Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Thanks for covering this one for us, man. Nice job on the reports. Sorry the festival ended on a low note for you, but at least you liked some of what you saw. Let’s see what today is all about...
Hey Moriarty!
Here's my last report as promised. It's been a pretty great week, despite a few stinkers... The worst of which is up next:
Ken Park
I don’t know why I still bother to see Larry Clark’s sexploitation films when each one is more despicable than the previous. I’ll give him one thing, his work his memorable, but so would be the experience of having to watch him rape your children. "Ken Park", which is co-directed by Ed Lachmen, follows three guys and a girl from Visalia, California, as they do nothing but skateboard, smoke dope and do each other, with the occasional bit of the old ultra-violence.
Shawn has a girlfriend, but he likes her mother better. Graphic sex ensues. Tate’s always yelling at his grandparents and his dog. The only person he tolerates is himself. Graphic sex ensues. Claude clashes with his drunken, abusive father. Graphic sex ensues (I wish I was kidding). Peaches’ dad is a gentler, religious man, but when he catches her being kinky with some guy from Bible Studies, he beats the snot out of both of them. Then out of nowhere, Shawn, Claude and Peaches (who we’ve never even seen together before) are having a threesome, shown in graphic detail, natch.
Why one would make such a film? I see two possibilities: 1) He’s only depicting a reality. If that’s the case, someone needs to tell him we got that teenagers were horny and amoral when he made "Kids" seven years ago, no need to keep shoving this down our collective throat. 2) Clark’s getting off on making films with the crassest characters and the most close-ups of penises possible. In any case, "Ken Park" is by far the worst film I’ve seen since... Well, "Bully".
The Sea
A day in the life of a spectacularly dysfunctional family, Baltasar Kormakur’s follow-up to "101 Reykjavik" is unpredictable to say the least. It starts with a bang but soon settles into an almost boringly low-key drama about how an old man, whose fishing and processing company has been holding together a small Iceland village, is being bullied into selling his fish quotas to a big corporation by his own son. As we meet the rest of the family, each member quirkier than the next, "The Sea" shifts into a bittersweet but comedic tone, before ultimately escalating into over-the-top melodrama drenched in alcohol, unhealthy sexual urges and old grudges bursting out. This makes for a wildly unbalanced film, hardly subtle but intense.
Far From Heaven
From the very start, Todd Haynes’ homage to Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas is a real treat. The autumn leaves in gorgeous Technicolor, the swooning score by Elmer Bernstein, the lavish titles... When Julianne Moore’s upper-middle-class housewife enters the picture, the attention to detail is even more impressive. It’s one thing to fill each frame with period cars, clothes and hairstyles, but here even the camera movements and the actor’s delivery and body language are old fashioned! Moore is superb as always, but Dennis Quaid also nails the 50s tone down as her fast-talking successful husband.
So far so good, but there’s one thing that slightly bothered me about "Far From Heaven": what’s the purpose at work, beside a brilliant exercise in style? I can see Haynes throwing a few curve balls, overtly addressing issues hush-hush in Sirk’s time like homosexuality and interracial relationships. Still, the handling is out-of-time: doctors conduct treatments to "restore heterosexuality", and the whole town literally frowns upon a white woman being friendly to a "Negro". The film can’t possibly think it’s daringly revealing that intolerance was rampant behind the polished exteriors of 1950s suburbia, right?
Some people around me seemed to take the film as a parody, laughing out loud at every retro flourish, but I doubt Haynes’ intent is this juvenile. Then what is it? In an interview with EW, Haynes explains that his film "uses the filmmaking style of the ‘50s to affect on an emotional level." Well, that sounds just dandy, but despite strong chemistry between Moore and Dennis Haysbert (who plays a charismatic and intelligent African-American gardener), the stunning but overwhelming art direction creates a distance between the story and the audience that makes emotional involvement difficult. I admire the heck out "Far From Heaven", I just wish I could embrace it more heartily.
Standing in the Shadows of Motown
The Funk Brothers had more #1 hits that Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys put together, but few recognise the name. Their music, on the other hand, is timeless: they were the musicians on all the Motown hits in its heyday. It’s almost tragic how these guys contributed to shaping the soundscape of the 1960s but were hardly ever acknowledged as more than the guys in the back behind Marvin Gaye or Smokey Robinson.
Now comes an extraordinary documentary that finally shines the spotlight on them. We learn all about how after having rock & roll "stolen" from them by the white boys in the ‘50s, the Black jazz and blues musicians revolutionised pop music again in Berry Gordy’s little Detroit studio, Hitsville USA, aka the Snakepit! Paul Justman’s film shows us how the Brothers created and regularly reinvented the Motown sound, taking off from jazz and blues licks, adding a taste of twist and doo-wop, experimenting with Afro-Cuban rhythms and psychedelic vibes, fusing all of it into the catchiest grooves. Even more important than the nifty arrangements is how Motown’s music inspires as much as it makes you groove. As Ben Harper (one of many contemporary artists who come in to jam with the Funk Brothers) perfectly puts it, they made "soul music, music that gives you hope and makes you feel like you wanna feel."
About the featured performers, I did find it disappointing at first how they brought in tourists like Chaka Kahn or Bootsy Collins to sing with them instead of reuniting with surviving Motown legends like Diana Ross or Stevie Wonder, but when you think of it’s a good thing because the band is not overshadowed, they are the stars for once: Joe Messina and Eddie Willis on guitars, Joe Hunter and Johnny Griffith playing the keyboards, Bob Babbitt on bass, Richard "Pistol" Allen and Uriel Jones accompanying each other on drums and tambourine virtuoso (really!) Jack Ashford. Not to forget the Brothers who passed away but are still there in spirit: bandleader and pianist Earl Van Dyke, bass guitarist James Jamerson ("Motown’s heartbeat"), drummer Benny "Papa Zita" Benjamin, guitarist Robert White and conga player Eddie "Bongo" Brown.
I expected the film to be a good "Behind the Music", but it’s much more than that. You grow to care for these guys and this family they formed in the Snakepit and on the road. It’s not even a race thing, as two of them are white. That they could groove is all that mattered to the gang. The anecdotes they tell are sometimes funny, sometimes bittersweet, but always interesting and endearing. I got so involved with them than by the last half hour, the musical numbers brought tears to my eyes. Hearing "What’s Going On" (the title track of arguably the greatest LP ever recorded) put in context with archival images of the social unrest of the late ‘60s, "What becomes of the broken hearted" sung passionately by Joan Osborne (don’t fret- she’s great), or "Ain’t no Mountain High Enough" doubling as an homage to the Brothers who died before getting proper recognition... Let’s hope that this documentary can finally introduce to the world the rest of them who’ve been standing in the shadows for too long.
11’ 09" 01
11 filmmakers, from 11 countries, making 11 films, each 11 minute 9 seconds and 1 image long and offering a different look at the events that occurred on September 11th 2001. The segments range from touching (Mira Nair’s real-life melodrama) to pretentious (Claude Lelouch’s navel-gazing break-up story), clever (Sean Penn’s poetic slice-of-life) to retarded (Shohehi Imamura‘s half-assed symbolism), cute (Samira Makhmalbaf’s kids-say-the-darnest-things episode) to heavy (Ken Loach’s reminder of the other 9/11, the 1973 US-backed coup in Chile that left 30,000 civilians dead), fun (Idrissa Ouedraogo’s charming hunt-for-Bin-Laden comedy) to tedious (Danis Tanovic’s slow yarn). There are also two digressions into the Middle-East situation, one pro-Israel (a show-off but inconsequential one-take by Amos Gitai) and one pro-Palestine (the cheesy "magical realism" of Youssef Chahine). And finally there’s the pièce de résistance, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s riveting impressionistic take on that tragic New York morning, Revolution #9-style. The overall picture is uneven, but the Mexican director’s 11 minute alone makes "11’09"01" worth seeing.
And that's that,
Norm
Great job. I hope you are able to attend again next year, and that we’ll hear back from you then. And maybe we’ll meet at FantAsia next year, eh?
"Moriarty" out.
