Gateway Cinephiles

Quick Review: Sweetgrass

USA (2009)
Directors: Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Viewed: June 18, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Sweetgrass is being featured in a limited engagement from June 18-24, 2010 at the Webster University Film Series.]

Raw and curiously engrossing, Sweetgrass is unwavering in its sparing, hard-edged appraisal of a vanishing way of life.  While Barbash and Castaing-Taylor are palpably fascinated by the Allestad sheep ranch, where men on horseback still graze their herds in the high country of Montana, the film aims for something far more lyrical than a mere anthropological treatise on the West.  Spiritually urgent and yet possessing a bittersweet lassitude, Sweetgrass bears witness to uncommonly cruel pastoral patterns that once characterized America’s proud self-conception, but are now forgotten, withered, and nearly vanished.  Nocturnal visits from hungry grizzlies and other daunting challenges lend the story a dose of drama, but the film-makers are more assured when they are simply observing the sensory character of herding life with reverent diligence.  The enduring sights and sounds are sustained, pensive, and faintly abstract, whether the dirty-white blur of hundreds of sheep picking their way through a stream, or the uncanny hush of men who are comfortable sitting in silence.  Sweetgrass might be an essentially American portrait, but the film’s closest kin might be Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze, as both share a quiet attentiveness borne of equal parts absorption and gentle sorrow.

This American Life

October Country
2009 (USA)
Directors: Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher
Viewed: June 5, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[October Country is being featured in a limited engagement from June 4-10, 2010 at the Webster University Film Series.]

On its weather-beaten surface, October Country is a straightforward documentary in the “anthropological study” vein.  Surprisingly deft and arresting, the film profiles a blue-collar family living in the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York, and marks co-directors Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher as emergent talents in documentary film-making.   Emulating Errol Morris’ signature approach—restive, slightly distanced, and ever-conscious of their medium’s artificiality—the directors chronicle a year in the life of Donal’s extended family, observing their tumble-down surroundings and listening to their stories with sorrowful attentiveness.  Undeniably, the Moshers’ tale is a bleak one, characterized by wartime ghosts, criminal betrayal, domestic violence, cruel estrangement, foolish decisions, and perennial economic hardship.  What’s remarkable about October Country is how Palmieri and Mosher elevate the story beyond voyeuristic goggling at misfortune to achieve something far more intricate.  In its finest moments, the film serves as a bitter rumination on the cyclical quality of family history, as well as a cinematic séance, not only with the Mosher clan’s particular demons, but with the Puritan shades that still haunt the American experience.

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Quick Review: The Art of the Steal

2009 (USA)
Director: Don Argott
Viewed: March 25, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

Narrowness of scope serves The Art of the Steal well. While the film boasts the righteous outrage of a more sweeping polemic such as Food, Inc., director Don Argott approaches his subject–the legal looting of the priceless Albert Barnes art collection by Philadelphia’s political and cultural elite–as an act of slow-motion theft.  Accordingly, the film has the feel of a heist documentary stood on its head, detailing how one man’s bequest to the world was systematically dismantled by those who object to his unconventional views on art.  The film’s uneven pacing and undistinguished style aren’t especially bothersome when the story is this intrinsically compelling and passionately told.  Argott frames his story as part Lear-like tragedy about the reaving of a legacy, and part exposé on the dastardly deeds of rapacious Philly blue-noses.  It’s fairly stunning that several of Argott’s villains–a former head of the Barnes Foundation, former governor, and former attorney-general–were willing to appear in his film and smugly characterize the looting of the collection as a proud moment.  These confessions only heighten the film’s potent sense of loss, as does the reverential footage of Barnes’ museum in both its early and final days.

Quick Review: Food, Inc.

2008 (USA)
Director: Robert Kenner
Viewed: June 24, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

If you’ve already devoured Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you won’t learn much in Robert Kenner’s provocative documentary, Food, Inc., that you didn’t already know.  That might have something to do with Schlosser’s producer credit, or the fact that both authors appear in and provide narration for the film.  Kenner, in his theatrical feature debut, works within the comfortable confines of Alex Gibney’s style, presenting Big Issues in a breezy, ever-so-caustic package that preaches to the choir and looks damn slick while doing so. Fortunately, Food, Inc. refrains from indulgent stunts and cheap shots, preferring to lay out its case against industrial agriculture firmly, relentlessly, and with a warm, affirmative tone. Like any polemicist worth his salt, Kenner knows that a film like Food, Inc. won’t convert his natural antagonists, but it may shift the perspective of viewers who weren’t aware of the costs of modern agribusiness.  Accordingly, the film’s most enduring aspect is its human element: the mother who lost a son to E. coli poisoning, the seed cleaner financially ruined by Monsanto, and the ebullient organic farmer who emerges as a captivating advocate for a better way of eating.

Quick Review: Tyson

2008 (USA)
Director: James Toback
Viewed: June 13, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

It’s tempting to dismiss James Toback’s absorbing documentary Tyson as an unapologetic hagiography of former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson.  The film is narrated and produced by the champ himself, and it doesn’t merely gloss over Tyson’s rape conviction, but permits him to hurl insults at his alleged victim.  Yet Toback’s canny approach does much more than solidify a sympathetic characterization of the man.  The director interviews Tyson from an indulgent distance, using the footage as the key component of an ambitious and unexpectedly personalized tale.  Tyson recounts his life and expounds on his views in sprawling monologues replete with malapropisms, upwellings of rage, and moments of poetic clarity.  Toback’s camera swallows Tyson’s version of events whole, but also devours his eccentricities and slumbering-lion features with a blend of awe and puzzlement.  Refreshingly, the director is less concerned with hewing to a Fallen Sports Hero narrative arc than capturing the specifics of his subject matter with passion.  The film reinforces the enduring wonder of Tyson’s athleticism with a triumphal style, but offers its revelations in a reserved manner, allowing the viewer the freedom to mull over, discount, or titter at them.

Long-Lived Rock

Anvil!: The Story of Anvil
2008 (USA)
Director: Sacha Gervasi
Viewed: May 13, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Much of the charm that vibrates in the bones of Sacha Gervasi’s amused, melancholy documentary, Anvil!: The Story of Anvil, is premised on the oddly ambiguous definition of success in the rock world.  Sure, the eponymous Canadian metal group, now twenty-odd years past its peak in popularity, might be a failure by any yardstick one might select.  Financially, they are a broke.  Artistically, they’re stuck on the cutting edge of 1982.  Culturally, their name evokes the response, “Who?”  (Though not from metal luminaries such as Slash and Lars Ulrich, who in the film’s introduction hold forth on Anvil’s key role during the early days of the genre.)  Listen carefully, however, to lead guitarist and vocalist Steve “Lips” Kudlow’s rambling, armchair philosophical assessment of the setbacks that have bedeviled the band.  Simultaneously painfully self-aware and laughably oblivious, Kudlow is relentlessly optimistic about Anvil’s success, even though he lacks a coherent conception of what that success might look like.  Depending on the moment and his mood, “success” might mean cultural relevance, uncompromised integrity, a packed house, or an honest living.  Regardless, one gets the sense that he will know it when he sees it.  Despite first-time director Gervasi’s gawking at the band’s fundamentally kitschy character and its sad predicament, the thematic heart of Anvil! is humane stuff: success is a slippery thing, and the dogged pursuit of such an ineffable goal is rife with dizzying highs and miserable lows.

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Ode to a Landscape Lost

Of Time and the City
2008 (UK)
Director: Terence Davies
Viewed: March 14, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

[Of Time and the City premiered in St. Louis at the 2008 St. Louis International Film Festival. The film was also recently featured in a limited engagement on March 13-15, 2009 at the Webster University Film Series.]

Even the most supple and contemplative documentary features usually make gestures towards a narrative, sculpting their visual and aural components into hand-holds where viewers might find purchase. The only noteworthy exception to this principle in recent memory is Philip Gröning’s magnificent Into Great Silence, a film that broke every rule of the medium and achieved something singularly beautiful. While Gröning’s triumph strove for a quiet, observational character, Terence Davies’ equally superb Of Time and City takes an entirely different track, embracing the director’s own memories and emotions with soaring enthusiasm. The ultimate effect is daring and exquisite, resulting in a film that functions as a tone poem to a vanished environment, and yet also as a tuning fork keyed to the viewer’s own nostalgic impulses. Via a collage of images, music, and narration, Davies explores the most cherished crevasses of his heart, where the lost Liverpool of his youth still resides, and in doing so he tunnels into our own hidden stores of bittersweet remembrance.

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Once Again, I Don’t Recall

Waltz with Bashir (Vals Im Bashir)
2008 (Israel)
Director: Ari Folman
Viewed: November 23, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

[This is one of several full reviews I am posting on some of the films that were featured at this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival and which have now opened in wide or limited release.]

Waltz with Bashir’s curious species–an animated documentary–serves to lure the viewer by means of sheer novelty, but it also emerges as a brilliant mating of form and function. Director Ari Folman adeptly employs the elements of a bold, compelling visual style to delve the rank sinkholes of memory and culpability, surfacing with artifacts that run from bizarre to disturbing to appalling. Via color, contrast, and motion, Waltz with Bashir tackles the sheer uncanniness of warfare, the slippery character of recollection, and the sway that remorse holds over our personal narratives. Never mind that such matters have been taken up by numerous film-makers before. Folman brings both a bruised and jittery aura of the personal–the film is, after all, partly the tale of his own experiences from the 1982 Israeli-Lebanon war–and a stunning instinct for the pairing of image and mood. The veterans Folman interviews are haunted by their wartime memories, which are blazing in their intensity but usually bereft of soaring wisdom. In the same way, the film burns vivid moments into the viewer’s mind, all while striking a slightly bemused, off-handed tone of hollow-eyed cynicism. Folman rejects the notion of war as a noble construct, plunging with grim familiarity into its surreal, monstrous facility for tangling morality and crystallizing animal instincts.

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Shooting Loaves and Fishes in a Barrel

Religulous
2008 (USA)
Director: Larry Charles
Viewed: October 8, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Odds are, you already know whether you will appreciate Larry Charles’s Religulous. If you find Bill Maher funny, then Religulous will tickle you. If the notion of Maher confronting the essential horseshit of religious belief via a series of globetrotting interviews sounds engaging to you, then Religulous will spin your dreidel, so to speak. More accessible and yet possessing a narrower, humdrum aim than Charles’ sublimely crackpot social critique-slash-Jackass stunt, Borat, Religulous doesn’t break any new ground theologically or cinematically. Maher, who has evolved from a Christmas-Easter Catholic to a doubter to a forthright critic of faith, clearly yearns to play the part of the acerbic foil, eager to “go there” and call religious leaders frauds and fabulists to their faces. If you’ve ever wandered into a watercooler–or Internet forum–discussion about religion, you know the arguments, just as you know that neither Maher nor his hapless subjects will walk away swayed by the other. While the enterprise is a little creaky–”Hey, did you know that there are fundamentalist nutjobs in America?!”–Maher and Charles surprise with an approach both more personal and more forceful than one might expect.

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You and Me, We Sweat and Strain

Trouble the Water
2008 (USA)
Directors: Tia Lessin and Carl Deal
Viewed: September 28, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal have achieved a triumph in documentary film-making with Trouble the Water, a phenomenal, searing portrait of American survival and spirit. The directors deserve a bow for offering veterans such as Errol Morris and Werner Herzog stiff competition for the best documentary feature of 2008. However, the soul and vision of Trouble the Water’s protagonist, one Kimberly Rivers Roberts, so suffuses–one might say possesses–the film, that any fair assessment must regard it as her film, at least in part. Indeed, Trouble the Water recalls Herzog’s own Grizzly Man in its near-surrender of its form and content to the sizzling force of its fascinating subject. Admittedly, Lessin and Deal’s stance towards Roberts is far warmer, more admiring, and more credulous than that of the German master towards Timothy Treadwell. There is a temptation to regard Trouble the Waters at least partly as “found art,” given that Roberts’ own amateur footage of the Lower Ninth Ward under Katrina’s lash serves as the film’s foundation. However, from this small seed springs a work so undeniably powerful that one can only praise the directors for revealing Trouble the Water’s glittering treasures for all the world to see.

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