Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2012: Day One

Just got home from the 1st day of the 15th Annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival at the Carolina Theatre (and a few accompanying venues) in Downtown Durham.

I'm getting up early and going again tomorrow for day 2 of 4 of jam-packed infotainment, so I'll get right to what I saw today:

THE BLACK PRESS: SOLDIERS WITHOUT WORDS

This year, Full Frame is paying tribute to noted filmmaker Stanley Nelson, who was there in person to introduce his 1999 documentary about the history of American black-owned and operated newspapers from 1827-the present.

The film, which is a very compelling blend of interviews with archive photos and original newsprint narrated by actor Joe Morton, is one of those docs that makes you think 'why haven't I heard about this before? Why is such interesting stuff so obscure?'

The anecdotes about papers like the Chicago Defender, and the California Eagle being where African-Americans turned to for news because they "didn't exist in the other papers," as interviewee former reported Vernon Jarrett puts it, pull the heartstrings and get in some humor too. Great doc to start the fest with.

Next up, a couple of short docs: Nellie Kluz's YOUNG BIRD SEASON and NATION. I think I choose poorly for this time-slot. For some reason, I picked a 20 minute short about competitive pigeon racing, and a 66 minute one about an athlete (Jesus Navarro) training to dodge and leap bulls for sport.

YOUNG BIRD SEASON which focused (maybe too kind a word) on a group of New England bird-racers was too slight and unwieldy (I can't really remember much about it except for some folksy banter and shots of mobs of pigeons being freed into the sky) to be much to write about, and NATION is well shot but deadly dull. Long (and I mean * long *) unbroken shots of Navarro running, jumping, and working out in the Catalonia countryside go on so tediously that people were walking out. The film picks up a little when Navarro enters the local arena, but a few more people still left.

The next couple of shorts fared much better: Fiona Otway's KISS THE PAPER and Andrew Beck Grace's EATING ALABAMA. The first is a charming 20 min. short about letter press printer Alan Runfeldt, who owns and continues to run a number of old printing presses.

The second, the hour-long EATING ALABAMA, concerns filmmaker Grace and his wife's plan to only eat only food grown by Alabama farmers for 1 year. Despite the Morgan Spurlock-esque gimmickry of the premise, the film is a sincere look at the challenge of eating locally, how dependent we are on the modern food industry, and its got a nice homage to the dream sequence ending of RAISING ARIZONA to boot.

The opening night film of the festival was the World Premiere of Lauren Grant's JESSE OWENS (produced by Stanley Nelson), a biodoc about the track and field star whose triumphs at the 1936 Olympics really pissed off one Adolf Hitler. Lots of fascinating footage plus fond recollections from family, friends, and historians drive this riveting re-telling. It's a pretty comprehensive doc despite its length (54 minutes). There was a after-film discussion with Grant, Nelson, and guest Jeremy Schaap, but I missed it because I had to get to my final film of the day:

MARLEY (Dir. Kevin McDonald) Reggae superstar Bob Marley isn't a new subject for a documentary, but McDonald's film is the best I've seen yet, a vast improvement on Declan Lowney's 1992 biopic TIME WILL TELL. A lot of the same footage is in both, but MARLEY weaves together a much more intimate and absorbing portrait, especially in the huge amount of previously unseen photos and in the sad depiction of Marley's final months alive before succumbing to cancer at age 36 in 1981.

Alright! Well, I better crash. Stay tuned to this space for more coverage of Full Frame 2012.

More later...

Obligatory Road-Trip Vegas Scene #5: STARMAN

Of course, there are tons of movies that are completely set in Las Vegas, but in this 5-part mini-series (inspired by wife's trip to Vegas this week) I’m talking about those scenes in cross-country road-trip movies in which the Nevada gambling mecca makes a brief cameo appearance.

Because of such scenes, when I was a kid I never thought anybody actually lived in Vegas - I just thought everybody on a road trip would have to stop there, gamble then got back on the road to somewhere else.

Only when I visited there for the first time in 2009, did I see it as an actual living breathing community and not just a place from the movies. I understand why I held onto those cinematic visions of Vegas for so long – the place is so surreal and outlandish that it seems like it could only exist in the movies.

We’ll start the countdown of Obligatory Road-Trip Vegas Scenes with:

#5: STARMAN (Dir. John Carpenter, 1984)

Way before he was “The Dude,” Jeff Bridges got an Oscar nomination for his role as an alien being (only identified as “Starman” although nobody calls him that in the film), who has taken the form of a recently deceased Wisconsin man. Karen Allen plays the man’s widow, Jenny Hayden, who has to deal with the craziness of having the physical presence of her husband back again, but his body is being controlled by something that came from Outer Space.

Jenny is abducted by Starman, but, as expected, she falls for him during their road trip to Meteor Crater in the desert of Arizona where he can meet up with his alien buddies on a very CLOSE ENCOUNTERS-looking mothership.

Before they get there, they catch a lift into downtown Las Vegas (Bridges’ bird-like movements when reacting to the world of bright lights surrounding him is priceless), where Jenny sees that the Starman can make the slot machines do what he wants them to do.

Carpenter cuts to Starman and Jenny walking through Binion’s Horseshoe Casino. Despite his earlier win, Jenny is skeptical about pulling this off, and wants them to start small, but Starman is already working his magic on a Super Jackpot machine that advertises a $500,000 Payoff.

Those amazing alien powers work like a charm.

The next cut is to Starman and Jenny driving a brand new Camaro out of town. It’s one of the funniest shots in the movie.

I always loved scenes like this when I was a kid. An alien or somebody with super natural powers can easily make a bunch of money by taking a trip to Vegas and manipulating the machines with their minds. How would these gifted ones deal with playing poker online on sites like this I wonder.

So I suppose the house always wins unless a member of a superior alien race is playing the game.

Stay tuned for Obligatory Road Trip Vegas Scene #4.

More later...

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN: The Film Babble Blog Review

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (Dir. Lynne Ramsey, 2011)

Last year I wrote that Pedro Almodóvar’s THE SKIN I LIVE IN was the creepiest film of 2011, well, I hadn’t seen this yet. Albeit it's creepier in a completely different (and much more preferable) way.

A intensely invested Tilda Swinton, who surpringly didn't get an Oscar nomination, stars as a woman who once was a successful author married with kids in a expensive house, but now is living in a dump of a home in a poor neighborhood.

How did she get there? Bit by bit her flashbacks tell us what happened, but the movie takes its sweet time in revealing the actual event. We can tell something incredibly tragic happened, as glimpses show a police scene with a crowd of shocked, crying people reacting to something offscreen.

It obviously has something to do with Swinton and husband John C. Reilly's first born, a nightmare of a child who stonewalls his mother, vandalizes her office, and puts his sister's hamster in the garbage disposal - just a few examples of his awful behaviour.


But Swinton is no great mother here. She dislikes the kid right from the start - she prefers the sound of a jackhammer in the street to her constantly screaming baby. Which is understandable, but less comprehensible is how Reilly is so oblivious to his wife and son's issues. Reilly is more involved with encouraging the boy's interest in archery, which you can sense will be very important later on.

The present day Swinton works an entry level position at a travel agency, and suffers through her lonely existence in which she is apparently octracized by the entire community.

This is one of the most draining, and often extremely unpleasant movies of recent memory, but it's also one of the most compelling without a dull moment right up until the end.

Swinton's performance is a study of focused anquish. I felt myself loathing her, yet at the same time I had equal feelings of pity and pain for the tortured character.

As I'm still processing it, I'm not sure if there was more humor in this picture than I grasped when watching it. Some of the soundtrack choices, like the Beach Boys' "In My Room" playing over a scene with Swinton snooping in her son's bedroom, made me think the film was trying to be too clever for its own good, but they didn't make me cringe like the stuff that was supposed to make me cringe.

I can't remember the last time I was so excruciatingly entertained. I kept cringing in advance of finding out what the kid (mostly played as a teenager by the effectively dead-eyed and acerbic Ezra Miller) did that was so horrific.

It may be a bit anti-climatic when it gets there, but the finely-crafted construction of the film doesn't falter, especially when concluding with a stirring, and blinding, final shot.

I suspect that Swinton wasn't Oscar nominated, because WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN may have been a conversation Academy members didn't want to have. If you're an adventurous movie-goer that's not afraid of dark material done well, don't make the same mistake.

More later...