30 Nisan 2015 Perşembe
Now playing at every multiplex in the galaxy and beyond:
AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON
(Dir. Joss Whedon, 2015)
If you live on planet Earth, you’re aware that today the Marvel machine is rolling out the biggest super hero movie of the year - sorry, ANT-MAN, but, c’mon!
AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON (from this point on, A:AOU), the sequel to the biggest superhero movie of 2012, THE AVENGERS, and the 11th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise that began with the first IRON MAN back in 2008, is here to officially kick off the summer 2015 movie season - sorry, FURIOUS 7.
But if you’re reading this, you most likely know all that, and just want to know if this highly anticipated, star-studded, and CGI-saturated production lives up to its huge hype.
I’ll say - yeah, it does. I had a tremendous amount of fun watching the reunited team - Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America/Steve Rodgers (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), The Hulk/Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), and Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) – working together with lots of wit and energy to defeat the powerful robotic villain Ultron (voiced by James Spader).
This adventure begins with an already-in-progress action sequence, involving the comic book crew storming the castle of Hydra leader Baron von Strucker (Thomas Kretschmann) in the icy terrain of the fictional European nation of Sokovia.
Amid the standard chaos and wisecracks (most of which are pretty funny) we are introduced to a couple of new characters, brother and sister duo Pietro/Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). “He’s fast, she’s weird,” is what SHIELD’s Maria Hill (the also returning Cobie Smulders) says of their powers, which means that Pietro can move at supersonic speeds, while Wanda can manipulate minds with magic.
The Avengers rescue Loki’s scepter, one of the McGuffins of the series, and return to their headquarters at the Stark Tower Complex in Manhattan, where we actually get to hang out with the guys as they party, and engage in a game of taking turns trying to lift Thor’s hammer. Meanwhile, Stark’s Ultron project, which is supposed to be a global peacekeeping program, is co-opted by the scepter and becomes sentient.
That means Spader, who in addition to providing the voice, performed on set in a motion-capture suit, takes over as the movie’s major villain, and sets out to wipe out humanity (“There is only one path to peace... your extinction”).
As if he thinks we don’t have enough characters to keep up with, Whedon keeps piling them on. We meet Barton’s (Renner, in case you forgot) wife (Linda Cardellini of Freaks and Geeks and Mad Men fame) and kids living at a “safe house” farm where the Avengers lay low between battles, geneticist Helen Cho (Claudia Kim) who gets co-opted by Ultron, arms dealer Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis, a motion capture master himself), and the re-occuring role of Stark’s A.I. companion J.A.R.V.I.S. (voiced by Paul Betttany) is expanded via a red and green android body (Bettany in the flesh).
There’s also the many cameos from the MCU including Don Cheadle getting in a few good one-liners again as as James “Rhodey” Rhodes/War Machine and Anthony Mackie getting in a few glaring grins as Sam Wilson/Falcon, along with appearances by Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter, Idris Elba as Heimdall, and of course, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, who no Marvel movie should be without. And yes, there’s a Stan Lee cameo, but, c'mon, you knew there would be.
Yes, A:AOU covers every single fan-pleasing base it can in its 2 hour and 21 minute running time and is a pretty bloated affair because of it, but it swiftly juggles all these strands until they collide in the big climax set on a ginourmous hunk of a Sokovian city land mass that Ultron has lifted from the earth and is planning on crashing down. The Avengers try to save the city's people while warring with the armies of robots that are all forms of Ultron (in a MATRIX sort of way I guess).
The special effects, of course put together by thousands of digital artists, are flawlessly top notch, but it’s the human moments that give a lot of heart, soul, and humor to this enterprise. A romance blooming between Ruffalo’s Banner (another invested portrayal - where's this guy's Hulk movie?) and Johansson’s Romanoff adds a thoughtful touch, and while Downey Jr.’s Stark is still full of snark, there’s an unmistakable conscience behind it. The rest of the gang also have their moments, but Hemsworth's Thor is still my least favorite Avenger.
Spader, even with only a mechanical presence, makes for a powerfully worthy foe, one who gets his share of well delivered quips and takes delight in destruction.
If this is Whedon’s final fling with the super hero franchise, he went out with a multitude of big bangs. Maybe they’re all riffs on the familiar formulaic tropes of the genre we’re all used to, but that doesn’t make them any less effective.
A:AOU is winningly and satisfyingly more of the same; it’s everything a superhero superfan would want out of a Marvel movie. Non fans who haven’t been won over by any of the movies in the series before won’t be converted by it, but I seriously doubt many of them will have read this far into this review anyway.
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Are you a big fan of the classic '60s sitcom Gomer Pyle? Well, here's your chance to win a copy of a 24-DVD box set of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.: The Complete Series, which was released last month. All you have to do is write a few sentences about your favorite episode. I want the collection to go to a real fan, so I need some details about a particular ep that proves you really love the show and would really appreciate having the whole series.
The factory-sealed box contains all five seasons (150 episodes) of the iconic comedy that starred Jim Nabors as a hapless Marine Corps private who constantly irritates his immediate superior, Sergeant Carter (Frank Sutton). The show occupies a place in folksy old school pop culture that a lot of folks grew up with, or couldn't avoid because it was from a time when there was only three channels.Bonus Features include audio intros by Nabors on Select Episodes, audio commentaries by Nabors and actor/comic Ronnie Schell on select episodes, the pilot episode “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” from The Andy Griffith Show, a clip from The Lucy Show episode “Lucy Gets Caught In The Draft” in which Nabor made an in character cameo, and a clip from Nabor's variety show The Jim Nabors Hour.
Also included: Jim Nabors' 1972 appearance on The David Frost Show, which is surely as historic and earth shaking as the Frost/Nixon interviews.
Yes, it's quite an extensive collection of Gomer Pyle goodies that should go to a good home. So get to it! Write about an episode and it could be yours.
Send your brief appraisals of your favorite GP ep to:
boopbloop7@gmail.com
Deadline for entries is May 5th.
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23 Nisan 2015 Perşembe
Opening today exclusively in the Triangle area at the Raleigh Grande:
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(Dir. James D. Cooper, 2014)
This fascinating documentary focusing on the original managers of The Who arrives in a timely fashion to Raleigh as the iconic British rock band just played a show in town at the PNC Center earlier this week.
I was among the thousands at the sports arena to see the remaining founding members, singer Roger Daltrey and guitarist/songwriter Pete Townshend, joined by a tight backing band including Ringo’s son Zak Starkey on drums, bash out over 20 of their classics for their “The Who Hits 50!” tour. The Who was an obsession of my youth so songs like “I Can’t Explain,” “Baba O’Riley,” and “I Can See For Miles” (among many, many others) are in my blood. Despite their advancing age and some flubs here and there, The Two, as many fans call them, really brought it.
Over the years there’s been countless docs, books, interviews, and profiles in major music magazines that have told and retold the history of The Who, but a crucial part of their back story, the intracacies of their origin story if you will, usually gets glossed over.
And that’s the story of how Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, two best friend aspiring filmmakers who, despite no management experience, managed, mentored, and helped make famous four blokes who, when they discovered them, went by the name The High Numbers.
Lambert, the son of acclaimed classical composer Constant Lambert, died in 1981, but the 70-year old, still dapper Stamp sat down for extensive interviews for first-time documentarian James D. Cooper, relaying anecdotes about the duo’s schemes and dreams that involved making a movie about a pop band that would establish them as first class filmmakers.
After months of searching through candidates they thought were “too clean,” Lambert and Stamp came across the High Numbers at a small London club in the summer of 1964, and were immediately taken by them. Then Lambert and Stamp’s plan to make a film was put on the back burner as they became the band’s managers and went about reshaping their image. This included changing their name to The Who, billed on posters with the tagline: “Maximum R & B.”
Flashy black and white footage, some of the first ever shot of The Who, capture the Mod movement in full swing, while fleeting bits of live shows display how the band’s abrasive energy connected with their small but growing audience. However, one not well versed in the British rock legends, could be forgiven for watching much of this and thinking that the Who’s entire early act consisted of making loud feedbacky noise then smashing their instruments.
Daltrey and Townshend are on hand to give insights from the band’s side, particularly Pete, always a great interview subject, who passionately speaks about long-gone Who members, bassist John Entwistle (“he was a fuckin’ genius!”) and drummer Keith Moon (“he wasn’t a drummer…he did something else”), and laments about overhearing that the two were considering leaving The Who to form Led Zeppelin with Jimmy Page (“I felt like a real outsider”).
One of the film’s musical highlights is footage of the young, lanky, slightly nervous Townshend playing a solo acoustic version of a new song, “Glittering Girl,” which would go on to be a beloved outtake from the 1967 album “The Who Sell Out,” in person for the adoring managers. “I do feel like they treated me differently,” Townshend recalls now about their relationship.
After The Who starting hitting it big, Lambert and Stamp went on to manage Jimi Hendrix, Thunderclap Newman, Arthur Brown, and Golden Earring. But a falling out, seemingly fueled by booze and drugs, with Townshend over the sessions for “Who’s Next” in 1971 led to the band firing the pair in ‘75. Stamp seems still a bit upset about this, and the fact that he didn’t get to direct TOMMY, the film version of The Who’s 1969 rock opera, when making a movie featuring the band was the whole idea in the first place.
Who biographer Richard Barnes, Daltrey’s second wife Heather, original Mod Irish Jack (considered to be the inspiration for The Who’s “Quadrophenia”), and actor Terence Stamp, Chris’ older brother, are also on hand to flesh out the film with sometimes witty, sometimes sad anecdotes about the bombastic band and their two eccentric managers.
Folks interested in the music scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the mechanics of making a band in that era should enjoy LAMBERT & STAMP, but really it’s a doc that the millions of people that cheer and pump their fists to the band’s 50th Anniversary tour should really seek out. Both casual and hardcore fans alike owe it to themselves to learn about who really made The Who happen.
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17 Nisan 2015 Cuma
Opening today at both art houses and multiplexes:
TRUE STORY (Dir. Rupert, Goold, 2015)
Maybe the tag-line for this film should be “James Franco and Jonah Hill together again, but this time you won’t be laughing.”
In this adaptation of Michael Finkel’s 2006 bestseller “True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa,” Franco and Hill ditch the stoner shenanigans (and their stoner buddy ensemble) of their previous movie, THIS IS THE END, and play it dead serious.
Hill steps into the shoes of Finkel, who we first meet as a star New York Times reporter working on a story in Africa about the modern-day slave trade. In short order we are also introduced to Franco as fugitive Christian Longo on the lam in Cancún, Mexico using Finkel’s name as an alias.
In short order, Finkel is fired by the Times for fabricating large portions of his article, while Longo is apprehended by the FBI for the murder of his wife and three children in Oregon. After learning that Longo used his name, the disgraced and desperate Finkel arranges to meet with him in prison.
Longo, graced with Franco charm, tells Finkel that he’s a big fan, and before you know it, they’re collaborating on a book about the murders together. Longo agrees to give Finkel exclusive access on the condition that the journalist teaches the suspected killer how to write.
So it’s got a SHATTERED GLASS meets CAPOTE vibe, with Hill’s Finkel and Franco’s Longo developing a creepy relationship as Longo’s trial looms closer. It’s obvious that Longo is manipulating Finkel from their initial encounter, but the film trudges onward continuously trying to make a point that it had already made in the first 10 minutes.
That point is that these two guys are alike. They are both characters with deplorable moral ethics; every action they make can be seen as self serving. And, of course, they’re both using each other – we get it.
The rest of the cast seems to know this. Felicity Jones, as Finkel’s girlfriend Jill (the archetypal worrying woman on the side), even goes to confront Longo to tell him she’s got his number in one of the film’s most contrived scenes. Even if this really happened, and I bet it didn’t, it’s a horribly handled plot point that adds nothing. Well, except that it gives Jones something to do.
Scripted by first time filmmaker Rupert Goold and suspense scribe David Kajganich (THE INVASION, BLOOD CREEK), TRUE STORY has neither the depth nor thrills (or even attempts at thrills) required to be considered a psychological thriller. It’s more a tense drama with transparently artsy ambition.
The storytelling, whether true or not, gets pretty muddled and strained towards the end. I got annoyed at Finkel for falling for Longo’s shtick, which at times reminded me of Franco’s breakout Freaks and Geeks role, Daniel Desario, but with a brain.
This whole overly calculated, and bleedingly obvious, exercise will most likely be jokingly dismissed by Franco and Hill someday in another meta-minded project with their fellow graduates of Apatow University. Probably like this: “Remember when we did that TRUE STORY shit? We were all so serious ‘n shit? Remember that? Yeah, me either.”
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16 Nisan 2015 Perşembe
Opening today at a indie art house near me:
MERCHANTS OF DOUBT (Dir. Robert Kenner, 2015)
Robert Kenner’s follow-up to FOOD, INC., the new documentary MERCHANTS OF DOUBT opening today at an indie art house near me, opens aptly with an illusionist displaying his impeccable slight-of-hand card trick skills to a rapt audience.
The master magician is Jamy Ian Swiss, an associate of Penn & Teller, who identifies himself as an “honest liar.” Swiss gets the theme of the film’s ball rolling when he explains that “it offends me when someone takes the skills of my honest living, if you will, and uses it to twist, and distort, and manipulate people and their sense of realist, and how the world works.”
From there we jump right into a credit sequence montage, set to Frank Sinatra’s “That Old Black Magic,” and decorated with sound bites like “Global Warming is a hoax,” “there is no consensus - this is a myth,” “asbestos is designed to last forever,” and “it is not known whether cigarette smoking causes cancer.”
Inspired by the 2010 book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Keller and co-writer Kim Roberts take us into the world of phony punditry, in which a small group of so-called experts can have an enormous impact on public opinion.
The roots of what Oreskes and Conway called a “history of manufactured ignorance” can be traced to the 1950s when the tobacco companies, aware of undeniable evidence that smoking was hazardous and highly addictive, hired a public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, to cast doubt on the scientific facts.
Anti-smoking activist Stanton Glantz lays out that “the playbook that they developed to attack science worked for them for 50 years,” and “so other businesses that were faced with regulatory challenges had to look at this and say ‘boy, if this worked for tobacco, we ought to be able to use that playbook too.’”
This is confirmed by the next segment on the Chicago Tribune’s investigation on flame retardants involving journalists Patricia Callahan and Sam Roe, who appear as interviewees; but this is just a prelude to the film’s central focus, the fossil fuel industry’s war on climate science and scientists.
Old cold warriors/climate change deniers Fred Seitz, S. Fred Singer, and William Nierenberg join the growing cast of collected con artist characters the film profiles, as does the slick, slimy Marc Morano, a frequent Fox News regular, and a former Rush Limbaugh producer. Morano casually discusses going after scientists via underground newsletter take-down pieces (later on his blog Climate Depot), and sending vulgar, death threat emails to them.
On the good guy side of the debate, the film gives us prominent climate scientist James Hansen, Skeptic Society Director Michael Shermer (key quote: “Data trumps politics”), earnest environmentalist (his words, not mine) John Passacantando, and the aforementioned co-author of the book, Oreskes, identified here only as “Science Historian,” whose commentary is certainly the most insightful.
However, despite all these fascinating factors, the film peters out roughly an hour into its 96 minute running time as all the major points have been made and what’s left gets pretty tedious in its repetition.
In addition to that grievance - a lengthy ending thread involving former Republican South Carolina congressman Bob Inglis going on a right-wing talk radio show feels tacked on, interviewees throughout are indentified so fleetingly that it’s easy to forget their credentials, and, as much as I love them, the film really doesn’t need pop song punctuation like David Bowie’s “Changes,” and Big Star’s “Don’t Lie To Me.”
Also, the magician stuff is fine in the intro, but, as charismatic as Swiss is, it’s a weak linking device that made me wince every time they return to it.
With a little more time in the editing bay, MERCHANTS OF DOUBT could’ve been the year’s first must-see documentary. As it stands, it’s only two thirds of that.
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13 Nisan 2015 Pazartesi
The 2015 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival was, as usual, quite a feast of non-fiction, and after four days I am very stuffed. So before I crash, I'll get right to the docs I attended out of the dozens screened on Saturday, April 11th, and Sunday, April 12th. (Oh, yeah – please visit my recaps of Day 1, and Day 2):
First up, Brad Barber and Scott Christopherson's PEACE OFFICER, the story of former Sheriff William “Dub” Lawrence's investigation into the 2008 homicide of his son-in-law by the SWAT team Lawrence originally created. Other similar cases involving inappropriate uses of force by the police are touched on in this calmly delivered treatise on what many call the militarization of law enforcement. Disturbing crime scene photos, news reports, and raw footage of SWAT raids capture the eye, but it's Lawrence's softly spoken dissection of the matter that is most compelling.
Next, I thoroughly enjoyed MAVIS!, Jessica Edwards’ biodoc of gospel/soul singer Mavis Staples. Sure, it's got the expected mix of interviews, concert footage, archival TV appearances, but its warmth and affection for its legendary subject elavates it greatly above the standard music doc formula. Staples dicusses her history with the Staples Singers who had a string of hits in the '60s and '70s, her solo career, her collaboration with Prince, her recent comeback which included winning her first Grammy for her produced 2011 album “You Are Not Alone,” which was produced by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, and, most importantly her close relationship with her father, gospel R & B icon Pops Staples.
One of many highlights deals with Bob Dylan's marriage proposal to Ms. Staples in the '60s (he ran it by Pops first). She says she “didn't take it to heart,” however “we may have have smooched.” Edwards' exceedingly endearing portrait also offers plenty of powerful live performances. In one clip, Staples promises her audience that she and her band have come to “bring some joy, some happiness, inspiration, and some positive vibrations.” I felt all of those things while watching this wonderful portrait.
Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman's LAST DAY OF FREEDOM moved me more than I thought an animated short doc with starkly spare imagery could. The 30-minute film illustrates the visage and memories of Bill Babbitt, whose Vietnam vet brother Manny was executed in 1999 for the murder of a 78-year old woman in 1980. Babbitt, still shaken after all these years, tells how he feels his brother has been done wrong by the system, which didn't take into account that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I can totally see this emotionally impactful short getting an Oscar nom. *
Now, I’ve heard about the revolutionary nationalist organization, the Black Panther Party my whole life, getting bits and pieces of their story here and there, but I never got the full picture until veteran filmmaker Stanley Nelson (WOUNDED KNEE, JONESTOWN, FREEDOM RIDERS) schooled me, and a full Fletcher Hall house, on the subject Saturday night. It was via Fletcher's newest historical doc, THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION, the third Center Frame screening at the fest this year, a vital, electric, and sadly timely history lesson that everyone should be taught. With rare archival footage, new interviews with surviving former members, vintage news reports and the like, Nelson takes us through the brief but explosive period in the late ‘60s, in which the Panthers, headed by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, rose to power in the black community. Fighting against police brutality and for more freedoms for their people, the Panthers made many enemies including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
In the film’s most striking sequence, one of the movement’s leaders, Fred Thompson (who has a cameo in another film at the fest, HERE COMES THE VIDEOFREEX), is murdered in a raid by Chicago police in conjunction with the FBI. This was mainly because, as the Bureau’s documents later revealed, they wanted “to prevent the rise of a black messiah.”
But this blurb barely scratches the surface of the wealth of information and insight into the world of the Panthers Stanley’s film powerfully provides. THE BLACK PANTHERS is set for limited release in September, so keep an eye out for it.
As I've said before many times, the last slot of the evening on Saturday night at Full Frame is a perfect one for a rock doc, and this year Tom Berninger's MISTAKEN FOR STRANGERS really hit the spot. The filmmaker is the brother of Matt Berninger, the frontman for the indie rock band The National, and his film concerns Tom's disastrous stint working as a roadie on the band's 2010-11 European tour.
Sloppily shot, yet infused with an undeniably crude sharm, this project amusingly deals with Tom having to cope with having a famous rock star sibling, while coming to terms that he has to get his life together. It's a funny, shabby, and fussy doc, much like its maker, and I enjoyed the flashy live footage despite its choppiness (i.e. don't go to this film expecting much in the way of full musical performances).
There have been many Brando documentaries before, but Steven Riley’s LISTEN TO ME MARLON distinguishes itself by being largely narrated by the man himself. With access to hundreds of hours of audio tapes Brando had recorded throughout his career, Riley and co. have taken the most telling excerpts, supplemented them with an engrossing collage of film clips, screen tests, production stills, and many never before seen photos, and constructed the most intimate Brando biodoc to date.
It starts off weirdly with a digitally animated 3D image based on facial scans Brando made not long before his death in 2004, but settles into a thankfully more conventional groove. It’s fascinating to hear Brando discussing his method acting approach (including much praise his acting teacher Stella Adler), his failed marriages, his son Christian’s murder conviction, and resolving his issues with his father.
Of course, film fans will relish hearing him dish on such films as ON THE WATERFRONT, MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY, CANDY (“worst movie I ever made in my life”), THE GODFATHER (“I wasn’t sure I could play that part either”), and especially APOCALYPSE NOW (“I read the script and it was stupid, it was awful. I told Francis, ‘you’re making an enormous error’”). LISTEN TO ME MARLON should satisfy long-time fans, newbies, and folks who are curious to get a glimpse behind the curtain.
Lastly, for sure, the funniest doc of the fest this year, but with a title like DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: THE STORY OF THE NATIONAL LAMPOON it really had to be.
Director Doug Tirola (ALL IN: THE POKER MOVIE, HEY BARTENDER) has done a great job here of depicting the history of how the legendary humor magazine became a comedy institution that produced live shows like “Lemmings” (launching the careers of John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Christopher Guest), classic records like “That’s Not Funny, It’s Sick,” and, most importantly for the masses, smash hit movies like ANIMAL HOUSE and VACATION.
The story of National Lampoon is largely the story of co-founder Doug Kenney, considered by many to be the heart of the original publication. Kenney, who you may know as Stork in ANIMAL HOUSE (which he co-wrote), was the charismatic comic genius behind much of the Lampoon’s most popular parodies in the ‘70s, but he would disappear for long periods of time, and his death in 1980 falling from a cliff in Hawaii has his friends and colleagues still scratching their heads as whether it was suicide or an accident.
Chase has been well documented as being an asshole, but in his interview segments here he’s actually charming and funnier than I’ve seen in years; it’s touching to see him a little choked up when he says Kenney was his best friend. Also worth mentioning is Tirola’s clever linking device of using hundreds, maybe thousands, of images of vintage cartoons, graphics, and art from the magazine with the word bubbles changed to echo the relevant quotes spoken onscreen.
Being a comedy nerd from way back, I really dug DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD. Those in attendance Fletcher Hall that Sunday afternoon appeared to too as they laughed so hard at some bits that it was hard to hear the next thing said onscreen. That’s something I bet Tirola, who told the crowd at the Q & A after, that they were “the best audience,” took as a very good sign.
Okay! So that's another Full Frame. Thanks for reading and stay tuned to this space for more Film Babble Blog Fun.
* LAST DAY OF FREEDOM won The Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short at the Awards Barbecue on Sunday. Click here to see the full list of winners.
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10 Nisan 2015 Cuma
The second day of this year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival was as overcast as the first, but to all of us film fans stuffed into the
Carolina Theatre and a few adjoining venues in downtown Durham, N.C. it really didn't matter. As usual, Friday brought a lot more people to the event, all lining up for helpings of primo infotainment. I was happy to be among them to take four fascinating films.
My Friday kicked off with Frederick Gertten's BIKES VS CARS.
It's really not that much of a spoiler to say that Gertten's film is rooting for bikes. With stunning statistics and factoids like “In Toronto, a pedestrian is hit by a car every three hours, a cyclist is hit by a car every seven hours,” Gertten's globe-trotting doc contrasts how different cities are more bike-friendly than others (Copenhagen and Amsterdam are voted the bike capitals of the world), and examines how traffic congestion is going to get way worse (with 2 billion cars projected to be on the planet by 2020) unless we embrace alternatives.
A few of the threads the film depicts involve bicycle activists fighting for safer bike lanes in São Paulo, Brazil, while in Toronto, Canada, Mayor Rob Ford (yeah, that guy) battles what he calls a “war on cars” by having bike lanes removed. BIKES VS CARS is a smart, concerned film that makes a lot of good points, but in the face of taking on the politically powerful auto industry sadly it's gonna make a lot of people say “Yeah, but what are you gonna do?”
Now onto a very different kind of cycling film:
People of a certain age remember how much of a sensation motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel was in the '70s, but the ups and downs of his unique career have mostly been forgotten. Daniel Junge's exciting biopic BEING EVEL puts it all in perspective by sorting all the publicity stunts, rocky relationships, and ego-trips that made the man into a fiery narrative that made the Full Frame audience gasp throughout.
Interviewee Johnny Knoxville, one of the film's producers, seemingly an Evel Knievel expert, breaks down how Knievel's death-defying feats paved the way for his own Jackass, and the whole extreme sports culture, while friends and family add their remembrances. But the best part is the archival footage of the stunts themselves including the Snake River Canyon jump in Idaho, and his unsuccessful attempt to jump 13 buses in London (he followed this up by successfully jumping 14 buses back in Ohio). A beautifully constructed blast from the past (loved seeing those Evel Knievel toy commercials again), BEING EVEL is the most fun of the films I've seen so far at the fest.
A subject I hadn't heard of before is explored in Jon Nealon and Jenny Raskin's HERE COME THE VIDEOFREEX, a profile of a collective of counter culture artists and activists armed with newly invented portable video cameras, who were intent on providing an alternate history of the late '60s and early '70s to what was being broadcast on the major TV networks. Despite having a pilot rejected by CBS - a program that included interviews with Abbie Hoffman and Black Panther Fred Hampton - the Videofreex went on to launch the first pirate TV station, Lanesville TV, and produce thousands of hours of material.
It can be a bit wearying to make it through all the old grainy black and white clips excerpted here, but the insightful interviews with founding members David Cort, Parry Teasdale, and Mary Curtis Ratcliff keep it from lagging. Neolon and Raskin's portrait of these ragtag pioneers will, with hope, keep their story from being just a footnote in the history of guerilla television.
Ratcliff perhaps sums it up best: “A lot of people said in the early days that the Videofreex could be one of the signposts toward a future in which we all have video cameras. Which at the time meant nothing to me, but now I see it came true. We’re all Videofreex.” We certainly are.
Lastly, I attended the best documentary of the fest so far: Marc Silver's 3 AND 1/2 MINUTES. Part procedural, part courtroom thriller, it breaks down what the media labeled the “Loud Music” Trial, in which a black teenager was shot and killed by a middle aged white man over an argument at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida in 2012. Michael Dunn, a 45-year old software developer, had asked 17-year old Jordan Davis and his three friends to turn down their music, and their tense exchange escalated when Dunn pulled out a gun and started shooting at their car. Davis was killed by one of the 10 bullets fired, and Dunn sped away with his fiancée.Yes, it's another angering instance of a white man murdering an unarmed black youth, and Silver's extremely well constructed film takes us into the aftermath with compelling clarity. It's a heart-wrenching experience to see Davis's parents, Ron and Lucia, fight for justice and for stricter gun control laws, and it's incredibly angering to hear audio of Dunn's prison phone calls to his fiancée, in which he claims he's the real victim. After the screening, Jordon's father, Ron Davis spoke (after a huge round of applause) and participated in a Q & A, and had many powerful, and undeniably righteous things to say especially about embracing racial differences. I walked away very moved by the entire experience.
Stay tuned for coverage of days 3 & 4 of Full Frame.
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