Waiting in line now for the premier of Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden. Nice to be in out of the single-digit cold. We're still a good 15 minutes from being let into the theater and already the line is out the door of the waiting area. Yay for being close enough to walk from the condo.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Nerakhoon (The Betrayal)
PARK CITY
If Terrence Malick were ever to make a documentary, it would probably look a lot like Nerakhoon (The Betrayal). Long, sweeping camera shots of stunning vistas and incredible focus on the emotions of the characters and their relationship with their surrounding environments make this a documentary that's not for you if you want excitement, action and a real character arc. Clocking in at a mere 87 minutes in length, it actually feels much more like three hours.
But for all the slow movement, this film has some real underlying intensity. It's a story about a family ripped apart by the rise of the Communist government in Laos during the 1970s, a time before which the US dropped three million tons of bombs on the country in the fight to overcome the North Vietnamese, more than the total of all US bombs used during both world wars. With the new Communist government came killings and arrests against those who were affiliated with the former government and the US. Many families scattered in attempts to save themselves.
What's truly remarkable about this film is the breadth. The film took 23 years to complete and primarily follows Thavisouk Phrasavath, a son in one of the escaping families. We start by following him and his family of nine through the capture of the father by the Communist government and the family's escape to Thailand (sans father). Expecting the US to greet them with open arms due to their father's "assistance" with the bombings during the Vietnam war, they relocate to New York only to find little support and hardly any acceptance. Life in their new world is very hard, but they try to acclimate themselves to American culture and make a new life.
Fifteen years later, the father whom everyone thought to be dead calls out of the blue and comes out for a visit. The family is happy for the first time in many years... but that happiness only lasts for a week. The father tells them he is leaving to return to Florida where he has a new wife and two children. Destruction reigns under this news as the family virtually disintegrates in the wake of the father's departure and everyone scatters again.
From here on the film becomes a story of the son's determination to rebuild the family, reconnect with his father and find two of his sisters who were left behind when the family evacuated Laos. Epic, very lyrical in quality and drawing many techniques from cinéma vérité, one of the most striking things about this film is that the main subject is also the codirector and editor. The product of a collaboration of more than 20 years with director Ellen Kuras, famed cinematographer, Nerakhoon is at it's base a tale of family, perseverance and a country betrayed by the United States. It's powerful stuff, but isn't going to catch the heart of anyone who can't sit back and simply let a story unfold piece by piece.
The premier of Nerakhoon was preceded by a screening of My Olympic Summer, a documentary short telling the story of a now-adult son's discovery of undeveloped 8mm film and an unopened letter that reveal a previously unknown rift between his parents just before his birth. His mother felt that she had all but lost touch with his father, who had been increasingly distant and unavailable due to his work - she felt like she was completely living in his shadow. It's a journey through the relationships and emotions that define and divide man and wife, echoed in the son's recent divorce from his own wife. But his parents were still together in apparent happiness. What had brought them back from the brink so many years ago? The summer that his mother shot that undeveloped roll of film and wrote that unopened letter was in 1972 and his parents were living in Munich. His father, a rabbi, was assigned to the Israeli Olympic team and was taken hostage along with the team when the Palestinian terrorists stormed the team dormitories. Several days later, his father was released by the terrorists. A week later his mother gave birth to their son. Sometimes the world has a way of making you reevaluate everything.
Be Kind Rewind
PARK CITY
Be Kind Rewind is pretty classic Michel Gondry, but with a more realistic slant than much of his past work.
For the most part, it's a very straight forward (albeit quirky) film about an old video store in New Jersey that's seen far better days. They rarely rent more than a few videos a day, much of their business likely having gone to larger chain stores that stock more copies and carry DVD. The building is condemned and is soon to be demolished to make way for condominiums (isn't that always the excuse?). To try and save his store, Mr Fletcher (Danny Glover) goes on a research mission for a week to see what the chains are doing to increase profits and maximize volume. While away, he entrusts the store to the only employee Mike (Mos Def). He's under explicit instructions not to let his crazy friend Jerry (Jack Black), who lives in a trailer at the back of a junkyard a block away, into the store for fear he'll scare away customers and destroy things (Jerry's a bit accident-prone and is always coming up with crazy ideas). Unfortunately, the effective communication of this message gets lost in translation until it's too late to reverse the damage.
After a bit of a slow start, things get interesting when Jerry accidentally erases all of the tapes in the store due to having been magnetized while trying to attack the power substation next to the junkyard. Yeah... just stick with me here... Since the few customers that still frequent the store are becoming irate at having all their rental tapes come up blank, Jerry and Mike hatch a hair-brained idea to shoot their own versions of the films. Since the customers have never seen these movies before, how can they tell the difference, right? Sure the movies are all shot with an ancient VHS camcorder and are only about 20 minutes long, but this might just work. It all starts with a particularly low-budget version of Ghostbusters shot under the gun in about two hours time. This is the kind of film that you may well have made yourself when you were little. Fishing line is used for "floating" objects, tinfoil is used for costumes and pretty much whatever they happen to find lying around becomes used for props, the Ghostbusters car, etc. It's horrifically bad, but incredibly funny. Next up they have to churn out a version of Rush Hour 2, using every trick in the book to recreate the movie as closely as they can remember... using only available settings, objects, costumes and special "effects." Their remade Hollywood "classics" soon become a surprise hit with the neighborhood clientèle, making Mike and Jerry go into full production, ultimately remaking over 200 titles from Driving Miss Daisy, to Robocop, to King Kong. Business is booming! Unfortunately, this cannot be permitted by the Hollywood powers that be, so the friends and the now-returning Mr Fletcher are faced with multiple copyright infringement lawsuits and the loss of the store unless they can come up with a new plan.
Though tedious at various times and perhaps not as comic as it could be, Be Kind Rewind manages to walk a nice balance between being "bad" and really pulling off some beautifully funny moments. Jack Black is just as annoying as he always is, but at least here it totally fits the character. Mos Def is... well... not really anything exciting - unfortunate considering I usually really enjoy him. Gondry's unique visual style comes heavily into play in the various remade films, giving them all a very organic feel as if they really could have been made in someone's backyard ten years ago before computerized video editing became widely available for the average consumer. Expectedly quirky, this is a film that really celebrates the idea of taking a story and shooting it with whatever means you have available - something that's lost on most modern day filmmakers.
You can see some of Jerry and Mike's remade movies at www.bekindrewind-themovie.com
Early show
Dragged myself out of bed this morning at 7am to make the short hike over to Library Center to wait in line for Be Kind Rewind. Sure, I already have a ticket, but you still need to be there at least 30-60 minutes before hand to guarantee you'll actually have decent seats.
Very serene outside this morning. Snow's still falling since last night. Probably have at least two inches of fresh stuff on the ground.
Made In America
Stacy Peralta, his crew and several former members of the Bloods and Crips discuss Made In America following the premier
PARK CITY
Few films will scare the shit out of you like this.
And I'll warn you in advance that without seeing the film itself it's even hard to start a discussion on the topic.
South Central Los Angeles. Bloods and Crips. Rampant gang violence. Turf wars, daily shootings. This war zone (and I'm using that term at the same level as it applies to Baghdad or any other war zone) really used to be a middle-class suburban community of nuclear black families? Yes. It absolutely did. So how the hell did we get to the shit we're in now?
Through brutally honest interviews with those who were there and who still live there, Stacy Peralta's Made In America traces the inception of gangs all the way back to the 1950s when black teenagers started forming their own "clubs" in response to being denied entry into the very white Boy Scouts of America. These "clubs" provided a place to belong, a place to learn a sense of community and a place to connect with others like yourself. Black "clubs" soon sprouted up in other neighborhoods and competition started to grow. While their inception was completely benign in today's standards, these "clubs" became the seeds that grew over several generations into the current day gangbanger mentality. Decades of white oppression and police brutality in the South Central communities finally came to a head in 1965 when the Watts "revolt" broke out (white history usually refers to the 1965 events as "riots," but in the words of one of the interviewees, they weren't riots because their communities "knew exactly what [they] were doing"). While the "revolts" were eventually contained, the oppression and systematic removal of black leadership (MLK, Malcolm X, Black Panthers, etc) pushed these communities further into hatred of themselves and "The Man," leading to the creation of a new element: the Crips (followed shortly by the Bloods). Following another "revolt" in 1992 in response to the Rodney King verdict, we find ourselves in a landscape vastly different from just 40 years earlier. It's dog eat dog, where the enemy is now your own people. You either kill or be killed - it's as simple as that. You can't go more than a block or two without having to "represent" by "busting a cap" in someone's ass to insure your continued survival. Simply put... the whole world (as South Central knows it) is fucked.
So that's a gross simplification of the film. In looser terms, you pretty much sit there for at least 50% of the film with your jaw hanging open - half because you had no idea this shit was going on and half because the lines that are being drawn between these various events seem to make a lot of sense. How the hell could "The Man" not see this shit coming? And how the hell can "The Man" not realize that they things He's trying to do to squash the gang "problem" are the very same things that catalyzed this shit in the first place? Can gang violence really be fixed simply by locking up anyone who's affiliated with a gang? Does being locked up really mean anything to you when you're already completely oppressed and don't give a shit? Does locking everyone up really help the communities build strong families (over 75% of black babies are born to single mothers, according to the film). Would not the lack of a strong family and crushing oppression lead you to try and find a sense of belonging with a group that provides all your family cannot? So now your kids are in a gang. And their kids. And their kids. It's a vicious cycle. How can the world break free from this?
And here we are with only a few minutes left in the film. Mothers with tear-streaked faces have shared their stories of sons and brothers lost to rival gunfire, gang members have laid out plain and simple why selling drugs is the only way they can make a living (damn near impossible to get a real job when you have a criminal record, but you gotta do something to make ends meet) and you're pretty much ready throw Molotov Cocktails at the capital building in Sacramento. The evolution of the issues are clearly complicated and not easily explained (most of those who were deeply involved are buried in the ground), but where do we go from here? Here... we'll throw you a potential tiny little glimmer of hope: some of these guys have quit the gang life and are trying to start up grassroots movements in their communities. They're starting programs to try and educate the new generations so they can make informed choices about their futures. Will this make a difference? Only time will tell.
Now.. The fun thing about all of this is that the audience in Park City is about as white as the snow that was gently falling outside the theater during the screening. Yeah... that means the majority of people seeing this are considered to be part of "The Man" that created this whole problem to begin with. "What can we do," asked one guy during the Q&A following the film that featured six of the former gang members who are trying to change the current course of history. Get involved, vote for change and realize that this shit is going on, came the responses. "Do you think there will be another riot on the scale of '65 and '92?" Yes... absolutely... it's just a matter of when, came the response. The scary thing now is that back in '65 and '92 "we still considered our fists to be our primary weapons." Now everyone has machine guns. Chew on that for a few minutes.
Even if you're not from Los Angeles you'll find this film to be exceedingly powerful and scary as hell.
Subject matter aside, I'll say that Peralta has created a pretty incredible piece of work in this documentary film. It's constantly engaging and leaves you asking the kinds of questions you should be asking after seeing something like this. There's no issue of "I didn't understand the material," just of "how the hell did we let this happen and how can we possibly hope to fix it?" It's a powerful, politically and racially-charged piece of film making.
Now... keep in mind this is all coming from a guy who's previous documentary films explore the rise of skateboarding (Dogtown and Z-Boys) and the world of surfing (Riding Giants). That's quite a leap to make and land with this level of success.
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