October 4, 2007 – 3:42 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
In one respect, the court of public opinion works just like a real U.S. courtroom: The defendant just has to prove, or at least cast a degree of reasonable doubt, that he didn’t do what he’s being accused of. It’s up to prosecutors to make the specific case.
And in the court of public opinion, documentary Strange Culture acts a bit like a defense lawyer for its protagonist Steve Kurtz, the college professor and artist who the federal government pursued as a bioterrorist in 2004, when Petri dishes were discovered in his home by first responders answering a 911 call. Kurtz called them himself because his wife of 27 years, Hope Kurtz, had died in her sleep of heart failure, despite no history of health problems.
This documentary film by Lynn Hershman suggests that the government is coming down so hard on Kurtz for one of two reasons.
One reason could be that the Department of Justice’s first impulse was to accuse him of bioterrorism, and they were then reluctant to back off the charges to save face and avoid looking foolish, and because of the immense political pressure they were under to make a bust in the conviction-less “War on Terror.”
Another could be that the Kurtzes and their art collective, “The Critical Art Ensemble,” were in the process of putting together a show designed to educate the public on the evils of agribusiness’ genetically modified foods, which, in the U.S., doesn’t need to be labeled, and which the government is therefore complicit in. (more…)
September 27, 2007 – 5:22 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
When it comes to documentary filmmaking, there’s probably no better kind of “good” a filmmaker can strive to achieve than “unbelievably good.” Finding a story and characters so compelling and colorful that the audience may have a hard time believing it wasn’t cooked up by screenwriters is a documentary Holy Grail, a best-of-both worlds situation in which it all seems too good to be true, but is anyway.
Seth Gordon finds just such a story with The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, the story of the intense rivalry between the world’s two greatest classic Donkey Kong players and their battle to be the crowned the best in the world at their chosen field.
Gordon, like all documentarians, has the power to mold and shape the truth he shows, of course, and undoubtedly work went into sharpening the contrasts between his players to wring further drama from the event—but there’s only so much massaging that can be accomplished in the editing room. And his “villain” just keeps handing him material with which to fashion him a black hat.
That would be Billy Mitchell, a gawky nerd who mastered several arcade games and racked up a series of world records in the early ‘80s pinnacle of arcade culture. Decades later, his Donkey Kong high score of 874,300, several hundred thousand points above the next closest contender, is unchallenged, and, more so, thought to be unchalleng-able. In a pronouncement typical of him throughout the film, Mitchell compares himself to the Red Baron, who’s number of shoot-downs in World War I was so far above all other fighter pilots of the time, that his is the only name anyone even remembers.
A star in the Twin Galaxies organization, the axis around which competitive arcade gaming revolves, Mitchell has grown into a successful Florida restaurateur and his own line of hot sauce. Now a (relatively) handsome, self-assured man with a short black beard, a menacing mullet, and a predilection for neckties, he waxes philosophically about all the success he’s seen in life, and that if he’s doing this well, then perhaps to equal it out “there’s some poor bastard who’s getting the screws put to him.”
Enter Seattle-based unemployed father Steve Wiebe, a talented but terminally unlucky, extremely earnest Everyman who’s almost had great success in sports and music, but always comes up short.
Until he demolished Billy’s 20-year-old King Kong high score.
September 27, 2007 – 4:41 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
A message movie that sends decidedly mixed-signals, there are times when The Kingdom seems like it might actually be too high-minded, and could use a few more explosions to nudge it into the genre it leans so hard into. It’s a somewhat schizophrenic GWOTsploitation police procedural-cum-action flick that goes to great lengths to show (via montages and a jackhammeringly obvious coda) that for all our differences, Saudi Arabia and the United States are a lot alike.
The point is explicitly made several times, like when an American émigré points out that Saudis, like Americans, don’t do their own manual labor, but farm it out to immigrants, or when American FBI agent Jamie Foxx and local police chief Ashraf Barhom bond over their mutual love of law enforcement, their sons and ‘70s television like “The Green Beast” and, how you say…Steve Austin?
So similar but so different, what can possibly bring us together? How about car chases, machine gun battles and brutal, brutal knife fights? America—and Saudi Arabia—Fuck yeah! (more…)
September 20, 2007 – 3:21 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
Paul Haggis isn’t exactly a subtle filmmaker.
As a screenwriter, his work tends not only toward the melodramatic, but also the manipulative and downright maudlin (Flags of Our Fathers, Million Dollar Baby and The Last Kiss are among the scripts he’s written).
As a director, he’s best known for Crash, which tackled the thorny issue of racism in modern America by focusing on an ensemble of racist characters, and then setting them up against one another in increasingly unlikely coincidences. The message? Racism is bad, and we really oughta cut that stuff out.
With In The Valley of Elah, Haggis tackles another thorny issue, this one just as explosive, but more specific to this time: The war in Iraq.
September 18, 2007 – 9:18 am | Written by Doug Elliott
Each Autumn, as the MLB season season enters its stretch run towards the World Series, baseball fans and cable buffs alike are treated to an endless stream of old playoff reruns and classic baseball films. This year, budding filmmaker Rob Perri attempts to enter that singular forum with a bang as he unleashes I’m Keith Hernandez, an 18-minute masterpiece that cleverly mixes archival television footage (and a bit of racy film history) featuring the greatest defensive first-baseman ever, Keith Hernandez.
Think Heavy Metal Parking Lot meets TV Carnage at Shea Stadium, or one of those Sports Illustrated give-away videos mixed with channel 99. Complete with vintage 80’s editing techniques, a straight-faced, professional voice-over and a soundtrack of the times, I’m Keith Hernandez has the look and feel of an uplifting This Week In Baseball special from 1989. Perri uses this familiar format to paint a sensational, partly fictional account of Hernandez’ days as a drug-fueled, lady-slaying hit machine with the Cardinals and Mets. And then there’s the mustache.
September 12, 2007 – 6:45 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
In 2005, a man in Washington state died from internal bleeding due to injuries he sustained from having sex with a horse. You probably remember reading about it, as it’s the only news story you’ve encountered in the last few years in which a man was fucked to death by a horse.
Robinson Devor has made a documentary about the incident. Or, more accurately, he’s made a documentary about the deeper difficult, uncomfortable and, ultimately, important questions the incident inadvertently raised.
September 6, 2007 – 12:12 am | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
Not since Snakes on a Plane has their been a movie title as literally descriptive as Shoot ‘Em Up, which is, in fact, a shoot ‘em up (Perhaps not coincidentally, the films share prodcuer Jeff Katz).
But it’s not just any shoot ‘em up; this flick takes movies about men with guns shooting other men with guns to the next level, if not the next level beyond that level. It’s a rare minute of this film that goes by in which five to ten people don’t get violently shot to death. If you took all of the gun battles from all of John Woo’s old Hong Kong work, an obvious inspiration (particularly Woo’s Hard Boiled), subtracted all of the slo-mo bird flights and replaced those with even more gun battles, then you’d be pretty close to the contents of Shoot ‘Em Up.
September 6, 2007 – 12:01 am | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
Named for a particular train its characters are trying to catch, 3:10 To Yuma is a much more interesting and exciting film than its title might suggest. That’s because of who it is that is going to be riding the train, and why.
We can blame Elmore Leonard, who wrote the short story that the film’s based on, for that title. The setting is the Old West, the train is headed for a federal prison, and its passenger doesn’t want to be on it, but is given little choice in the matter. Legendary outlaw, stagecoach robber and killer Ben Wade, leader of a small army of followers, got uncharacteristically sloppy, and was captured. In order to get him out of town before his gang find out what happened and raze the place to free him, the lawmen must get Wade to the train and quickly and quietly as possible.
September 5, 2007 – 11:54 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
There are two essential components to the creation of a great documentary—finding the perfect subject, and then successfully communicating the inherent drama of that perfect subject to viewers.
With No End In Sight, first-time director Charles Ferguson has an important subject, perhaps the single most important subject of them all at the moment—America’s war with and continuing quixotic occupation of Iraq. For all its importance though, it’s hardly a novel topic, or anything you haven’t (hopefully) heard a thousand times before: The United States completely fucked up in Iraq, and the long list of mistakes made created far more problems for the U.S. and the Iraqi people than they solved, and both nations will continue to pay for those mistakes for as long as anyone can see.
While many of the complaints will be familiar, gathering them all together like this has a transformative effect on them; no longer are they isolated, but seem to lead one to another like dominoes. In hindsight, you can watch the administration turning victory into defeat, wining Iraq and the goodwill of the people, only to destroy the country’s infrastructure, and creating out of thin air an insurgency that we must then spend the next four years fighting.
September 5, 2007 – 3:53 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
An airborne camera tracks along a pristine river lined with verdant trees, while a narrator begins, “Once upon a time,” and then laughs at his private joke. This isn’t going to be one of those kinds of stories, he tells us.
By “those kind” I suppose he means Western fairy tales, and while the story he tells doesn’t have a prince or princess or wicked witch, and while it lacks the touch of the Brothers Grimm or the stink of Disney, it’s not far off from a fairy tale either.
It is, after all, a story handed down from generation to generation, it just comes from a very different story-telling tradition than those that begin with the words “Once upon a time” and end with “and they all lived happily ever after.”
September 5, 2007 – 1:07 am | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
The Wexner Center kicks off a three-film retrospective of Polish-born filmmaker Lech Majewski’s works today with his 2004 The Garden of Earthly Delights.
It’s a good place to start, given the way it makes vivid use of the highly hyphenated Majewski’s command of multiple media, and the way one can inform the other. Probably best known for his contributions to 1996’s Basquiat, which he wrote and co-produced, Majewski is himself a painter, a poet, a novelist and composer.
Adapted from his own novel, Majewski’s Garden of Earthly Delights follows Claudine Spiteri’s terminally ill art historian and her odd and highly accommodating boyfriend Chris Nightingale as they move from England to Venice and embark on a peculiar and highly personal quest. The pair are both intelligent, attractive and a little over-angsty doctorate students who have found each other at the turn of the millennium.
He’s devoting himself to ship-building, applying art theories like that of the golden ratio to hull design, while she’s made a life’s study of the titular Heironymous Bosch painting. When it becomes clear she doesn’t have long to live, she has Chris film her interpretations of the painting, complete with meticulously reenacted details from it, which the pair perform themselves. It turns out that Chris is uniquely, if improbably, suited to the task, as he films absolutely everything. Even when she tells him she’s dying and he strokes her face to comfort her, he keeps his other hand on his handheld camera, focused on her face. (more…)
August 30, 2007 – 1:47 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
Built almost entirely from ideas and jokes taken from other, similar recent comedies, even homaging and parodying the same source material as those films, the very best way to review Balls of Fury would probably be as some sort of elaborate math equation, with a long string of other titles connected by plus signs, minus originality, equals Balls of Fury.
As lazy and familiar as it all is, if there’s one genre that can get a way with lazy and familiar, it’s this sort of dumb comedy. Writer/director Ben Garant and writer/co-star Thomas Lennon, both of Reno 911! and The State fame (which explains all the cameos from those shows’ stars), are at least smart enough to pack the cast with gifted players and, more importantly, likeable presences.
We open during the 1988 Olympics, where pre-teen U.S. athlete Randy Daytona was embarrassingly defeated at ping pong by East German rival played by Lennon (leading to a neat Rocky IV-style U.S. vs. Communists scene). His ping pong career already over, he’s forced into semi-obscurity (like Will Ferrell and Jon Heder in Blades of Glory, or Ferrell in Talladega Nights).
Nineteen years later, he’s tubby and disheveled, and now played by Tony award-winning stage actor Dan Fogler. He’s working in a stage show at Reno, Nevada (Garant and Lennon must love the hell out of that place), when he’s approached by FBI agent George Lopez, who wants to use Randy to infiltrate a Triad archfiend Feng’s legendary ping pong tournament, which will gather the world’s greatest in one location for matches to the death (Like in Enter the Dragon, and the 4,000 movies inspired by it).
August 23, 2007 – 1:38 pm | Written by J Caleb Mozzocco
This film is so perfect a comedy that the fact of its existence alone is something of a joke. It’s an office comedy written and directed by Lars von Trier, the Danish filmmaker responsible for some of the most soul-crushingly depressing films ever made (Dancer in the Dark, Dogville) and partially responsible for the Dogme 95 aesthetic movement.
Von Trier himself is keenly aware of the oddity of a director like himself making a movie like this, one that isn’t far removed from the British version of The Office in terms of its sense of awkward humor, production value and documentary-like verisimilitude.
The trailer tells von Trier’s filmography like a joke, building up to the revelation of this film’s genre as a punchline, and the film opens and is occasionally interrupted by narration from von Trier himself, talking about the audience’s expectations in a comedy. (more…)
August 14, 2007 – 2:47 pm | Written by Kevin J Elliott
In 2005 I had the surreal pleasure of meeting one of rock music’s greatest enigmas, Roky Erickson, shortly after he performed for the first time in over a decade at the annual SXSW Festival in Austin. I thought this was simply a one-time deal — the city dusting off a local legend and carting the eccentric genius to the stage to play a bit of “Two-Headed Dog” for old-time’s sake. Little did I know about the trials and tribulations Erickson went through to arrive at this point again. I knew his back-story (an acid casualty sentenced to a maximum security state mental hospital, where shock treatment further fried his former self), but had no knowledge of the germ of a life he led after becoming ward to his mother Evelyn.
You’re Gonna Miss Me, a new documentary by Keven McAllester, is a rather poetic attempt to connect those dots. From Erickson’s heady beginnings inventing psychedelic music with the 13th Floor Elevators to his recent road to recovery sponsored by his youngest brother Sumner, and all the highs and low in between, the film explores his life from within the family drama that exists in the present. Who has the best intentions for Roky? (more…)
