In my last post, I waxed lyrical on the inspiring, warm and exceedingly well-organized and well-programmed Woodstock Film Festival. I saw several films and attended a couple of panels, as well as one of the most enjoyable (and raucous) awards ceremonies in recent memory. Here are my thoughts on a few of the films:
After settling in on Thursday afternoon, the first flick I saw was a special screening of Larry Charles' Religulous, fresh from its debut at Toronto. I was at BRITDOC this past summer in Oxford where Charles was the special superstar they had for their "In Conversation With" event that preceded the awards ceremony on the last day of the fest. As part of that talk, Charles showed extracts from the film and shared some behind-the-scenes stories. Oddly, almost every scene we saw didn't make the final cut, so we essentially saw outtakes, it turns out. I had uneasy feelings when I saw those bits then, and seeing the cut that has already released in theaters, that feeling of unease persists. (But it's doing gonzo box office and it's a doc and Variety calls it "brilliant and incendiary," so hurray, I guess.)
I'm a huge fan of Bill Maher's. I think he's relentlessly funny and smart with seemingly unending reserves of chutzpah (his Jewish side, natch). He's a great comedian, in other words, with important things to say. What was so sorely disappointing about this film is that the amazing opportunity and access they had at their disposal in doing a theatrical feature on this topic went largely by the wayside. Maher has been on the pulpit, so to speak, about the insidiousness of organized religion and its damaging effects on the mass human psyche for decades. It's something near and dear to his heart and he's fiercely eloquent and wickedly wry when he talks about the "myths of religion."
To be sure, I expected loads of irreverence, sarcasm, wise-ass behavior and all kinds of shenanigans. He was directed by the helmer of Borat, after all. They could have done an uproarious piece and still put what I like to call substance in the damn thing. The film is bookended by Maher, in a who-cares moment sitting and talking with his mother and sister about their religious upbringing (his mom is Jewish and his dad is Catholic and he and his sister were raised in the church--another scarred ex-Catholic, how "incendiary"), and a tacked-on diatribe at the end where Maher gets all high-and-mighty from the mount of Megiddo in Israel (the site prophesied in the New Testament as the place where the final battle between good and evil will happen, aka Armageddon, aka The End of the World!), and holds forth about how religion is the root of all evil and one of the key things that is taking this world down. What's sandwiched between is nothing more than a series of gags, poking fun at pretty much everyone that agrees to be interviewed. It has none of the intelligence and hard-hitting investigation that could take it beyond portraying anyone who believes in God and worlds beyond this one as an ignorant idiot, and the doubters or skeptics (like Maher) as the only folks who have an ounce of sense in their heads. Maher displays the same disdain for his subjects that religious fanatics show for the heathens. So where does that get us exactly?
Nonfiction, as we've seen in plenty of instances, can be as highly cinematic, entertaining, engaging and exciting as a narrative story can be. This film has none of those qualities: It's shoddily edited, whipsawing us back and forth between cozy little chats with freakazoids, smarmy commentary from inside the traveling minivan, and sloppily produced segments of decreasing hilarity. This is just plain silliness and I came away with a very empty feeling, a what-was-the-point-of-that? feeling. As an audience member, I don't need to be constantly winked at to assure me I'm in on the joke, especially when the joke is right out of some Catskills stand-up schtick. And can someone please explain to me the necessity of showing the crew filming every scene at every location with Larry Charles documenting the production? Weird.
The next morning I took myself to the Documentary Shorts program. I rarely see shorts at a fest, don't know why, so I thought I'd mix it up a bit. The Community Center venue is not a good one at all. The whole system in there needs upgrading and why they didn't put every piece on one master reel instead of having gaping amounts of time between each film put an awkward kink in the whole program, a program obviously curated very carefully with one piece, The Unhappy Traveler: A New Yorker in India, used as an interstitial between the other films. Substantively and artistically, they were all very strong and distinctive. Stand-outs were Dinosaurs and Rocketships, about local Woodstock artist and designer, Steve Heller (he designed our beautiful Cinema Eye Honor statuette) and festival award-winner, Pickin' & Trimmin' by North Carolinian, Matt Morris. I hope Morris might consider trying to qualify this piece for a Best Doc Short Subject Oscar; it's a superb piece of storytelling clocking in under twelve minutes with lots to say about all kinds of things, in a subtle and artful way. I could have watched a lot more. Morris has been making shorts for years, but this is the first time he's ever submitted a piece to a festival. Don't be so shy from now on, son--show us your wares.
The last film I'll write about in this post is director (and Woodstock resident) Astra Taylor's second documentary feature, Examined Life. This was its US premiere post-Toronto and Taylor will also show her film here this month in New York as a special screening in Thom Powers' Stranger Than Fiction series on October 23 (for pass-holders only--buy one).
Taylor's film is one of the most thought-provoking, exciting and richly conceived films out there right now--it fed my soul and head in equal measure. It's also cinematically stunning, so the eyeballs were taken care of, as well. And a lot of it is laugh-out-loud funny. (It's everything Religulous could have been, but isn't.)
Taylor introduces us to some of the most profound and prolific thinkers of our day through ten-minute vignettes where high-falutin' and challenging ideas are set against the background of familiar public spaces. As these philosophers' minds and thoughts travel, so do we--over bridges, through city streets, over water, riding in cars, gliding through airport terminals, strolling through parks and hanging out in garbage dumps. Here are some of Taylor's thoughts from her blog on the TIFF site:
"For the film, I invited each of these thinkers to take a walk. It’s a simple conceit, I know, but one that has numerous implications. Historically it speaks to philosophy’s peripatetic origins and to the fact that many great philosophers were enthusiastic wanderers. Cinematically, the walk provides an opportunity for movement, gesture, and variation of scene (on this front I was partially inspired by the incredible sequence in the documentary Bright Leaves where director Ross McElwee is pushed around in a wheelchair by a rabid film theorist). The walk also illustrates my intention of taking philosophy out of the ivory tower and 'into the streets.' I wanted my subjects to talk about their ideas in a way that was free of jargon and directly relate-able to the viewer's experience, so an academic office didn’t seem like the right site for such conversations.
"I also didn’t want to totally be
in control. Any art-maker knows magic happens more often by
accident than design, thus another benefit of being out in the open was
the emergence of obstacles and encounters that provoked reactions and
insights I couldn’t have planned. Unfortunately, some of the
most memorable impromptu moments didn’t make the final cut, like
when we were heckled by irate, obscenity-shouting gutter punks in
Tompkins Square Park (unflappable, Avital Ronell wryly remarked to the
camera, 'We have a great audience!'), or when Peter Singer
was cross-examined about his theories by an inquisitive security guard
on Fifth Avenue." (From the Hip's Ingrid Kopp had a lot of questions for Mr. Singer, too!)
Along with Ronell and Singer, the film features Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek (the subject of Taylor's first nonfiction feature Zizek!), Judith Butler, Michael Hardt (I have a crush), Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martha Nussbaum. Provocative and eloquent, each speaker takes us on a journey through layers of thought and feeling on how we should muster ourselves for the daily human experience; they each invite us to pull those peripheral questions and quandaries to the forefront of our individual and collective consciousnesses and challenge us to shift our orientation to one of intense engagement and yes, responsibility. As the firebrand prof, Cornel West, has said, "Who wants to be well-adjusted to injustice? What kind of human being do you want to be?" I will be interviewing this talented and intelligent filmmaker when she comes to New York this fall. Look for our conversation soon on this blog.
Tomorrow, Ron Mann's Know Your Mushrooms, Kief Davidson's Kassim the Dream and Jeremiah Zagar's In a Dream.
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