Father Geek here at Geek Headquarters... These next 3 postings of mine are a little late... I've been swamped since Thursday with film watching, almost like a big time festival... 1st a press screening of KILL BILL, then another press viewing of LOST IN TRANSLATION, then a private sneak of the wonderful LES TRIPLETTES DE BELLEVILLE, then Harry & I hosted the Kids Club screening of BUGSY MALONE, then it was off to the premiere of SCHOOL OF ROCK with Jack Black etc... in attendance, then we raced out into the boonies to the old state nuthouse for the premiere of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE with R. Lee Ermey etc... attending,then we watched THE FRIGHTENEERS with Ermey, Then I saw 2 screenings of ENTER THE DRAGON with Jim Kelly there and those were followed by a 1:30am jampacked showing of Kelly's BLACK BELT JONES with him still there... sooooo please forgive my tardiness in getting these posted...
MORE FROM CINEMA PARADISE FESTIVAL by Albert Lanier
by Albert Lanier
The little film festival that could--the Cinema Paradise Independent Festival in Honolulu, Hawaii--continued to inch its way forward during the fifth and sixth days of the fest.
Tuesday, Sept. 23 saw surf films dominate the slate of screenings although there were at least one or two other cinematic alternatives available that day.
I got to see the short RED WAGON and the surf doc THE FAR SHORE after 5:15 p.m.
RED WAGON proved to be funny and enjoyable revolving around the frustrations of would-be writer and biographer Tamara living with her unpleasant and slightly sarcastic sister. Tamara finds an unconscious man lying on a rocky shoreline and brings him home on a child's small red wagon. Tam! ara finds a scrap of paper on which a few letters are written including the letters JULI. The rather dreamy Tamara thinks the scrap of paper is the fragment of a love poem.
It turns out that the paper was part of a recipe for Julienne fries. This comes straight from the mouth of the unconscious man who has now been awakened through sex--I'm not making this up--chiefly, the sensual ministrations of Tamara's sister whom he falls for. In fact, Tamara's would be paramour was a cook on a Merchant freighter who jumped ship and swam to "freedom." Her hopes and dreams shattered, Tamara also decides to make the leap and find her way to freedom.
RED WAGON has a sort of innocence lost feel to it as a short except that Tamara's head in the clouds personality is explored humorously. Director Alison Marek mixes a sort of light, wistful tone with a sort of a broad, slightly direct sense of humor to create a nice ! comedic hybrid.
Filmmaker Gregory Schell's THE FAR SHORE about surfers and adventurers Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson who traveled around the world looking for out-of-the-way beaches and surf spots is an accessible doc that should appeal to surfers and non-surfers alike.
Naughton and Peterson (who worked as photographers for SURFER magazine while still in high school) are interviewed along with companions and friends. The film does a fine job of exploring the wanderlust of travel by using home films and stills to provide a panorama of the joys and agonies of travel to parts of the globe such as Costa Rica and within the African continent.
NIHI--shown in the early evening--was a documentary biography of surfer Titus "Nihi" Kinimaka directed by Brooks Guye! r. Kinimaka talks on camera about his childhood and adult exploits as a surfer and all-around waterman extraordinaire.
NIHI is largely successful because we have Kinimaka's presence on camera. Thus a direct source who can articulate his life spent surfing and working as a lifeguard but more importantly, Nihi's love of surfing, swimming and virtually communing with the ocean is present onscreen and this film is all the better for it.
The South African doc IN SEARCH OF GRACE was a middling doc about five South African males--Jonno, Jabu, Charlie, Deon and Justin--who are brought together for a surf trip that takes them into such locales as Namibia to seek the choicest waves. This doc has a boyish, kidding sense of humor which is works some of the time but another subject--namely race and surfing in South Africa--might have served ! as a more potent topic for exploration. IN SEARCH OF GRACE mentions race in passing terms choosing to stay on target and explore how the personalities in this group get along and how surfing affects each person.
In the end, IN SEARCH OF GRACE winds up aiming for a comedic and philosophical mix and largely fails because these two approaches don't seem genuine but studied and structured to elicit certain responses. This doc wants to go with the flow but ends up going on with the show.
The final films of the day were the short doc PARALLEL UNIVERSE and the feature-length documentary FIVE SIDES OF A COIN.
PARALLEL UNIVERSE directed by Mauricio and Tereza Eca briefly looks at the Rap culture springing from the slums of Sao Paulo, Brazil. This short is arresting at times. Filled to the brim w! ith a macho energy, a slight frontal assault of testosterone, PARALLEL UNIVERSE features an on-camera narrator who directly talks about Brazilian Rap as he stands in front of the marginal and poor neighborhoods that gave birth to this type of sound. Worth a look if you can find it.
FIVE SIDES OF A COIN is an almost encyclopedic history of Rap music and the hip-hop culture that goes along with it. Divided into different chapters, FIVE SIDES ably spans the history of one of the most influential forms of music in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.
Whether it's charting Rap's origins in the styles of performers like James Brown (who was rapping before the term and the music existed) and the music's birthplace in the borough of the Bronx in New York City and moving forward to look at specific aspects of the music such as Beeboxing, the role of the DJ in spinning and scrat! ching records, MC's rocking the mike as well as the impact of hip-hop cultural activities such a breaking; FIVE SIDES OF THE COIN is worth a look.
FIVE SIDES--directed by Paul Kell--ended the festival day on an energetic note.
Day six--Wednesday, Sept. 24--actually was the last full day of screenings for me (since by this time, I had seen all the films slated for the closing day of the fest) so I was stoked, as you will well see. I started out my day by viewing the fine computer animated films that were packaged under the Flash TV program. The Flash TV film program--consisting of films produced and animated in the flash format--was presented by Nicholas Da Silva, head of Zoolook Entertainment, who runs the Flash TV website.
Da Silva told me afterwards that the Flash TV Program at Cinema Paradise was actually a first ! for them--the first time a collection of Flash animated films featured on the website had been screened for a festival audience. Flash TV itself featured probably the best animation I had seen at the fest (though I must admit I didn't get to see too many animated films during the fest).
As there were 22 shorts, I won't go through each short but just briefly note my favorites: MUTAFUKAZ from France--set in a dystrophic, fascist version of 2003--where our heroes Blackhead and Flaming Skull engage in a shoot out with faceless SWAT-like police, NINJAI: THE LITTLE NINJA about very young ninja warrior, NYLON STALKING from the U.S. about a sexy-looking redhead who winds up with a robot for a pet, SECRET AGENT DAN from the U.S. deals with a former dot com company employee who works in a fast food restaurant by day but who is really a Secret Agent..or so he thinks, STRINDBERG AND HELIUM also from the United States about melan! choly playwright August Strindberg and a flying ball of helium out in the "single's" bars looking for action (this is one hilarious short), GARAGE SALE ANTICS from the U.S, starring the sarcastic character Stinky who visits the house where a garage sale will be held real early--like in the middle of the night and finally SIDEWALK from Israel which looks at THE WIZARD OF OZ from an off-beat, skewed perspective.
I then got to watch the short PANDORA directed by Antonio Campos. The short revolves around a screenwriter named Phil who's career is on the downturn and who is convinced that his girlfriend is interested in someone else and that people dislike him and are stabbing him in the back.
Watching a QVC or Home Shopping Channel-like program, he sees a pitch for Pandora's box and orders the item which comes immediately to his front door. Phil opens the box and finds his girlfriend's diary in the ! box which includes declarations of love...for someone else as well as a DVD showing his friends bad mouthing him.
Phil gets help from a fairy of sorts (dressed as a cable company installer) who allows Phil to disregard what he has seen and receive only positive views in the diary and DVD. Returned back to his everyday existence, Phil is convinced he had a dream and goes over to his girlfriend's apartment. However, a twist lies in store not for Phil but the audience.
PANDORA is predictable but effective. The performances by Andrew Keegan as Phil and comic Mario Antone as the fairy are good and help hold the film together.
Also, Campos is able to work the kinks out well of the film's Pandora’s box premise by utilizing a DVD and a diary. The story seems somewhat pat and pedestrian at times especially with its ending but PANDORA move! s at a good pace and generally take a myth and makes a workable post-modern story out of it.
STOKED: THE RISE AND FALL OF GATOR--directed by Helen Stickler--was next up for me.
STOKED is a good, solid doc that looks into the career of vertical Skating star Mark "Gator" Rogowski. Rogowski became not only a major star on the skateboard circuit in the mid to late 80's but a legend of sorts--a cocky, flashy personality who projected a rock star and movie star aura to fans--who was known for his attention grabbing antics like slugging a cop during a skating event in Virginia.
Gator became a big star in his teens, signing contracts and working for skate fashion and apparel companies and earning thousands of dollars--even buying a large home--before he hits his early twenties. By the time he was 21, Gator's star was on the wane. Street skating--skating done on city streets and sidewalks--was on the rise in the early '90s and vertical skating--done mostly in skate parks and huge u-shaped ramps--was declining in popularity.
Gator sucked at street skating and couldn't adapt. He also started abusing alcohol and recklessly fell out of a hotel in Germany onto a fence below resulting in numerous cuts on hands and arms. Gator tried to get his life together after his fall. He became a born-again Christian and tried to embrace a religious life style.
However, Gator's newfound religiosity couldn't get rid of all his emotional and personal demons. Rejected by his longtime girlfriend Brandi, Gator admittedly took out his frustrations on Brandi's pretty young friend, Jessica Bergstron, and raped and killed her in 1991. Gator is currently serving out his sentence at a prison in California.
STOKED contains the usual documentary arc moving from stardom to failure but Stickler's film is top drawer because of the world of professional skateboarding that she delves into.
Actually, STOKED is as much about professional skating in the mid '80's to early '90's when it became a major youth sport that was starting to see a convergence of fashion firms, agents and endorsement moneys penetrate skateboarding as it is about Gator.
By understanding skateboarding and the spectator sport built from its foundations, we can begin to understand the charm, the attitudes, the foibles and the loneliness of Mark Ragowski, the man as well as the skateboarder. Maybe some people who see STOKED won't be able to fathom why Gator wound up killing Jessica but they will understand a little of what made Gator such a star.
The docs FOO FOO DUST and AFRO PUNK concluded the slate of films shown on Wednesday.
FOO FOO DUST is a harrowing, unalterated look at a mother and her young kids--Stephanie and Tony--who are both drug addicted and living in a welfare hotel in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.
Directors Gina Levy and Eric Johnson show some fairly disturbing stuff here including Tony shooting up on Heroin in a hotel bathroom and Stephanie's foul-mouthed rants as she demand a razor blade to cut up her container of crack. You got to give credit to the filmmakers here. They don't sugarcoat or water down drug addiction or the addict's existence but show it with a clarity that may shock some audience members at festivals.
This is the kind of raw, unadorned kind of film I like to see at festivals. Frank filmmaking that allows one to ponder over th! e horrors rather than dressing it up with propaganda and lies.
AFROPUNK, directed by James Spooner, is a fine documentary about black devotees of punk rock music in the U.S. and their reasons for feeling passionate about this punishing almost pulverizing powerful form of rock.
Featuring interviews with African-American punk rockers from states as diverse as Iowa, Illinois, Arkansas, New York and California, AFROPUNK addresses a wide range of personal issues from the under representation of blacks within an almost all white musical environment to interracial dating to black community criticism and personal African-American identity. As someone who is half African-American, I found AFROPUNK completely fascinating. I've always loved rock and roll myself though not of the punk variety and only about as hard as say Quiet Riot or Def Leopard.
Spooner gets a number of interesting interviews on video and as well as some great performances by black punk rockers that I found riveting. One such rocker wrote a song based on American slavery--the treacherous middle passage--that he performed in front of a largely white audience.
This one scene in AFROPUNK blew my mind. I don't know if it was because I am black, if it was because I was a freelance reporter covering a film festival, and that I had personally never seen anything like that before but that portion of AFROPUNK was truly awesome.
AFROPUNK not only documents a rarely seen part of the Punk Rock experience but also argues for a more realistic perception of the black experience in America in which African-Americans are involved in playing and listening to all kinds of music, getting involved in varied ar! t forms or other types of interests but never getting the attention they deserve.
At least, that's what I got out of AFROPUNK.
