with little more than the protestors trying to shield their heads from the bloody batons and noses from the suffocating tear gas. The correlations between the exaggerated actions and force of the Chicago police and the Saint Paul police at this years RNC convention are striking. Members of the RNC Eight were in attendance at the Walker Art Center for this screening and made appeals for funds to assist in their legal defense.
Four Sheets to the Wind (2007) stars Cody Lighting Writer/Director Sterlin Harjo
When I spoke to Sterlin Harjo over dinner at 2021 in the Walker Art Center, I sensed a mild case of exasperation. The Seminole/Creek filmmaker has been traveling, speaking and explaining his 2007 Sundance audience award winner for almost 18 months and is looking to move on.
"Tell us about your film," pleads Catherine Whipple, Managing Editor of The Circle News.
"I don't feel like talking about the film. You'll see it tonight," Harjo replied. I find I admire his straightforward honesty in light of what any PR-minded person would consider an obligation to explain.
An occupational hazard of being a filmmaker is most of your time is spend NOT making films and instead promoting them, finding backers, meeting with distribution and marketing and it is easy to get lost in the wilderness of promotion.
"I couldn't live in Los Angeles. I go there a lot but I would get nothing done if I lived there. Everybody is trying to make a film there so what's the point?" Instead he choses to live in Tulsa, Ohlahoma, "Nobody makes films in Tulsa. I feel like I have a purpose. I'm close to my family. I'm close to my tribe," he says.
Harjo is currently editing his follow-on feature BARKING WATER with Isabel Archuleta and he seems to find sustenance in going back to Tulsa to work on his films.
Four Sheets is a coming-of-age drama set in rural Oklahoma with contrasting urban locations in Tulsa and depicts a young man in search of his identity on the reservation and beyond. Featuring a performance of quiet intensity by Cody Lightning, the film tactfully balances the pathos and humor in the parallel transitions from rural to urban and boyhood to maturity. Lighting is the son of actress/director Georgina Lighting who recently finished directing OLDER THAN AMERICA, shot in northern Minnesota with local producer Christine Walker.
Harjo's feature film restores a faith in filmmakers who chose to live outside the false pretenses of industry movie making with stories fabricated through negotiations with agents, studio development executives, and expectant producers who know little about the subject of their movies but end up dictating the terms of story or character plot to fit their investment package.
Watching Four Sheets gives the sense that you are in the Tulsa that Harjo lives in -- the coffeeshop where Miri Smallhill (played beutifully by Tamara Podemski) works, the bar where Cufe Smallhill goes with Francie, the house party where 20-somethings mix and mingle, asking odd naive questions of each other, resonates as personal detail just as the streets of Ausin, Texas did for Richard Linklater's 1991 indie film SLACKERS.
"The best thing about Sundance Institute is that you make connections with the right people for the right reasons," Harjo explained about his experience with the Labs. Actors, cinematograhers, music composers, casting directors, as he observed, come to Sundance for the love of film and not for the money.
A project of the Sundance Lab, Four Sheets to the Wind won a Special Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.
Sikumi (On the Ice) (excerpts) in Iñupiaq with English subtitles, 2008, 35mm, 15 minutes
Andrew Okpeaha MacLean has made the first film in the Iñupiaq language and tells the story of an Inuit hunter who drives his dog team out onto the frozen Arctic Ocean and fortuitously witnesses a murder. The short poignant drama won a 2008 Sundance Short Filmmaking Award. Sikumi shows an artistic mastery of simplicity and elegance in capturing a thought-provoking story.
One has to admire MacLeans pitch-perfect balance between what is seen, what is said and what circumstances dictate in the stories unfolding. The director uses just one location, three actors and two dog sled teams to shoot this contemplative moment that makes a viewer prize short storytelling in the film medium.
The Minnesota Declaration was issued at the Walker Art Center in 1999 by German filmmaker Werner Herzog A statement of principles, Herzog speaks of the "lessons of darkness" including observations on then Governor Jesse Ventura and the idea "You can't legislate stupidity" regarding people riding their snowmobiles on lakes when the ice has already melted.
At the time Herzog had grown critical of Cinema Verité and was calling for new answers to the 1960s filmmaking principles used as a Bible. Herzog also sat down with Henry Rollin's Show to continue to articulate his ideas about filmmaking.
The conversation between film critic Roger Ebert and Werner Herzog took place on April 30, 1999 during the Regis Dialogue series which will be celebrating 20 years.
Isn't it unusual to find such high-praise for a screenwriter in Hollywood by some of its leading dignitaries?
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s notable journey from Hollywood nobility to McCarthy-ear blacklisted writer to Academy Award winner is a great story idea in itself. Focusing on Trumbo's own scripted words and attitudes, TRUMBO features performances of his letters, clips from his films and, archival and contemporary interviews with those who knew him best.
As an intellectual feisty man of the era, TRUMBO illustrates how one his steadfast belief in the First Amendment and the power of the written word - aided by a drink or two - empowered Dalton to battle back after his HUAC blacklisting that destroyed many in the film industry. If freedom means anything, it must have fighters like Dalton Trumbo on its side.
Blacklisting in America came at at time, not all the different than today, when the culture held high contempt for intellectuals and ideas. Accusations flew about and the acquisitors had little need to prove their claims to assure their motives were pure. The only shallow motive needed as proof was "patriotism." Yet, quite clearly those who bashed, battered and threw American principles of political freedom to waste bins of government ruled the day.
Forced to write underground, the exposition of his letter writing became the chief repository of Trumbo’s phenomenal reasoning talents, and serve as a exceptionally entertaining tribute to his creative intellect, acerbic humor, and authentic resilience against powerful yet brutishly dull men.
TRUMBO is slated to open in cinema's at the end of June.
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE, unlike recent Iraq films is about seeing, perception and the act of photographing. Errol Morris turns his camera on a very thin slice of time and space in this vast conflict but a layer with huge moral and political implications.
In typical Morris fashion, his documentary doesn't provide easy black and white answers. Factions on both the right and left want their documentary films to wrap up neatly and tight but Morris is not going to be the filmmaker who makes the viewer feel comfy by providing a quick and easy sound bite answer to the difficult questions of war. Were the kid soldiers inside Abu Ghraib who took pictures and appeared in them guilty as charged?
Ron Rosenbaum in his article for Slate online, keeps asking the question are the "bad Apple's" responsible for their actions even if we accept that higher-ups order them to carry out actions against the prisoners?
First, the "bad-Apples" Rosenbaum is referring to are Lynndie England (shown in photographs holding a "leash" around a prisoners neck), Sabrina Harmon (shown giving the thumbs-up next to corpse of a former prisoner) Javal Davis, Tony Diaz, Tim Dugan, Megan Ambuhl, Jeremy Sivitz, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski and others. Morris gives us the first opportunity, using his non-patented tele-prompter interview camera, to hear England, Harmon, Davis, Diaz, Dugan, Karpinski and direct participants talk about what when on inside the prison and in their heads. Why would they do these horrible acts? Why take pictures?
Well, for the most part it wasn't their idea. Let's be clear, the "bad-Apples" pleaded guilty, lost their rank and status in the U.S. military, were dishonorably discharged and went to prison. Is that enough responsibility for Salon magazine? Apparently not.
Obviously, Rosenbaum wants a few bad apples to be the responsible the American people won't be held responsible for these actions torture and death inside Iraq death chambers. That's the bigger order Salon magazine and others wish the bad apples would follow. This certainly was true of the audience I saw the film with - they wanted contrition and for the "bad-Apples" to apologize to the American people. They wanted tears and remorse. America wants a neat and tidy ending. Closure perhaps? Morris is not the man who is going to give easy endings to morally uplift.
Just as back in the 1970s the American people wanted the Vietnam Vet to suffer all the guilt and remorse for the policies of that war, the people living safely in their comfy homes on American soil want the "bad-Apples" to take the rap for Iraq and Abu Ghraib. And then the bad dream can all be over with and we can go on our merry way. I have always thought England, Harmon, Davis, Diaz, and Sivitz should take responsibility for their actions and they do. BUT, they don't do it in the way everybody wants them to, in the way that exonerates American citizens and covers our horrible government actions and policies.
But let's look deeper. Truth be told, the real bad-Apple's at Abu Ghraib have never been charged. The corpse Harmon stands next to is not a prisoner she killed but the CIA or MI person who did torture and killed this prisoner has never been charged for his murder. Never. And the U.S. government has covered it up. The only thing Harmon is guilty of is thumbs-up and a smile like a cheshire cat.
Gruesome, no question, but hardly a major crime in comparison to those going on all over Iraq, in secret prisons on European soil, Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo under the auspices of the U.S. government. The pictures that put Harmon and England in front of the camera, posing before prisoners in the moments of and surrounding their humiliation are only the staged face of American humiliation while the true crimes of torture and murder have been covered up.
Morris reveals in these interviews there is good reason to believe America's true reason for invading Iraq is to humiliate Arab men and use our young women soldiers to do so. The photos inside the prison bare this out. Talking with Morris after he screened the film in Minneapolis, he told me it's very difficult to wrap his head around the insanity, the lack of rational clarity on the part of our political leaders who have lead us into this senseless war. Even more so for the fact that their actions come nowhere near producing what they pretend they wish will result.
Rosenbaum likes to create an eroticized view of Morris' use of slow motion or super-slo-mo in the re-enactment scenes of STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE. Morris uses a camera called the Phantom v12 to capture motion at 1,000 frames per second as opposed to standard 24 movie frames or previously the standard over cranked slo-mo of 130 frames per second. If anything unintended or off-message, Morris' slo-mo makes horrific motion stunningly beautiful. We see dogs snarling and bullet casings drop and bounce on the floor set to Danny Elfman repetitive and melodic scores.
However, it is clear why Morris uses slo-motion in many of his films from THIN BLUE LINE to FOG OF WAR. Less I think for the "moral investigation" as Rosenbaum likes to imply (the use of slow motion in science fiction as in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY or football games to show the spiraling ball in motion which does not have moral overtones) and more as a tool that focuses viewers attention more precisely on the details of the real world. In dramatic filmmaking we think about our purpose constantly: How important it is to direct the viewer to comprehend the story with purpose and focus. Great documentary filmmaking should do exactly the same thing. Comprehension is reinactment
The reason Morris footage of Abu Ghraib appears charged with moral implications is because, mostly simply stated, war has moral implications. Treatment of captive prisoners, innocent and guilty alike, is the most moral of all situations. That is why our founding fathers took a restrained view of government abuse of the people. None: This means all human beings and their rights not just American national human beings.
The truth behind the Terror memos by John Yoo and Timothy Flanigan, the White House and the Justice Department is that they have no moral compass and fail to see the horror of their actions and policies. They see exceptions abound. To circumvent the law, they seek court opinions that will rule human-beings as non-people just as the most notorious tyrants and dictators in history have done.
Morris' use of slo-mo is perhaps more pronounced in an age when information is devalued by its speed and constantly updating nature. We need slo-motion to gain focus and put the space of closely observant thought back into seeing. Slo-motion give us the time to contemplate critical details that fast and dirty media skips over.
The questions that are more important is "What was happening outside the frame?" Of course, this means what is happening in terms of these young soldiers being instructed and order to comply with their commanding officers. This also means what is going on inside the torture chambers and secret prison camps.
Certainly, as Rosenbaum wishes, the bad apples could have violated their orders and faced immediate and severe discipline in a war zone. Not a happy course for a soldier in a hostile war zone but, yes a possibility. Would the shameful actions of torture and murder end there? No. Would American's moral authority have been retained? You've got to be kidding.
Morris has called this film a "non-fiction horror movie" and it truly is - Evil is not banal it is horror.
A year ago at this time Screenlabs Challenge participants were hard and fast at work molding scripts into shape and bring their crews together. One of those projects, FORGOTTEN written by Julie Kane Meyer, produced and directed by Chris Gegax will be screening in the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival on Tuesday, April 29th at 7:00PM
Meyer had read her script in the Sunday night Screenwriters' Workshop Script Group and was able to create a tight character study matching two women during a chance encounter that melds their lives in ways they previously would not have wanted or imagined.
In her script group was Chris Gegax, a film director with a few shorts under his belt and a eager interest in looking for new material. Chris and Julie became partners in response to the Screenlabs Challenge.
As those who followed this web site last summer know, Gegax and Meyer's FORGOTTEN was awarded the Jury Awarded Best Film Prize and Meyer also given Best Screenplay for the short dramatic film.
Gegax took risks with casting the film by pairing experienced stage actress Marilyn Murray with Katie Rhoades, a counselor who works with victims of prostitution but no acting in her background. Drawing upon personal experience, Rhoades brought a cool confidence matched with determined street smarts to her role.
If you are interested in making your own Screenlabs Challenge dramatic short for the 2008 challenge, like Chris and Julie, you can attend a free workshop this Thursday, April 24th from 7:00pm to 9:30pm at IFP Minnesota Film Center.
--------- The FORGOTTEN screening takes place at St. Anthony Main Cinemas on Tuesday April 29th at 7:00 PM, 115 Main Street NE, Minneapolis (50-cent parking all-day at St. Anthony Falls Ramp). This program is likely to sell-out. Arrive early to guarantee a seat, or purchase tickets online.
When I was living in New York in the mid-1980s I would take my lunch during the summers and eat it in Washington Square Park. The park was a nexus of activity both legal and illegal from chess playing, comedy acts, feats of daring-do, escape artists, student filmmakers shooting films to crack dealers right next to NYPD's finest sitting in their Ford cruisers.
And then there were the dancers. The break dancers.
One weekday afternoon, my co-office worker at New York University, Sheri Bishop and I went over to the park and on that day her son Bobo had come down from the Bronx on the subway to share lunch with his mother. We went to the park where a bunch of kids with boom-box and cardboard sheets set up for break dancing.
After a few minutes of Sheri watching in consternation, her brow deeply boroughed with confusion she said "Bobo, you show these boys how to break dance!"
"Ma, no, don't start" he said. We were close enough to this group of East Village kids to hear Sheri's comments who often came over from Alphabet City to do their dancing in the park and hoping for a few dimes and quarters to be thrown their way.
"No Bobo, that ain't break dancing. These boys don't know how to break dance."
"Ma, shut up" he said embarrassed and trying not to be heard by the downtown crowd, "I don't come downtown to show anyone how to break dance."
"Bobo! Show these boys how to break dance! This ain't dancing they are just pulling tricks."
"This isn't my turf ma, don't make me..."
Truth was that the Alphabet city boys, some crush and some stravin; marvin, weren't break dancing -- all they were doing were tricks. Amazing as tricks can be, the ten, twenty or thirty second routine was nothing more than gymnastic flips, freezes, twists and spins. Astonishing and cool enough for any guy eating his Gyro and grape Fanta at lunch, but, Sheri was right: it is not break dancing.
A few minutes later one of kids came over and invited Bobo to join them and he did. The kid from the Bronx showed these downtown guys how check-in, take out, cut it and the challenge was on. This kind of community dancing in the streets, the give-and-take, and the exchange of moves both athletic and artistic is amazing.
When you watch PLANET B-BOY by filmmaker Benson Lee you feel at bit of the same way. You're not seeing the whole dance but the tricks are so amazing and death defying you won't be disappointed.
Patricia and I went to the Walker Art Center to see MUTUM during the Women's in the Directors Chair series. This Brazilian film by Sandra Kogut is about a family on an isolated subsistence farm in the arid backlands of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Our central character is Thiago, a ten year old boy who knows little about the outside world except for a few horseback trips into a nearby village.
Thiago's father is distressed by a passing way of life and trying to provide for his family. His mother bares the burden of her husbands anger and frustrations and Thiago throws himself between them as his mother protector.
The feature film is an adaption of Jose Guimaraes Rosa's novel and while it is fiction, it strikes at the heart of Brazil true agrarian migration and the poverty that devastated rural Brazilian states like Minas Gerais and Bahia.
Religion plays a significant role in MUTUM, as the mystery of how nature delivers its fate evades common experience or a social consciousness thus becoming an acceptance of an authority beyond that which you can see or touch. But there is no preaching and deifying of faith.
In many ways, MUTUM reminds me of the brilliant German documentary film THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL for the intensity and detail of how they story is told. Not much dialog and visual detail aplenty, it keeps your head in the world in which Thiago lives. We feel the full power of a thunderstorm as dramatic as it can be in a place where a person is not constantly barraged with manufactured drama.
MUTUM is a mood-piece, a film that is evocative and deeply detailed in creating the sense of a simple life where children spend the day playing with insects, teaching the papagaio to talk, and chasing chickens. The pacing and lack of dialog set the viewer in a different spatial and temporal frame -- a pace of life that is nearly incomprehensible to modern western over-stimulated audiences. But MUTUM's unhurried observations are well worth the effort to persist in watching.
The young actor whose name is also Thiago is astonishing and the film, with all its subtlety and nuance pays off hugely at the end -- even with its small and unsensational emotion. The emotional impact is deep but not blunt. You may never get the chance to see this film but if you do, let it transport you into a different world than the one your are accustomed to living.
In preparation for the upcoming Screenlabs Challenge, here is a short digital film shot for SNL with Ellen Page as the guest host. Simple. Easy. And filled with comic twist -- this short proves you don't need much time, money or extravagant locations to make a funny short film.
There is no question that the Coen Brothers A SERIOUS MAN story comes out of the Book of Job and it more universally applies to any person who has "cursed God in their hearts." As much as I laughed and enjoyed the details the Coen's relate about being Jewish in Minnesota, Larry Gopnik could easily have been my Scottish (mostly) father, with a ungovernable family, a house in the suburbs in the 1960s, a teaching position on his way to tenure, and trying to be a serious man while nearingly failing even the most average expectations for success. It's a brilliant movie. A portrait of a time and funny, really funny.
